I’ve never been much of a partier, but partly not by choice. I don’t drink and I don’t smoke, so naturally my friends thought I wouldn’t be interested in going out or going to parties. And part of me wasn’t. I don’t really see the point of sitting around and drinking or smoking. It doesn’t seem very productive to me, or maybe that’s just what I convinced myself to think. I’ve never really felt included. I went to my first ever “party” at the end of junior year, but before that I spent many nights sitting on the couch wondering what I did wrong to not get invited. I’ve felt like people didn’t want me there, like I was a bother, and that left me with a lot of emotions. I had to find a way to express them. 

That’s when I really took the gym seriously. I felt more welcomed at the gym than I did at parties or “functions,” and I’m starting to be okay with that. 

I was a scrawny little five foot five eighth-grader who weighed 125 pounds the summer going into freshman year, and I hated the gym. I decided to play football my freshman year, which meant in the summer we had workouts to get us ready for the season. About 2 hours of these workouts, every day, were spent as a team in the weight room. I had never stepped foot in a gym before that summer, and to say I was intimidated was a grand understatement. I’ve always been scared of the unknown, and when I put myself in these new, uncomfortable situations it can be really scary. 

Seeing all the seniors stacking 45 pound plates on their bars, you can feel this sense of expectation in the air. At that point in my life, I don’t think I’d been introduced to that level of intensity that the gym can bring. You have the opportunity to be put in these do or die situations, not literally do or die, but these situations where you’re being tested with a great amount of pressure. Or at least that’s what it felt like in that weight room. Pressure. And maybe that’s why I was repelled by the gym back then. 

Who knows who I would be now if I didn’t stick out those hot afternoons, with the seniors yelling at me, barely being able to lift the 45 pound bar off the rack, and coming home from practice so sore that sitting down at the dinner table to eat left me in wincing amounts of pain in my legs. 

People really struggle with the consistency aspect of the gym. For some people, it feels like a chore, and they have to drag themselves there.

For me, the gym is more than just a place to move heavy objects, it’s an outlet. It’s structured and it’s stable. Having a planned out routine for the week on what exercise is definitely part of that, but when you have to move your belongings from one house to another each week, you start to lose the sense of being grounded. Everything else around you feels like it’s moving, but you just feel stuck and lost. At the gym, I feel grounded. I show up everyday in sweatpants, a tank-top, my Birkenstocks, socks of course, my camo baseball cap, and my Skull candy crusher evo headphones. It’s become a habit. Sometimes I bring my lifting straps too.      

It’s stable, and I feel like I belong.

That wasn’t always the case though. The first real “gym” that I was a member of was Body Kinetics. I had no clue what I was doing and I was afraid that people would judge me. I joined when I was probably 15 or 16, and at that point, I was very new to lifting. I distinctly remember being afraid to go to the gym. I would get butterflies in my stomach walking through those automatic doors to awkwardly greet the receptionist and scan my fob. I was intimidated.

But, with anything new, it takes time to become more comfortable, and confident. I developed a program. I would go home and watch Youtube videos of fitness influencers walking you through their workouts and documenting their lifts. I wanted to be like them. They seemed so confident and happy with themselves. Confidence was also a reason I started really focusing on weight-lifting in the first place. 

I felt like, maybe if I had more confidence, I’d feel like I belong.

To me, there are two sides to confidence; there is self-confidence, feeling comfortable in your own skin and who you are, and there is the confidence you get from those around you. I’ve gained so much self-confidence from my time spent in the gym. Yeah, it’s nice to have your friends and even people you don’t know compliment you on your looks, but you can’t control that.

No one wanders into the gym by accident. It’s a choice. A choice to show up, and to put yourself through something hard and uncomfortable, for results you won’t see for a month or two. It teaches you delayed gratification, and consistency. People say that muscle growth doesn’t truly occur until you reach failure and keep going. When you’ve done all the reps your mind is telling your body it can do, and you push past that. The gym allows you the opportunity to hold yourself accountable. No one in there knows how many reps or sets you are doing. You could tell yourself you’re gonna do 10 reps and give up on the 8th, no one would know. 

But in the gym, you get out exactly what you put in. If you push yourself past failure, and endure the pain of that, you reap more progress. 

I’ve learned that no matter how big or strong you get, you can’t change the way people perceive you. It’s out of your control. So just be yourself, and if people don’t like you, then find new people. Speaking of people, the gym isn’t meant for one type of person. Their moms, and dads, people that just got off work, people trying to lose weight, people trying to gain weight, ego lifters, powerlifters, teenagers, elders, all sorts of people. But they are all there for the same reason. To get better.

But, those few years I spent there, the  late nights at 8:00 or 9:00pm being the last one in there, was when I found the most growth. It was a place to channel my emotions, to let them loose, and it still is.