Pilates week 1.
Pilates
What a world.
Nothing acquaints you with your own limitations quite like reaching them. I did Pilates for the first time today. It was not horrible. I was. I am overweight and not very flexible, so there was a lot of flapping about. My core which I thought was strong betrayed me within 10 minutes and it basically became “remedial Bealinda” “bottom of the class Bea” from there on in. It was a 45 minute class. Add to the humiliation I was the oldest one there by a solid decade and that I was also the fattest one there by a solid 20kg. As it happens the exact amount of weight I want to loose. But even if I lost that weight tomorrow and couldn’t hold my own against 20 year olds in Pilates it wouldn’t feel good. A huge, huge benefit to this job is I get to work on myself and there are no shortcuts to what I want. I could Ozempic my way into losing the weight and it wouldn’t matter. The point is to get stronger. The point is discipline. I was meant to go to the library for an hour beforehand. (That will be next week) but work spanked 30 minutes of that hour, and I realised I needed a hair tie whilst I spoke with a friend in need. Today I will be going to German having failed to understand Rammsteins “Sonne” over the weekend. (It’s in German) The trope, “everyone fails the first time” fails to grasp the scale and magnitude of my failure. Of how hard I humiliated myself. Of how aware I was of my own inability, inability to complete a task, to keep up. I thought I was “strong but stiff” and maybe a few muscles in my legs are strong, but the rest of me is not. I felt like a loser and a freak. Mainly a loser. “You showed up” yes…because I didn’t know how bad it would be. The next time you go, you’ll know in painful reality. How far you have fallen. How unfit you are. How many of the moves you can’t do or fumbled. How all that walking you do didn’t mean shit because you couldn’t hold your core up. All that walking that made you feel strong and superior crumbled on impact with your glutes so as I write this between Pilates and German. Painfully, in every way aware of my own limitations. I will not be quitting. Not in a “defiant” “chin up way.” But because I know quitting or not quitting will not get me where I want to be body-wise. There will be plenty more uncomfortable stares in the mirror. There will be many weeks where you feel like you’re doing even the easy parts wrong. I have no hope. So I can quit if I want. But it’s not going to get me anywhere. No weight loss, you will continue to obsess how uncomfortable you are in your clothes, in your body, how you are letting stress make you ugly. Also no new clothes. I just want some of the self loathing to go away. A flat stomach will be valued because I have had a lot belly, 60kg will be so amazing to amazing because I have been 80kg. I will be back next week. I will get “Pilates strong” after about 6 months. Then I will feel better about the whole thing and no one needs to know about the omnidisaster that was today. Something else worth talking about was how much personal prep it took just to show up. Tomorrow I would like to suffer silently and in a corner, no one needs to see that. Call it perfectionist nonsense but I didn’t enjoy seeing me. So I can’t imagine anyone else does. I just want this stage over and done with. When I am a little less hideous I don’t mind sitting with myself. But my body isn’t appealing as it is. It needs to be bandaged up and corseted to be just about passable. There may not be a “perfect” body but dear heaven there’s about 40 stages better than this. I’d like to experience all of them.
I doubt myself until proven otherwise.
Grace and courage
Annetta Mother Smith