Woman walks into a weightroom

On learning to lift heavy things and solve my own problems.

It always would happen when I least expected it, unprompted and unwelcome.

Trying on rollerblades, I skated a few circles around the showroom and then skidded to a stop in front of Steve, the skate shop owner. “You’re wobbling,” he said appraisingly. “It’s your weak glutes.” 

Or when my job offered us ergonomic workspace consultations and the specialist listened to my issues patiently before telling me, “Sounds like weak glutes.” 

Or that Christmas when I visited a high school friend who’d just had a baby. My friend, an occupational therapist, observed me as I squatted down to greet the child. “Hm,” she said clinically. “Weak glutes.”

Three mentions are notable, strange even, but not a full-blown pattern yet—right? 

But then there was Greece.

In Greece, we arrived on the island of Milos where we had rented an Airbnb set into a rocky cliffside right on the water’s edge. Our host was a ruggedly beautiful Greek man with tan skin and silver hair named Nikolas. He picked us up at the ferry dock and drove us 30 miles along the coast, stopping at a high grassy hillside overlooking the water. He got out of the car.

“Now, we walk!” said Nikolas cheerfully. 

We followed him out of the van and peered over the edge of the cliff. A long, rocky path wound steeply to our Airbnb way down below. Nikolas tossed the smaller bags into a wheelbarrow. He hoisted the last suitcase, my enormous checked bag, atop his shoulder as if it were as light as air. I don’t think I’d ever truly swooned before then. I elbowed past my friends so I could walk next to him down the path.

Turns out, Nikolas was Milos’s version of Kirk from Gilmore Girls: he seemed to do every job in town. Airbnb host, Uber driver, nutritionist, yoga instructor.

“And,” Nikolas told me. “I do massage.” 

Later, people would say it was a questionable decision to hire a strange man with no known credentials to give me a full-body massage in a remote Airbnb at night.

He gave me his card. I texted immediately.

Nikolas arrived that evening and set up the massage table in our living room. What followed was an extremely professional massage with great attention paid to my main problem areas. Afterward, Nikolas stepped out so I could get dressed again. When he returned, I assumed it would just be for payment and some pleasantries, perhaps an offer to run away together. But when he walked back inside, he wasn’t carrying a second helmet so I could jump on his motorcycle and sail into the spangled Grecian night. Instead, he had a worried look on his face.

“Your forearms are very tight,” he said. Not how we typically declare our love in the States, but maybe he was ramping up to it.

“Your feet—they are a problem, too. You must walk barefoot more.” I didn’t like where this was going.

“And your glutes,” he continued, leaning in with urgent intensity. Oh god. “VERY WEAK.”

beautiful place to be violently humbled

—

How do I describe my relationship with my body up until now?

It would be too obvious to say I wanted to be small, though of course that was true. Small was good. If I knew one thing from growing up as a teenage girl in America, it was that.

At 16, I got my first job at a body wrap clinic, which promised women instant weight loss through a 90-minute process that involved being violently dry-brushed, wrapped neck-to-ankle in muddy Ace bandages, then bundled into a plastic jumpsuit and left to sweat in a hot room for an hour. I was allowed to get my first body wrap before prom, under the condition that I continued to work during it, so I waddled around the cleaning mirrors like a mummy in my bandages and plastic suit. After an hour, they unwound me, measured me, and congratulated me: I had allegedly lost 13 inches!

For as long as I can remember, my mom, sisters, and I have always greeted each other with some version of: “You’re so tiny! You’re so little! You’re barely there! You’re nothing!” You’re nothing, you’re nothing! As if the best thing we could be was completely insubstantial.

As recently as this Christmas, my mom greeted me at the door by literally lifting me off the ground and guessing my exact weight to the pound, like a circus carnie.

I saw my body as ornamental, not functional. It was something to be crafted for the consumption, approval, and enjoyment of others. This meant prioritizing smallness over any other goal, including (or maybe especially) strength. I didn’t consider that my body should, first and foremost, serve me—the source of my endurance, longevity, and creative energy. I certainly never considered that I could be physically strong.

—

I found weightlifting the same way everyone is radicalized on the internet: on YouTube.

I came across an interview with Casey Johnston. Casey, a writer and former tech journalist, told a familiar story of years of caloric restriction and over-exercise, trying to make herself as small as possible. She was trapped in that cycle until she found weightlifting. The way Casey described it sounded suspiciously easy: three movements per day, three days a week. Fueled by lots of food, sleep, and rest. Simple. But in a world where deprivation was the default, it felt revolutionary.

I downloaded Casey’s 12-week LIFTOFF: Couch to Barbell program, a no-nonsense PDF that teaches you to teach yourself to lift. I read it. I let six months pass. I read it again.

