As part of my trauma therapy I did a big personal narrative project where I went back over all my journals and wrote my life story through my adult eyes. It was one of the best things I ever did for myself and I gained so many insights. One that particularly struck me is how much space I dedicated to talking about “getting in shape.”
Pages and pages – volumes – written in the different handwriting styles I tried out over the years, glitter pens, gold ink, fountain pens, in loose leaf papers and fancy bound books. Over and over I castigated myself with some shame smothered version of “I’ve got to get it together, I’ve got to get in to shape.” When I look back at pictures of myself from when I wrote these words, I want to weep. My shape was fine. It was usually even within the “acceptable size” category. But still I believed that anything other than visibly dehydrated muscles and the ability to run marathons made me someone unworthy of admiration or praise. And usually, I believed my lack of ability made me unworthy of dignity.
During the media hellscape of the last 20 years, these things were normal things to think. They are still normal things to think. Which is why a reevaluation is so necessary.
Our beliefs about bodies were given to us by powerful systems invested in justifying exploitative behavior. We are taught that anyone who can’t labor enough to provide for themselves is a burden to society. We are taught that having a body that deviates from the one kind of body that Power approves of is a personal failure. We are taught that having physical limitations or the need for rest is just a lack of discipline. These teachings aren’t for the benefit of humanity, they are to make colonialism seem rational.
The quest for perfection, the comparison and competition, the push for individual success at the expense of everything else? Those are colonizer values. Internalizing those values and judging your body by them won’t make you feel better. Believing that some bodies are better than other bodies will never make you feel confident and secure in your own.
In reality, so much of what we have been told to admire about intense exercise is just marketing. Running a marathon pops up again and again on lists of aspirational goals, despite the cost of that level of exercise on the body. While moderate running can be exceptionally good for you, marathon runners and triathletes can experience a lot of physical risk including heart issues, injuries, inflammation, and muscle damage.
I grew up dancing along to VHS tapes of aerobic instructors in shiny leotards. Years later, those aerobic acolytes experienced the long term consequences. In the NY Times one former aerobicizer said, “It was supposedly all about staying in shape, but look at me: I can hardly walk.”
Moving our bodies is necessary for our health, but this fact has been distorted through so many layers of agenda and spin that it has become disconnected from health and becomes about chasing status. These extreme behaviors don’t create health, but they do become a way of signaling superiority.
The outcomes we get don’t have anything to do with any form of superiority. The outcomes themselves aren’t virtuous at all, because it comes down to luck. For whatever results one person is getting from their exercise, someone else is out there doing the same amount and getting different results. Social determinants of health aren’t virtuous. Genetics aren’t virtuous. Hard work, diligence, dedication, sacrifice, those can all be virtues that deserve a sense of personal pride. But the outcomes are due to so much outside of our control that taking the credit for them is a fantasy that will turn into a nightmare when your results are anything less than exceptional.
Discipline is not the same thing as ignoring your body, but in exercise circles I see so much praise for the people who ignore the pain, injuries, and fatigue to keep pushing their body to work harder, no matter the cost.
I think of this method as shopping on credit. You can get real flashy with borrowed money, but one way or another, that bill is coming due.
Dominating the body is not a virtue, it’s a fantasy. It’s another way those colonizer values show up, by treating our body like a natural resource to exploit or a people to conquer. And just like the other effects of colonization, it will only end in devastation. Attempts to dominate the body can only create shame and produce pain.
Too often exercise is treated as punishment for having the wrong kind of body or fear of acquiring it. Movement is about taking care of the body with regular maintenance and celebrating what it can do on its own terms. Throughout your life your abilities will change, and your movement practices should change to meet them.
So many of the things we accept as common sense about exercise don’t have any basis in science or care, they are myths that trickled down through generations, or practices we adopted from the military or prison systems.
Is it any wonder so many of us have negative feelings about exercise when our experience with it as children was being made to run laps to teach us the error of our ways, being degraded by insulting coaches, or being publicly humiliated as the last picked for the team?
Research has proven that harsh treatment like yelling or insults does not improve performance. We just imported that style from the military, and the military’s goal is not to improve performance, it’s to prepare for war.
Even our independent workouts carry this corporal framework. Treadmills are the most popular at home workout today, but they were originally created to use in prisons to punish inmates for their crimes.
“Two hundred years ago, the treadmill was invented in England as a prison rehabilitation device. It was meant to cause the incarcerated to suffer and learn from their sweat. It would mill a bit of corn or pump some water as a bonus.”
The idea that suffering and sweating under adverse conditions would create rehabilitation had nothing to do with endorphins, it was old-fashioned asceticism. It was the belief that suffering would prove devotion to god(s) and earn their mercy, provide safety from demons, and that the body was a base artifact to overcome on the path to purity leading to communion with the divine. These beliefs go back to ancient greek philosophers and all kinds of religions, and they have often remained unexamined in the face of further scientific discoveries and philosophical change.
There is no longer a reason to believe in a duality between mind and body, because neurology has given us a better understanding of the unity between them. In the disability community we often use the term “bodymind,” as originated in Indigenous traditions, to reflect this unity. Your body is not something to escape to achieve enlightenment. Your body is what makes enlightenment possible, because your body and mind are one.
These kinds of beliefs about the body as base and deserving punishment for having needs cause us so much harm. They teach us to hide our needs and consider having them a personal failing. They make it so that we don’t protect our bodies ahead of a long life and advancing age. They teach us to be ashamed of the very thing that makes us human.
