I have really related to Christina’s story, although in
different ways. Growing up I was always
in competitive sports, often more than one at a time. When I ten years old, I started waking up
with my dad very early in the morning to workout, both by running long
distances with him as well as lift weights.
Unlike Christina, I never felt pressure as far as my body weight goes (when
I got older, I felt pressure to stay in sports, but I’ll get to that later). The only part of my body I didn’t like was
the fact that I had so many scars on my legs from soccer. However, in high school that changed. I have the ability to gain not just define,
but very prominent muscles in a way that most girls can’t. I never noticed it growing up because it’s the
way I always was, which perhaps why no one in my elementary or middle schools
ever commented on it because we had all grown up together, and that was the
body type I had always had. However,
when I went to a new high school where no one knew me, it became the only thing
anyone knew about me. At first, it just
made me feel extremely self-conscious. It
didn’t help that I had to continue to lift weights since I was in sports, and
being athletic was the only way I had ever defined myself. My junior year something happened that took
my self-consciousness to self-loathing.
Because I played girls’ basketball and had the physique that I did,
people started to assume I was gay. Now,
I won’t get into how humiliating it is when the guy you have a crush on asks
you your opinion on a girl’s rack, or the frustration of the paradox where, the
more you deny something, the less people believe you. What pertains more to Christina’s story is I
began to feel masculine. I began to
absolutely hate the way I looked, and the fact that I felt like I couldn’t do
anything about it. People defined me by
my athleticism, and to be honest that’s how I defined myself as well. I didn’t know any other world or way of
being. When I got to college, I vowed to
never lift weights again. For a while it
worked it worked tremendously. I shed
the muscles fairly quickly, but maintained my skinny physique, and as a result
I was getting attention from boys that I wasn’t used to. Once again, I’ll be honest and say, I liked
it. I liked it a lot. I felt feminine again, and the attention was
a sort of vindication that all those people in high school were wrong to judge
and make assumptions about me. What’s
interesting now is, I’m experiencing the reverse. I never really had good eating habits since I
was always burning way more calories than I could consume, and those habits
didn’t change much despite the fact that I stopped working out. I recently discovered that I’ve gained close
to twenty pounds since I shed the muscle, and just yesterday I tried on some
winter clothes that fit well just last Christmas, but now expose those places
that were once slimmer. It was
devastating, more so than I was expecting.
It made me realize how much I had come to rely on my body image and that
attention I had come to enjoy, and I was ashamed. What’s even more embarrassing is, while I was
having feelings of shame, I was also trying to figure out if I could lose the
love handles before I go home for Christmas.
It was a very strange experience.
One I hadn’t had before, and am still trying to figure out what to do
with before that kind of thinking becomes a habit. Since I share Christina’s upbringing in the
fitness world, I also share her mindset of self-criticism and “no pain, no gain”. Her words of encouragement to abandon that
kind of thinking is extremely foreign and yet encouraging to me, and I’m
excited to hear the rest of her story since it’s so similar to my own.
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