fitBallet | reclaiming our bodies

Not too terribly long ago Julie and I sat in a coffee shop and she told me about this idea she had: she would leave her current job and begin a small business. Julie is remarkable. Smart, tenacious, and a huge advocate for women--for women doing what they want, even if is hard and terrifying (actually, especially then). 

fitBallet is an exercise regimen designed to strengthen and empower women. I've taken it twice now and I'm not going to lie: it's hard. But that's the point. That's why it's exciting. Because at the end of the class, with shaking legs, I walk away knowing I did something that demanded I try a little bit harder, and in a new direction. It's my new (favorite) Saturday morning tradition. 

Julie wrote what follows a few months ago and it is one of the most exciting things I have ever read about women's bodies and why we should move them. 

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Let's go ahead and say something uncontroversial: most women have a complicated relationship with exercise.

This isn't news, right? If you're like most American females, you've grown up logging hours on cardio machines and bribing yourself with cute workout tops. You've swung between periods of obsessive dedication and overwhelming revulsion, the latter only ending when you feel massive guilt or the calendar ticks over into January 1st. You want to love exercise. And for small, endorphin-sparked moments in the middle of a kickboxing class, you do! But then, inevitably, it's the next morning, and the sour cocktail of exhaustion and resentment kicks in, and you leave your gym bag by the door.

Who's mixing the cocktail? Why do we so often view working out as an obligation we'd do anything to avoid?

One reason, I think, is that we feel our efforts are never-ending and a notch above pointless. The messages we receive--from the media, from other people--tell us that exercise is a vehicle to physical perfection, and that perfection for women means being as small as possible. Our "health" magazines focus not on building, but on taking away, whittling down. Lose fat. Trim your waist. Become smaller as a physical human being. Exercise, cast in this light, is a battle against a rising tide: get on your treadmill and outrun all the calories you took in. Don't let them catch up to you. 

But even more damaging than this message is the one we're not receiving. Women are not given the important, motivating speech that is the birthright of most men: "We're expecting big things from you." 

When it comes to fitness, women have long been the spectators. We don't need to grow up to be big and strong like the boys, because no one's going to ask us how many push-ups we can do, or how far we can run. No one cares if you can do a pull-up, but everyone notices if you lose five pounds. Is it any wonder that women center their attention on minimizing their physical footprint? But this constant focus on a "skinny" body obscures what the focus should be: accomplishment.

Women aren't taught to view their bodies as glorious machines, but that's exactly what they are. Nearly every physical feat a man can do can also be done by a woman. Do we have less upper body muscle mass than men? Maybe fewer fast-twitch muscle fibers? As a gender, yes. And now we're finished discussing the immoveable biological differences between men and women. They don't even begin to explain why men are pushed to maximize their physicality and women are encouraged to try for slim thighs. Add to all of this the elephant in the room: the survival of our species depends on us willingly undergoing a massive physical trauma at least once. Most women do it twice. With this kind of genetic legacy, why don't women think of themselves as superheroes in hiding?

Because you are. We all are. And those masked avenger qualities--speed, strength, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound--belong to us just as much as anyone else. It matters, in this life, that you push yourself physically. It is important that we be able to carry groceries over city blocks and support the bodies of our aging parents and maybe outrun a zombie apocalypse. Even if we're just sitting at a computer, it's crucial that we feel the particular afterglow of having recently hit our bodily limits and inched them forward.

And so, I think it's time to just call it. Exercise is not an endless race race pitting us against ourselves. Your body is for you. Whatever your personal goals are--lungs and legs that can run a marathon, abdominal muscles that can sustain a two-hour ballet performance, arms that can carry two children to safety--that is what you should work toward with the same fervor that you pour into being a success at your career, your relationships. Let's tell ourselves the truth, as it's going to be from now on: the gym is not where you expend the Recommended Daily Allowance of calories in order to gain societal approval of your body. It's where you go to polish and reinforce the temple in which you walk around.

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To take a class, train with Julie, find out what it's all about this is the rabbit hole to fall down. 

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the next five years

We sit across from one another, a small table between us, coats and bags at our feet. It is cold out and the requisite clothing, now off, is spilling over toward the next table. I sip on white wine. He tells me it’s not good for me. He drinks water. Carbs too, he says. He orders meat. I ask for the pasta.

And because I know he cares for me, I let him ask the hard questions. What is the future? Have you decided to go back to school? What will your life look like in five years? What will you bring to the table? How will you make money?

And my stomach twists in an uncomfortable knot. Because the truth is, I don’t know.

And he sounds like my father.

I only know there is a small seed of self-belief. And a faith that I am moving toward something. The shape and depth of which has yet to reveal itself.

But for a linear mind these are not answers enough. It’s hardly enough for my mind, which moves in many directions and all at once.

It’s hard to say, wait, just wait. It’s coming. When I can’t be sure what it is.

How much I want to make it all tangible, for others, as well as myself.

But I’m learning--I think what I’m learning is, the answers--or any semblance of an answer--lie on the other side of returning home each night, sitting before the computer, and writing.

Which is a relatively solitary existence. Occasionally lonely, but mostly not.

To write.

To write more.

To write relentlessly and persistently and ruthlessly.

To revel in those few hours each night. In the honor of the fight. To celebrate the commitment. Because not everyone gets to spin air into magic. And at this moment in my life, I get to try.

We speak different languages. Literally and metaphorically. His hard questions are met by my own. About love. And what it means. And doesn’t he think he should hold out for the real thing? He thinks my version of the real thing doesn’t exist. And we sit in silence wondering who is right. And living with the possibility that, in this context, right is beside the point.

Because there are so many shades to the thing. And we all make our own choices.