These beliefs are also a straight line to eugenics. If you believe that body needs are a sign of a weak character, than you believe disabled people are bad. If you believe that your health is in your control through enough hard work and discipline, then you believe getting sick is proof of failure. If you believe individuals are responsible for meeting their every care need independently, than you believe disabled people, elders, and children are burdens.
Of all the lies we are fed, I think the lies around what makes a body worthy of dignity are the most damaging.
When you are visibly disabled, people will look you right in the face and tell you that you don’t deserve to live. They’ll think they’re saying something uncontroversial while they do it. Sometimes they’re even surprised if you don’t agree. I see the panic on their faces as they project their own fear on you. Fears of becoming a burden with no one to care for them.
A lot of people have internalized this corrupted “survival of the fittest” idea and think that it is common sense that people who can’t take care of themselves independently are expendable. People will make vague references to history to justify their bigotry, but that history is false. There is fossil record of disabled people all throughout time, with signs that they were cared for and tended to by their community, and were valued for their contributions.
Our survival is a collective survival. Survival of the fittest isn’t about who is the strongest or most deadly, it’s about who is the most adaptable. All the big game animals are on the endangered species list. If you care about survival, look to things that are hard to kill. Look to rats and mushrooms and cockroaches and ants – all adaptive because of how they rely on community. Every one of us has contributions to make to our community, and every one of us deserves the dignity of having that contribution respected.
These beliefs hurt people even if they aren’t disabled. Any sign of physical need creates panic and shame. The fear of becoming disabled, while believing disabled people are burdens, makes injury, age, and illness into existential threats. Any sign of deviation from the norm turns into failure and self hate.
If you have a body that grants you a lot of status, it is so tempting to take credit for that as evidence of personal virtue and success. But if you take the credit for luck, you get all of it. The good luck and the bad luck too. If you think you earn your health through your behavior, that means you believe you’ll earn the bad health that will inevitably come for you. It creates hatred for any sign of mortality.
Movement doesn’t have to be punishing, it can be joyful. Instead of treating yourself with the attitude of a merciless drill sergeant, you can be the encouraging nurturer. Instead of going until it’s painful, you can move until you are done.
With my medical conditions, a joyful approach to movement has been extremely hard for me to find. For years, every workout I tried to follow would put me in bed for days. Walking as far as I could just made me sad over my lack of ability. To learn how to function I had to learn how to pace myself, but I also had to learn to evaluate the experience by how it felt and not what it produced.
I found an exercise class called Qoya, which was a form of yoga inflected intuitive movement focused on emotion and trauma processing. We’d form a circle with a yoga mats, put on some music, and move however our bodies needed to move that day. Some days I swayed and some days I screamed. The type of movement was never the point, it was the internal connection and allowing my body the movement it needed with no demands for personal bests or measurements.
People like me with chronic pain or energy limiting conditions can still benefit from exercise, but under very precise conditions. If we move without care, we create more hurt. This is true in other circumstances as well. If your movement doesn’t feel like care, you can create more hurt.
Even on days when exercise is out of reach, movement is not. When I was at the age where all my friends were having babies, I’d regularly catch myself rocking back and forth with them as we talked, mirroring their movement. A bunch of us standing in a circle, some with babies on hips, some without, rocking back and forth. That movement doesn’t stop being soothing one day as you grow up. As I stood there holding nothing but my bags I would still feel my own spirit settle down right along with the babies being hushed.
Movement can be a celebration of ability, for as long as the ability exists. It can be a celebration of the freedom to move and all the amazing things each of our bodies can do.
Bodies are amazing, and we forget that pretty easily under the onslaught of dehumanization we experience. When you are raising a child like Atticus, however, you get a different perspective. Every little incremental ability he has accomplished has been so hard won that we don’t take anything for granted. Capturing additional range of motion is amazing. Plotting a new way to move independently is astonishing. The creativity he shows in finding ways to use his ability and make incremental improvements is breathtaking to me.
When there is no guarantee in the outcomes, we find so much joy in celebrating the effort.
As I learned to change the way I valued movement from an external lens to an internal one, I discovered virtues I had never been able to appreciate before.
I grew up learning to prioritize avoiding pain. But that led to body dissociation and poor health outcomes. No one ever taught me I could prioritize pleasure. People jump straight to fears of hedonism without even glancing at enjoyment or satisfaction. Your body works so hard to give you opportunities for joy through sensation, it is a shame so many of us ignore all that in our attempts to control our bodies.
Atti was an example to me here too. As an autistic kid, he is never still. His body is always moving. Rocking, flapping, chomping, hooting. He uses his whole body to feel. Stimming provides him stimulation – it’s right there in the name. While I have spent so many years focused on the external experiences – trying to stay still and ‘socially appropriate,’ he has unashamedly used his body in the way that feels good to his internal experience.
At Body Loyalty we define Movement as: Any practice that moves the body according to its abilities and needs.
This could be any kind of movement that feels rewarding to your body. A traditional exercise program. Intuitive movement. A creative hobby. Sex, dance, singing, cuddles, walking, yoga, gardening. Anything that your body is capable of today.
What does it look like for you to move your body out of joy? I’m willing to guess it doesn’t include a lot of “I should”s, because shame is the opposite of joy. Demanding inhuman levels of performance from our bodies, in a way that creates hurt, is a shame factory.
You deserve to rediscover the joy of what your body can do for you. Whatever ability you have, whatever experiences you’ve suffered, your body is deserving of care.