Shame

I'm exercising again. Exercising in a way I really never have before. I've been active most of my life. Lots of soccer playing and some soccer coaching. Then also dancing and running. Some years of being terrible at gymnastics but certainly trying. A tad bit of swimming and a few years of tennis. Zumba here and there with some yoga mixed in. At one point I took a weight lifting class, but it was pretty much all machines. And occasionally cycling has made an appearance in my life.

But basically for the last year and a half, I've done nothing. I had an injury and then the pandemic and the move and then depression and lack of motivation and running sporadically but really nothing.

Then a neighbor invited me to exercise with her.

I didn't want to.

But I also did want to.

You know?

But I knew I should. Part of the point of quitting other stuff was so that I could have time to exercise.

So I did.

And my neighbor is really, REALLY kicking my butt.

I have never done much of anything with bands and dumb weights and the bar. I don't think I've ever tortured myself with box jumps, and apparently I don't know how to to properly jump rope, let's not even discuss burpees, and I never knew any of the names to all of these things.

The other women know all the names of all the things and know the forms and just are basically not clueless.

They're also all my friends and incredibly nice and supportive. So while I'm like "what's a dead lift?", they are incredibly patient and don't mind that our exercise sessions basically have twenty minutes added to each one as I am told what the names mean and as I try to get my brain to work with my body to have the proper form.

Also, counting is impossible. Just on a side note: I'm really good at counting. In general. Until I have to also remember to hold my body in whatever position it is supposed to be in and I can only add a number when I've done whatever the thing is and I have to stop my mind from wandering to other topics. I basically add one more rep for however many times my mind wandered. So it is possible I am doing like five more of each thing than I should, but since I'm really only competing against myself, the worse thing that happens from doing more is that I get stronger faster, right?

Well, today, I was introduced to something called "cleans." 

Guys. My body could not grasp all of the steps. She had me try it with the bar (with no weights so 35 pounds). She had me try it with dumb weights (20 pounds) (or maybe 15 pounds?). She had me try it with a medicine ball (14 pounds). Finally I just ended up doing it with a broom stick, and my form was still all wrong, and I was doing it SO slowly with each like muscle movement separate as my brain tried to correctly get all the muscles to do what they needed to do.

And it was so incredibly hard not to cry. I felt so stupid. I felt so embarrassed. And when I was trying with the actual bar, I felt fear. I haven't felt fear in exercising for a really, really long time. Not since I quit gymnastics actually. I had a lot of fear in gymnastics, which is one of the reasons why I was pretty terrible at it. You can't conquer the beam or any apparatus if you're afraid of getting hurt. And trying to do cleans with the bar brought that fear rushing back.

And everything added on top of all the rest. I felt stupid because I couldn't figure out what looked so easy when my neighbor did it. And then I felt stupid for feeling stupid. Everyone was so nice to me. Everyone knows it is new to me. Everyone also had their own learning curves for different moves. Everyone was supportive and encouraging, and it was all I could do to not sob out loud.

All these negative emotions kept churning inside me, and I knew—I KNEW—that they were all internal. Every single one of them was coming from inside me. None of those women there would have called me any of the names I was calling myself. And my eyes were filling with tears, and it was hard to concentrate, and it became even harder to do the muscle movements I was trying to do.

It made me think of parenting. How often am I teaching my children something that I've done many, many times. Things I've done so many times that they are natural to me, instinctive. But my kid just can't get it. Am I as nice to my kids as my friends were to me? Am I as encouraging? I hope so. But I probably am not always. But even when I am as nice as my friends were, my kids might still cry just like I was crying. Because it's an ugly feeling to not understand something, to not succeed, to keep failing, to be afraid of hurting oneself. It's terrible. And I'm an adult who has all these words to describe how I'm feeling, how to explain what is churning inside me. My kids are still learning these words, are still learning to understand what they are feeling.

I hope the next time I am teaching my children something that they are struggling with that I can remember that I cry too when I'm struggling and that it feels horrendous to not be good at something.