The gym at a new size

Dear You,

There is a specific kind of impostor feeling that happens in two directions at once, and I didn’t have a name for it until I was standing in a gym lobby at 6:40 in the morning holding a towel I’d brought from home like a security blanket.

Direction one: I didn’t belong there because I’d spent most of my adult life being the person gyms were not built for. Direction two: I didn’t belong there because I’d arrived at this body through a prescription, and some voice in my head said the room was for people who’d earned it the proper way. Both voices were loud. Both were wrong, but knowing that didn’t make them quieter.

Why strength, and why then

I’d been on the medication long enough that my appetite had settled into something polite and small. I was eating less than I ever had. My prescriber had mentioned, more than once, that when you eat less your body doesn’t only lose the weight you’d like it to lose. Muscle goes too, unless you give it a reason to stay. That was the whole pitch. I wasn’t chasing a look. I was trying not to become a smaller, weaker version of the same person.

So the plan was strength. Not a program, not a split, not a spreadsheet. Pick things up, put them down, come back in two days.

The first month, honestly

Week one I used the machines nearest the wall, where nobody walked past. I did three exercises, badly, and left in twenty minutes. I counted that as a win because I’d gone in.

Week two I discovered the free-weight area had a mirror the size of a garage door and I couldn’t look at it. Not out of shame exactly. More that the person in it kept surprising me. I did goblet squats with a weight that would have embarrassed my former self, who could have carried it under one arm with the groceries. Current self had to sit down afterward.

Week three I ate a small container of yogurt in the car before going in because I’d learned that lifting on nothing made me lightheaded. Small, protein, twenty minutes before. That rule still stands.

Week four I stopped bringing the towel from home.

The trainer who didn’t ask

Around then a trainer named, let’s say, Marcus caught me doing a row with the enthusiasm of someone trying to start a lawnmower. He walked over, adjusted my elbow, said “pull from here,” and walked away.

He never asked why I was there. He never asked what I’d lost, how, or in what time frame. Over the next few months he’d drift by, fix one thing, say one sentence, and leave. “Heels down.” “Slower on the way back.” “That’s the one.”

I didn’t realize how much I’d braced for the questions until they didn’t come. Everyone else in my life had opinions about the medication. Marcus had opinions about my elbow. It was the most relaxing relationship I had that year.

What I’d tell you

Go at an unpopular hour. Early mornings and mid-afternoons are full of people who want to be left alone, which is exactly the crowd you want.

Eat something small before. On a quiet appetite you can forget, and the floor comes up fast.

Pick three movements. Do them until they stop feeling foreign. Add a fourth when you’re bored, not when you feel you should.

Don’t look for the person you were in the mirror, and don’t look for the person you’re supposed to become. Just check your form and move on.

And if someone fixes your elbow and walks away, that’s not rudeness. That’s the gym saying you belong there like anyone else. Nobody asks the regulars why they came.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.