The main thing stopping me was that I couldn’t imagine walking into a weight room without looking like a certified idiot. I was terrified of gym bros and all the menacing, complex equipment I didn’t know how to operate. Mercifully, the very first four weeks of LIFTOFF could be done at home with only a Swiffer broom handle to practice the movements. I liked this because it didn’t require me to humiliate myself in public. But after a month, there was no way around it: I was going to have to set foot in an actual weight room.

My community center gym has one squat rack, three barbells, and roughly 300 sq. ft. of free space. Something’s always broken. People wear jeans. It’s not exactly a haven for the athletic elite, but I was still petrified. 

I started slow and small. Imagine the Rocky montage but it’s a blonde woman listening to Mitski in her over-ear headphones. On my first visit, per the PDF’s instructions, I just observed from the treadmill. The second time, I practiced with dumbells only. I had written a note on my phone with terminology in case I needed it. I practiced asking: “Can I work in?” No, that inflection wasn’t quite right. “Can I work in?” Better. On my third visit, it was finally time to approach the barbell.

In The Artist’s Way (you thought I’d go an entire letter without mentioning TAW?) Julia Cameron writes,

“Exercise moves us from stagnation to inspiration. We learn we are stronger than we thought, we learn to solve our own problems.” 

Buried underneath my bravado, I think I’ve always felt a little bit helpless. I’d spent most of my life dependent on others in some way, outsourcing my agency, waiting to be told what to do next, and building a life that was smaller than I wanted. The prospect of becoming physically stronger—of literally making myself more substantial, more capable—felt almost illicit after a lifetime of shrinking myself, physically and otherwise.

At the squat rack, I finished loading up my barbell. I looked at myself in the gym mirror. I reminded myself: I don’t want to be small; I want to be strong. I want a body and a life that serves me. I want to solve my own problems and lift my own (metaphorical and literal) suitcases! But more than any of that—more than fighting the patriarchal forces at work in my own mind, or long-ingrained beliefs about size and strength, or a lifetime of dependency—I really, REALLY wanted people to stop commenting on my weak glutes.

I braced myself, shifted the bar onto my shoulders, and lifted.

—

It’s been four months since then. These days, I’m squatting triple digits. I’m deadlifting my body weight. As Greta Gerwig said, “It feels like psychologically you should be able to pick yourself up.”

Turns out, I love being strong. After so much time and energy spent shaping myself for others, weightlifting has felt like a radical reorientation toward doing things for myself, trusting my own strength, and solving my own problems.

I see the benefits outside of the gym: in how much easier hikes are, in the stamina and energy I have while traveling, and in the thoughtless ease with which I can swing around heavy things (for business or pleasure). This October, I was at the airport with my pregnant sister and we were running late for a flight when we encountered a long, steep, broken escalator. Without a second thought, I grabbed both of our suitcases, one in each arm and bounded up the stairs.

“Strength training teaches you to grow, and when you are someone who can grow, you can become anything.” — Casey Johnston

In weightlifting, you make progress in small increments. You add 5–10 pounds every session, but the beauty is that by the time you’re adding more weight, you’ve already gotten stronger from the last time, so you barely feel the difference. Your weights go up, but the effort feels the same.

Over the past year, every experience of doing something I wasn’t sure I could (from traveling full-time to living with strangers to driving across the U.S. alone to quitting drinking) has been a tiny moment of personal expansion. They are small steps, but they build up over time. Suddenly, without even fully realizing it was happening, I’ve surprised myself with how far I’ve come—and how easy it’s felt.

And I must say: My glutes are nothing short of magnificent.

—

There’s a guy I keep running into at my gym. He’s not a gym crush. He’s a gym nemesis. He’s always using the space I need. He dawdles and doesn’t wipe down his equipment after he’s done. Until now, we’ve orbited each other in silent fury (me) and utter obliviousness (him). But today, I approach.

“Hey, sorry to bother you,” I say. He’s taking one of his long breaks between sets, playing videos loudly from his phone speaker. “But where did you find those small weights?” 

I swear it was an innocent question. But even as I say it, I hear it delivered as a devastating blow. I may as well have tickled him under his chin and asked, “Hey little guy! Where do you find those itty-bitty, teeny-tiny weights?” He looks visibly wounded, pointing to a rack in the far corner.

As I retrieve the plates, I realize I have inadvertently bullied a gym bro—a poetically full-circle moment from those timid first days in the weight room. A chorus of angels sounds in the distance. 

At the squat rack, I crank up Mitski in my Bose headphones. I brace myself and hoist the barbell onto my shoulders. I feel exactly like a Greek god.

Love,

Lane 💋