By Sarah Gunnell
@srbg

My alarm goes off and I don’t hear it, but I feel a hand gently shaking my shoulder. It’s 5:45 a.m. and the noise has woken my husband, who has subsequently woken me. I silence the alarm and mentally calibrate for a few seconds, shifting from sleep to awake. My body wants to remain inert, but my mind is already moving. I leave my cocoon and step quietly to our bathroom, sliding the pocket door closed behind me. By the glow of the nightlight, I change into the workout clothes I picked out yesterday and left on the counter next to the eye cream and hair ties. I head downstairs to put on my shoes and leave the house. The stars blink above me, and I can see my breath. I walk down the street to my trainer, Casey’s, garage gym.

Last night, I groaned at my husband when he turned off the show we’d been watching, the clock ticking way past bedtime.

“Wait! We can’t just stop now, Mister!” I pleaded. “I need to see who leaves!”

“Sarah, it’s already 10:30. You have Casey in the morning, right?” He reminded me gently as he left the couch.

“Uggh! I know” I groaned, flinging the blanket off my lap.

“Remember how you say that you have your best days when you go to Casey’s?” he asked.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “You’re right. Damn it. Let’s go to bed.“

***

I’ve read too many novels to keep an honest, handwritten journal.

Because here is what would happen if I kept one: someone would find it after I’ve died. The police. My husband. One of my daughters or a long lost cousin. They’d uncover it on my desk under a pile of papers or in an old chest in the attic, dusty and tied with ribbon.

If I kept an honest account of my life and feelings and not a sporadic, superficial, banal version, here is what they’d read:

I am so ashamed.
I am deeply embarrassed by the size and weight of my body.
I’m uncomfortable, in every room I stand in, with the space my body takes up.

It’s only by the grace of God and the decade I was born that my belly rolls and the horrible acne I had in college never morphed into a series of humiliating online memes. A miracle of flip phones, dial-up internet, and 35mm film that I survived unscathed.

***

I’m on my way to a grocery pick up Saturday morning. Pulling into the shopping center, I see the Chick-fil-A next to the grocery store—if I visit there first, I’ll make it while they still serve breakfast. Alone in my minivan, stopped as cars pull in and out of the busy parking lot, I can turn left to the grocery store or right to the restaurant.

The last thing YOU need is a freaking chicken biscuit.
It’s fine—you need to eat something for breakfast.

I think about my neighbor who is, at that actual moment, running a 5k.

If you get a biscuit now, you’ll save time and can spend your morning being productive instead of making a mess cooking breakfast at home.

My watch buzzes, notifying me my sister has just completed a workout. I clench my jaw and my stomach rumbles.

What do you even have at home for breakfast anyway? If you’d plan your meals like you’re supposed to, you’d have a healthy breakfast ready and this wouldn’t even be a debate.

I pull into the drive-thru line, full of disgust and desire.

At the cashier’s suggestion, I make it a large biscuit combo. If I’m going to make this bad choice, I might as well make it worth it.

***

Last year, my daughters were invited to be junior bridesmaids. Each spent hours poring over dress options, bookmarking multiple designs and matching shoes, before finally settling on the perfect ensemble.

Is it shame, then, that drove me to use an incognito window—on my own phone—to search for plus size wedding attire?

I told myself the incognito browser was an attempt to defeat Big Data and The Algorithm, to bypass moving my waist and bust measurements into their pipelines. Those four letters—P-L-U-S—remained a dirty secret I didn’t even want Google to know.

Eventually I settled on a dark green off-the-shoulder jumpsuit, with spanx. For shoes, I found a pair of beautiful Betsey Johnson heels covered in champagne colored jewels. When I saw their fizzy glamor in real life, I was immediately smitten.

Only, they didn’t fit.

My feet—wider after years of bearing children, just like my hips—are, apparently, not the type of feet designers use when crafting dazzling shoes.

Defeated after a long search for a stylish replacement pair, I finally ordered neutral, tan sandals in wide width. If the other heels were flutes of bubbly champagne, these shoes were Chamomile tea. The box arrived and I ignored it for weeks, still stinging from the heartbreak of the last try on.

Finally, I opened the package and slid my foot into a blessedly-wide-enough shoe. Encouraged, I moved to buckle the ankle strap.

But it came up short.

