four hours

As of today, I'm four hours stronger.  Which means I've taken 4 hour-long classes at Barre Releve.  Which means I have spent four hours staring at my body making awkward, ungraceful shapes in the mirror.  Four hours of frantic motion in absolute disbelief that I am that person in the mirror.

How did it happen?

I have an immense capacity for incredible fidelity to illusion.  Maybe it's my religious background.  My imagination.  My parents' divorce.  Who knows, but I tend to believe the BEST about myself and others until it becomes undeniably false.  In my mind, I was only a few 20 minute work-outs away from the racquetball shape I rocked in undergrad.  In my mind, the fact that none of my pants from a year and a half ago fit was just some accident of the laundry or a big dinner.

But being forced to look at myself for an hour- lost like a chubby buoy in a sea of other bodies in yoga pants- made it impossible to deny that the best self I imagined myself to be was buried under about 15 pounds of flabby flesh.

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The unfortunate reality is that, just as the extra mass creeps on so slowly, it takes time to wear off as well.  Even after changing bad eating habits.  Even after hours of movement.  Even after being painfully aware of the baggage that you no longer want- it's not so simple to shed.  I don't know how long it will take.  One side tells me that after 30, bodies are just bent toward decay anyway and that I'll never be in tip top shape again.  But the other side knows that it's possible.  That people work for and achieve amazing levels of fitness all the time, and that I can to.  I'm counting on it.

But I also don't want to become one of those people whose whole life has to center around their next workout or meal in order to sustain their shape.  I'm not willing to funnel 70% of my energy on something as fleeting as appearance.  But there's got to be a middle.  There is a middle.

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Thanks to the time I've had staring at my awkward shape, I've also learned that I've been walking incorrectly my entire life.  Most of the ballet positions require your chest to be perpendicular to the ground.  I can't tell you how unnatural that feels to me.  It feels like work to stick my chest out- shoulders back. I distinctly remember Dr. Janet Schroder telling me at a little kid check up, "make sure to stand with your shoulders back, the boys will like you more."  But somewhere in the vast stretch of middle/high school where I not-so-patiently waited for breasts, I must have decided that baring my flat chest to the world wasn't doing much in the way of advertising.  My shoulders caved in, and I somehow developed a walk with my chest angled forward- bent and determined toward whatever direction I was headed.  It's my mom's walk- forehead first. Going places.

But oh, how I wish I had listened.  Not for the attention of boys turned men- but for my own body.  My own spine.  My own sense of space and ownership of my form.

So I've been trying to relearn walking.  It's painful.  I don't even know if it's possible to retrain yourself after 30 years.  But it feels good to try.

So instead of shoulders bent toward some concrete destination, they're here now.  Straight up and down.  Wherever I am.

However I am.

Here.