Big Enough
Like lots of artsy guys, I grew up a bean pole, and I was always pretty self conscious about that. That first photo above is from about 2013, the year before I started lifting. I weighed about 160lbs and had never once, not one time, felt comfortable in my body. That’s a part, I bet a lot of people can identify with.
The following year (2014), I fell into my first real depression. It’s hard to say where it began. My more adventurous nature took me a lot of places in those years. I was working 2 miserable jobs to support my bad habit of volunteering 40+ hours to a local church I hoped would someday give me a paying job in their creative department. I went to Scotland that May to play some shows with a friend’s band, only to find by July that the brain-fog taking over my days didn’t mind moving 4,000 miles to follow me. When I came back, nothing was fulfilling. I had no creative drive anymore, and I was studying for a degree I didn’t really want. I was existentially, romantically, and psychologically alone.
That year is a blur to me, but what I do remember is a very, very long month in which I couldn’t find work, and I didn’t leave the couch for an unbroken period of at least 30 days. In the post-pandemic world, I get that sounds pretty normal, but for a seemingly healthy 21 year old, at the time, it was definitely not. For weeks my friends had been coming over and lifting with my roommates in the basement, but I wasn’t interested. I was never into sports and even less so in “lifting”. One day after a few weeks of this carrying on, they used their superior muscles to physically pick me up and, yet, gently carry me down to the basement, and I was hooked.
From then on I lifted weights between 3 to 7 days a week, every week, for between 30 minutes and 2 hours, for almost 7 unbroken years now. One day at a time, one week at a time, one year at a time, and it became so normal that missing a single day felt wrong.
At first that was it, just doing something, anything, and it made such a big difference in my mental health. That’s a wonderful, science-backed thing about exercise. It really can work! However, as I started to lift a little heavier, and I saw just a few outlines of muscles start to take shape on my body, a goal started to emerge: I was going to stop being a string bean. Hopefully, maybe—in the process, I would fix all my other inferiority complexes, too. What I didn’t realize was that like many in our culture, I started to lean more and more on this supposed “healthy hobby” to scapegoat the things I was really hiding from.
My last relationship left me afraid of commitment, my unhealthy roommate situation, as well as, being stuck in the hometown I despised, left me socially isolated. I was trying with all my might to become something that physically resembled “good enough” on the outside in the hopes those changes would reshape the creeping mental health issues on the inside. As the years went on, this dynamic in my mental and physical health evolved from a positive change in activity into a varying mix of passion, obsession, and full-blown compulsion.
For many in gym culture, this is the point where things can get very toxic. “If you wanna get big, you gotta eat big!”, “Train hard to get hard!”, and so on. Next thing you know, you’re eating until you’re uncomfortable, ever chasing the “pump”, all while trying to cover over a deep, amorphous something-nothingness. It’s not all bad, and I’m not trying to be dramatic, but as I was in the thick of becoming a competitive powerlifter, I started to see how this hobby can quickly become an unhealthy culture. Here are a few stories:
One young kid bragged about not missing a single day in a gym, somewhere for 3 unbroken years. Not a single rest day. He annoyed the piss out of everyone, especially me. It turns out his mother had to remove every mirror in the house because he couldn’t stop screaming at them, “I hate you”. That revelation cut me deep.
Another guy got out of the Navy and then passionately into powerlifting. He was unspeakably obnoxious, always shouting and slamming weights around, and rude to boot! No one took much time to talk to him. It turned out he suffered from mental illness, and we came back to the gym after a holiday to find that he had taken his own life.
A girl I had a crush on, at the time, was a very talented powerlifter. She was strong for her slight size, which gave her a scoring advantage at competitions when calculated as a ratio. She was obsessive about working out and frequently injured herself. Overtime, as I became better friends with her, I learned she suffered from an eating disorder and basically only lifted as a means of giving herself permission to eat.
Lastly, there was one guy who was truly talented in sports—always took it seriously. He was blustery and a little arrogant, to be sure, but he wasn’t so bad. There came this period where he started going to the gym for multiple hours 2 or 3 times a day, 7 days a week. Even we, who knew him, thought it was strange, and then someone figured out that he had just lost a parent. He wouldn’t talk about it. The gym was the only safe place he could think of, and he tried to cover it there.
I have a lot more stories like this, but I’m sure you get the point I’m making. The stereotype is the self -obsessed and the arrogant, but I’d venture most people reading this might already know better, that such traits are always a compensation for something.
The thing is that, much like a twisted version of mindfulness exercises, the physical activity allows for short periods of time where your attention is outward, away from the maelstrom happening within. It works, but like a party drug, it only works for so long, and the come-down is harsh. For some, this leads to ever increasing amounts of time in the gym, and for others it means obsessive programming and meal prepping when they’re not training. In my story it means all of these things, while the rest of my life deteriorated around me. I was afraid to reach out to another human. I had been battered and bruised by life in ways I just wasn’t ready to face, and I was determined to at least like my body.
The good news to the beanpoles of the world who just want to get somewhere and stop: there is such a thing as big enough.
I had one other great passion, and I gave it up in about 2017, right when I started getting serious about lifting. Music. Recently, I rediscovered that passion, and it’s been like waking up from a long, long sleep. Not only that, but I started getting real psychiatric help for what I deal with, and I’ve been lucky enough to get in a healthy relationship. Wouldn’t you know that in the process of my comprehensive healing, I’ve found I just don’t have the appetite to lift much these days? Who would’ve guessed??
Spending a few weeks on it, I realize as I look at those other photos one of me, the ones taken more recently, that I reached my original goal: I’m not a beanpole anymore. Congrats, me! I won weights! Mission accomplished, it’s over. I still go to the gym, but mostly for the quality time with my roommate (aside from the necessary health things), and that works for me. It brings me joy to see him become confident in himself, while not feeding any growing obsession in him or myself. The future looks brighter than it has in a long time. Maybe I’ll compete again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll quit the gym altogether, to be honest, I don’t care and it doesn’t matter- because there are other, better things in my life to look forward to. I want to go back to school for something I actually want to do. I’m investing in a relationship that is meaningful, supportive and life giving—and I am creating more music now than I ever have.
To be honest with you, I’m still not in love with myself. My teeth are a bit funny, I wish I had a better hairline, and sometimes when I have too much beer and not enough gym I get a little soft in the midsection. However, I like my body more than I did, and the real goal is acceptance. When you’re ready to heal, when you work on your mental health, when you have something to shift away the constant attention off yourself, you can get better. It can get better. You accept. It’s no secret that culture teaches us to prioritize and hyper-value our appearance. Fit booty instagram workout this, get yoked that, blah, blah, blah. What really matters is holistic health, and the body is part of that, but not all of it.
So, dear readers, and especially, fellow genetic stringbeans, yes. Go to the gym. Lift the things. But also, and more importantly, find the passions. Talk the hard stuff. Choose to love someone else in an active, ongoing, full of effort way. Expose your wounds, and don’t look away from the abyss in you, wrestle with it. Keep things in their perspective, and remember to keep one eye on the original goal, and ask yourself if either you’ve reached it, or if it still matters. I promise, you are enough.
