FitnessFixation.com

There’s this exercise called “smashball”. You slam a small medicine ball into the ground and catch it on the bounce, even though it only bounces, like, one inch. Lots of people request it in training if they’ve gotten into a fight with someone or got chewed out by the boss and feel angry. Mostly they wanna use exercise as an outlet for all that pent-up madness.

But you know what? I don’t think of anger as needing an outlet: I think of it as fuel. Extra gas in the tank.

Anger has all kinds of negative blah blah associated with it. And yeah, we do all kinds of crazy-ass destructive shit out of anger. But that ain’t the anger’s fault; that has to do with our behavior choices. (I’m very therapist tonight.) We kicked around frustration here a little while ago, and I don’t find frustration particularly productive. But anger? It’s a creative force. That shit is gold. Mint it and stick that in your pocket.

I honestly think lots of the good things I’ve done in workouts and in life have been initially motivated by being really fucking pissed at someone or something. Sometimes that rage gives me confidence, and sometimes it just spurs me to get over fear, and sometimes I just pick up some heavy-ass weight I couldn’t lift yesterday and heave that shit up because I’m fucking mad. Juliet always jokes about how I run faster whenever we start getting scrappy. It’s true. Needle me enough and I’d be a mother fucking gazelle.

I have a few mantras for workouts that don’t involve the word ‘fuck’. These might seem contradictory, but you have to go with the sentiment. One, “You can’t keep a bitch down.” The bitch meaning me. (As if we all had to reach for that one.) The other, “I am nobody’s bitch.” I said, go with the sentiment. Hey, good thing I work out for all that aggression, huh?

Okay, here’s the story of how I started writing the way I do (and it does sort of come back around to exercise, if you fluff it a little): I wanted to go to grad school and study, well, it’s not important. I worked at a fancy university, so I met with some professors and audited classes. For a year I did all the reading and wrote papers, I raised my hand and said pithy, articulate things, and I thought very deep and meaningful thoughts. The professors said some really complimentary things, and wrote me letters of recommendation. I applied and dreamed of an academic life.

Guess what? I got rejected.

It was very devastating and I got all kinds of upset, because that was a fuck of a lot of work and I saw my li’l dreams crumble. I cried. And then I got really mad.

The problem with academia, I thought, is that so many people write in this bullshit way that is so hard to understand, and that is really just evidence that they don’t really know shit. Why not write about things in a more readable way? I mentioned this to a friend, who asked what I had written, and I lied and said I wrote a review of a TV show that included some of my grad school thoughts. He asked to see it. I told him I’d send it. Then to save face and to show those grad school admissions committee fucks I was nobody’s sniveling bitch, I actually went home and wrote this terrible thing. My friend said, “Hmmm, it’s smart and all, but it doesn’t sound like you.” (That is what is known as a “backhanded compliment”.) So I rewrote it the way I talk, all bitchy and critical with a sense of humor, and showed it to another friend, who liked it and helped me get it published. And it was on. (And for the record, I’m no longer anti-grad school, that was just my hurt feelings talking.)

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was ten. And once I started writing like this I forgot about grad school and being mad, because it was so easy and I just loved doing it. So point here, is that anger has been the first little push in the best directions of my life. Works for exercise, helps me take care of myself, and motivates me in new directions. Just, you know, don’t get in my way when I’m doing smashball.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 10:48 pm and is filed under blah blah, exercise, feelings, first person. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.