Like the shock of ice water, I felt shame move down my P-L-U-S sized body—from my round face and double chin, over my flabby stomach, past my thick calves, all the way to my treasonous, chunky ankles. I sat defeated, surrounded by breakfast dishes, and cried hot tears of humiliation.

It had never occurred to me to be ashamed of my ankles the way I was ashamed about so many other parts of my body.

***

When we first started working together, Casey asked what my goals were. I didn’t have any courage left to admit the truth. I told her I wanted to be strong. Acknowledging my desire to be thinner felt like typing those four letters into my phone. It’s acceptable to say you want to be stronger. But there is so much shame in saying you want to be smaller.

My body has always felt like something else to take care of, one more thing on my to-do list. But the needs of my body—to move, to sweat, to be nourished—were easier to ignore than the laundry that needed folding, the child in need of comfort, the report due ASAP. And so, my body dropped to the bottom of the heap, taken for granted and ignored while I focused on every other part of my life.

Working up the guts to call Casey felt like my body demanding an end to the longest intrapersonal filibuster of my life. It felt like a step toward quieting the never-ending inner catalog of all the ways I am not comfortable in my own skin. I wanted to silence the voice that says this is not good, when looking at myself in the mirror, and muffle the fear that tells me others are saying the same.

This has gone on for too long, Sarah. Do something.

With one phone call to the personal trainer down the street, my body finally called my mind’s bluff.

***

I’ve been sleepily resenting the early alarm every Tuesday and Thursday morning for almost a year now. Yet, somehow the 60 minutes I spend moving, squatting and lifting heavy things transforms into hours of feeling lighter. The return on investment is baffling.

Lifting weights tethers me back to earth in a way that even completing a sweaty session on the Peloton does not. It’s a paradox of anchoring me down while I'm lifting things up. The overwhelm of working and living and mothering fades under the concentrated effort of each exercise. For those 120 minutes each week I am in my (P-L-U-S sized) body, focusing and present in a way that I am not able to be anywhere else.

I am stronger now than I was a year ago. There is a tightness to my legs and arms, muscles appearing in ways they have not before. I’ve moved to the second rack of weights and slowly built up to the big, yellow weight plates. I know a Sumo squat from a Romanian deadlift and am an efficient, skillful rower.

The highlights of these achievements run as a powerful counter melody to the deeper, negative inner refrain about my body I’m still working on silencing.

***

Before my first session with Casey, buried deep in my fears were two questions that weighed heavier than the others. Will I ever treat my body with the respect it deserves? And will I ever believe that I am worthy of committing to?

I’ve been numb to the miracle that is my functioning, able body. At what age, exactly, did I stop believing that the Divine providence who created every one of the stars sparkling in the night sky also deemed this body and these thighs and these ankles worthy of creation?

Since that first dark morning, I have spent more than one hundred hours in Casey’s garage. Still, I’m coming to terms with the fact that listening and committing to my body is not a one time—or even a hundred time—choice. This work is a slow, sweaty untangling of the complex malaise woven deep into my life as far back as I can remember.

Rationally, I know that the story of my life is bigger than the size of my body. But, it takes more than a year of cold dawns to dismantle a lifetime of messaging and shame-based beliefs. It’s a complicated dance of choice: what to eat and what weight to lift, who to listen to and what needs to be ignored. If I want to reclaim my wonder of a body, I need to push back—with all my might—on the ways the world tells me mine is wrong.

***

The garage has warmed up. Sweat dampens my hairline and drips down my neck. I watch my body in the mirror behind the squat rack, the span of the barbell stretches wide across my shoulders. I squat down slowly, feeling my muscles burn as I push through my heels to stand back up.

“Eight. Good, get a little lower. Nice, nine.” Casey counts. “Ten. Rest.”

The third set of squats is over and I have 60 seconds to recover before doing it again.

“How’s the weight?” she asks.

I check in with my body. The bar is heavy and my movements are competent, but the weight that was just on my shoulders is not the heaviest my body can carry.

I take a drink of water and look over at Casey. Through the window, I see the sun has risen and the sky is alight. “I can lift heavier.”

Guest essay written by Sarah Gunnell. Sarah lives in Virginia with her husband, three wild and beautiful daughters, too many houseplants, and one reliable sourdough starter. This is her second published essay. Her days are spent writing Excel formulas, doing squats, and returning overdue library books. She wouldn’t have had the guts to submit or share this essay without the encouragement and feedback she received from fellow writers in Exhale—specifically Sonya Spillmann and Karen Miller.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.