English is not his native tongue. He will complement my photographs, but never my words. He hasn’t a clue if I’m any good. And most days, I don’t know either. But I go back to the words of Brian Doyle--again and again:

...It's what I do, and what I love to do, and no one else can do it quite like I do.

Better, perhaps--but not with my particular flavor and music, and somehow, in a way I do not wholly understand, that is important, and in a very real sense miraculous, and necessary.

How I wish he could hear the music of my particular voice.

How I wish I could give him the answers.

But it is for this reason--and so many others--that our affection begins and ends with dinners and hard questions and a kiss goodnight. And with him walking away.

So I drink my wine. Because I believe in a glass with dinner. And I order the pasta, because I believe in carbs, too. And I let him kiss my neck and I pull on the collar of his coat and then I go home and I write.

And sit with my questions.

And do my best to suss out answers . And make peace with the terror of not-knowing.

And I remind myself: Wait, just wait. It’s coming.

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the 6:45 south

There was a moment, walking up the stairs together, just after I caught up to you--I was saying something and looking ahead, but I watched, from the corner of my eye, as you tilted your head away and mussed with your hair. Sweeping it behind your ear. Or patting it down, perhaps. Three quick flicks of your wrist. It was not a cool-guy-hair-sweep. It was the gesture of a boy who’d been caught unaware.

Later I will tell you that was the moment I fell in love with you. Which isn’t true at all, that happened nearly as soon as I saw you. But that was the moment, my lip caught behind my teeth and I thought: oh, you too, huh?

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home

I let go of it. The notion of home. I stopped dreaming of thick rugs and hardwood floors. Of hanging pots and a countertop. Clean white walls and molding tracing the bones of a place. I let go of the idea of permanency and roots and what-comes-next. Began to dream of travel. Of leaving. Of letting go and moving on.

I don’t own a bed. Or a dresser. There is no bookshelf or coffee table or couch. When I left the apartment on Christopher Street I left behind so much. The steamer trunk, my grandmother’s table that I’d promised my father I’d care for. Instead I clung to photos. To candlesticks and bowls. Mugs. I carefully wrapped my few framed prints and tucked them away in a garage in New Jersey.  I have one piece of furniture to my name. A small reading chair that my parents bought me when I turned twenty-five, two months after we all watched as the familiar stormclouds rolled in. They passed quickly. But we didn’t know that then. It’s a tricky business, predicting storms.

The idea of home, in any physical sense, became as small as a glass jar filled with coffee beans and two winter coats: one for everyday use, the other for evenings out. To allow myself to dream of anything else was to be crushed by all that I did not have.

And yet there is so much.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.*

To try to write about home without writing about the events of this last year is a nearly impossible task. It would be to write around the sadness. And the more I write around it, the unrulier it grows. It is a story of unkindness. That is as much sense as I can make of it. Before the words are out, that’s all I have.

I’ll write it eventually. Because I write to unpack stories. And then pack them away.

But not tonight. Tonight as I sit on the floor next to the fire, a glass of wine beside me, music playing softly, I’ll write about this hundred year old brownstone. This house with a stoop and an iron gate and tiled entry way. This house on the corner, at the end of a park. This home that is always alive with noise and movement--the television left on, a set of hands on the piano, the shuffle of footsteps. The music of everyday life--full and good and deceptively mundane.

Tonight I will write about how I answered an ad. And how because of that, a small room on the second floor of a hundred year old house is, for a moment, my own. Filled with furniture that belongs not to a person, but a place.  

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.

It is so different that I imagined. And yet here it is.

There are four of us here. Two who sit often at the piano. Two who trade in the written word. All of us spinning stories in the best and truest ways we know how.

How lucky we are. How imperfect it all is, and how lucky we are.

How in this place our lives abut and fold over and involve the others. Except when they don’t, which is much of the time.

But when panic sets in after I tumble down a whole set of stairs, a door will open and someone will come to see that I am alright.

And it’s nice to have others look after you. Sometimes it’s exhausting doing everything on your own.

I didn’t want to live with others. Certainly not strangers. How long I avoided this very situation. And yet here I am--in a Dickensian-boarding-house as my girlfriend Alisha has dubbed it, and how good it is. I say that without an ounce of irony or pretense.

I let go of the notion of home, and here I am. In a house. Waking early each day, for the first time in months, to make my morning latte.

Occasionally I’ll catch myself looking sideways at the situation. How did I get here? This isn’t what I dreamt of. But god it’s good. Odd, but so, so lovely.

And how much I have.

Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.

*Walt Whitman, of course. 

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Growing Up

He sent me a small message. By phone. As we all do now. 

I’m not dating seriously, just something casual, he declared.

A two-day-late response that wasn’t really in response to anything. 

The last two times he’d asked for a drink I’d been unable and said so. I wasn’t playing games, was simply busy. We’ll touch base this weekend, he’d written back. Sure, no problem. But know that these are the days when I'm available. Time fills quickly now, I told him, as way of an explanation. A subtle hint that to ask the day before was to ask too late. 

He said nothing in response. 

Until two days later. The days do fill quickly, he agreed. Followed quickly by his declaration: Causal, please. 

I knew what was expected of my response in this dance of male-and-female living in Manhattan. I was meant to be agreeable—thankful, even. 

And say: Yes, fine, no problem. To level myself in response to his whim. Because that’s what girls do here. Laugh easily and go to bed easily and say, as you wish. 

Instead I wrote, I totally get it. Good for you. Not my thing. 

And I’d like my hat back, please. 

Not-good-enough by another name. 

Few things have felt so good. To be able to say this is who I am and this is what I’m worth and so no—No, thanks. I don't do casual.  

See, not only did I learn a few things from last year…I’m actually putting them into practice. 

Go fish. 

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