Fighting

It's an odd feeling at 37 to be in a situation where I am purposefully uncomfortable. At this age, I tend to not do things that would lead to face planting into the ground from exhaustion. So yesterday I'm staggering around a gym on legs turned to noodles and dust, just inches away from that fuzzy blackness luring me to fall into it. And I keep muttering to myself, this is all your fault, this is all your fault, this is all your fault. My body hates me.

Exercise is a conversation you have with your body, and if you have been feeding it well, and exercising often, the conversation goes great, a couple of old friends, pushing one another to new boundaries and unlocking new things it can do. WOW, look how far and fast I can run. WOW, look how high I can jump. But, when you feed it nothing but sugar cancer and lard, and stop using it almost entirely, when you lay it up to rest on couches and comfy chairs for years at a time, it's going to be really pissed when you start trying to use it again. And when you start pushing your body to do new things you're saying: "Oh hi, how have you been? How do you feel?" and your body sends a clear signal to let you know it's not happy about what you've done to it. In response it falls apart and quivers and pours sweat, and your heart jumps around your chest and tries to push you over. It's basically saying: "I feel like shit asshole, all you've done is sit around and feed me terrible food and all your muscles turned into mushy messy pudding, and now you expect me to do these things?" and then your body spits on you and in it's anger, starts to fall apart. It's so angry it can't function, it turns your lungs against you, it shakes your limbs, it squeezes your insides until they cramp, your body hates you.

Think about it like the couple that just quietly exists without any communication about what's bothering them. The couple you see at the diner, sitting in silence in their soup, with nothing to say, staring through one another, content with ignoring their differences and disgusts. Then one day, one says to the other, "I hate what you have become", and so they fight. They battle fiercely. All the sudden they are talking, really speaking to one another. They wake up and start unloading hard truths. The point is most people don't want to fight through the problems or what's hard. So they walk away, or they figure out how to justify the differences enough to go back to simply ignoring them, and they quietly exist, and continue to deteriorate.

When you are fighting to get something back, fighting to rebuild, fighting to make something brand new-- that is a brutal ugly nasty fight. It's long lasting, it's hard work, and it hurts, almost every day it hurts. That pain is supposed to remind me that it's starting to work. That pain is there to tell me that we are at least talking again, and these are all the places that need work. And then one day it just stops hurting so bad, and there is a friendship that begins to spark. A trust builds that we will be taking better care of one another from now on. These are just rumors I hear from people that have been fighting with their bodies and have new relationships with them. I hear they go new places, and get new clothes, and people say, "Look how great you look!" But I also hear that isn't the best part, it's how they feel inside, and what they feel like they can accomplish-- anything they want to.

Keep pushing for the life that you want.

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