Flailing as an Art Form, Crisis of Confidence, Bad Checker

I feel weird going on and on about my trainer, but to be honest with you, there isn’t much else going on in my life right now except work, a realm in which I am struggling to defend myself against the slings and arrows of Other People’s Needs vs. my career goals and the desire to defend my team against the vagaries of senior leadership’s whims. It’s very tiring. And this thing with my trainer, which started out as sort of a temporary lark and a distraction, has become something that I never expected it to be: It’s become transformative. I didn’t want or expect that, but here I am. I shall explain. And I’m going to go ahead and name names because he won’t read this—his name is Akida.

In the last few sessions, in addition to him babbling on about his wish for me to “display confidence”, whatever that means, one of the things Akida showed me is how to jump up onto a square-shaped stool, lift and hold up one knee, then come down, reverse it, and lift and hold up the other knee. At first, I was certain that the stool was unstable and I kept watching it like a hawk, worried that it was going to shift or collapse under my feet, until he assured me it wasn’t going anywhere. I was still uncertain of that, but I decided to trust him. Then I was bobbling around a lot, slipping and shifting and falling with every jump. He told me that I needed break it down into parts, stop trying to do everything at once, be intentional and “stop flailing around.” I laughed off the “stop flailing around” comment, but I must admit, it got to me. It got to me a lot. And by that, I mean it really, deeply hurt me to my core. I was a tall, weak, skinny kid with zero confidence, and I feel like I have spent my entire life flailing around physically. Also, I do have an unfortunate tendency to try to do everything at once, but there is no way I was going to admit that to Akida.

Yesterday I went to the gym, yanked that stupid stool out, and did four full sets of those bitches with only a few bobbles. I was totally focused. I did what he told me to do—broke it down into parts, drove with my hips, and was intentional. I know it sounds like such a simple thing--such a non-event--but to me, it was transformational. It was the first time that I have ever felt fully in control physically. I was able to set a physical goal, think through how to achieve it, then execute on it. This is not a normal experience for me. I came home and cried afterwards. I am not going provoke Akida to use the word “flailing” in reference to me ever again. I know that realistically, I am just getting to a baseline level of fitness, a level of physical confidence that almost everyone else grew up with and that feels natural, but to me, it’s huge. I am still struggling with the grief of never finding a sport that clicked with me, and feeling out of control all of the time in the physical realm, and this felt like a beginning for me. I feel that there is potential now for me to do more and to build on something. It feels like a future. It feels like pure potential. And it feels strangely like confidence. 

On a lighter note, in regards to nothing going on in my life but work and the gym, I still go grocery shopping twice a week, during which I contend regularly with a Bad Checker at my grocery store. I’ve worked at an untold number of low-paid, crappy jobs, and I am not being an elitist here when I say that objectively, this woman is bad at checking. However, the Bacon Guy that day didn’t seal my bacon up properly with the little price sticker, and when I brought it to the Bad Checker, she looked at it askance and asked, “Who packaged this up for you?” Not wanting to rat out poor Bacon Guy, I mumbled something vague about “a young man in the meat aisle.” Her face hardened with recognition and she nodded knowingly. “He did a bad job sealing this up,” she said. She then painstakingly pulled out a random sticker from under the counter and sealed the bacon with a sticker that said, “THIS PRODUCT CONTAINTS LIQUOR.” Then she said, “Your bacon has booze in it now”, to which I nodded approvingly. Life is fun. 

--Kristen McHenry