Endorphins make you happy
Dec. 17th, 2021 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileI have been having a difficult time these past few weeks in making myself get up and get my ass to the gym. Or outside to go running. Or even out of bed to do yoga on my floor, immediately next to my bed. A predictable result is that I feel disastrous–to go from five-to-seven workouts a week to one or two half-assed ones makes me feel gross in every conceivable way, from my skin (which is breaking out) to my sense of general vitality (which can best be described, roughly, as “my get-up-and-go got up and went”). All I really want to do, besides nap, is sit around and read, so I figured it might be a good idea to read something that would make me want to get up and move. I put in a library hold for Alison Bechdel’s new memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength.
I’d read Fun Home over the summer and decided that I liked Bechdel’s dry, neurotic humor; unapologetically meandering bookishness; and, of course, her art style, which is kind of important with graphic novels. If anyone or anything was going to be able to talk me out from under my weighted blanket, it’d be this.
While I did manage to get up and do a proper yoga session this morning, it would be an oversimplification to say that this book is all about the benefits of exercise. It is, in fact, mostly about Transcendentalism, and Bechdel’s lifelong habit of getting involved in a variety of very intense fitness trends in a serially-obsessive way that I can certainly recognize. What are we doing when we get really into a new sport? Are we getting more in touch with ourselves, or are we distracting ourselves from other things we ought to be paying attention to? Are we becoming more in tune with higher truths and at one with the universe, or is the relentless search for certain types of self-improvement an impediment to self-acceptance, a late-capitalist, Protestant-work-ethic dysfunction intended to keep us constantly buying fancy new running shoes? Or both?
The book is broken up into decades, starting with the ‘60s, when fitness had not quite yet got hold of the American imagination. The memoir thus also serves as an interesting cultural history, examining each decade’s fitness trends in philosophical, but loving, detail. Over the years Bechdel gets into running, skiing, karate, yoga, weightlifting, mountain climbing, HIIT, and a bunch of other stuff, although she seems to have had the good sense to swing back around to running before Peloton became a thing.
Bechdel is, emphatically, not a jock, she was a bookish artsy kid and grew into a bookish artsy adult. She is a gym rat, a fitness freak, an exercise nerd–a solitary, ever-searching sort of creature trying to conquer a lot of overthinking about What It All Means and fear about her place in the world by putting her body through a variety grinding disciplines and their subsequent waves of endorphins, in pursuit of some kind of indestructible self-sufficiency. It is extremely relatable to me personally, even though I am not a 60-year-old lesbian with a house in Vermont, and I haven’t drawn anything since like eighth grade.
In addition to her own journey through various forms of exercise–and other coping mechanisms, like bouts of low-level alcoholism, high-level workaholism, therapy, and meditation–Bechdel walks us through the lives of some of the key Transcendentalists and Beat writers who had similar obsessions. I’m a terrible English major and have never read Kerouac, but these historical subthreads provided a broader philosophical grounding to Bechdel’s musings.
There’s probably a lot more that could be said, but I’m just going to think it over instead and see if maybe I can talk myself into getting up and going for a run tomorrow morning.
I’d read Fun Home over the summer and decided that I liked Bechdel’s dry, neurotic humor; unapologetically meandering bookishness; and, of course, her art style, which is kind of important with graphic novels. If anyone or anything was going to be able to talk me out from under my weighted blanket, it’d be this.
While I did manage to get up and do a proper yoga session this morning, it would be an oversimplification to say that this book is all about the benefits of exercise. It is, in fact, mostly about Transcendentalism, and Bechdel’s lifelong habit of getting involved in a variety of very intense fitness trends in a serially-obsessive way that I can certainly recognize. What are we doing when we get really into a new sport? Are we getting more in touch with ourselves, or are we distracting ourselves from other things we ought to be paying attention to? Are we becoming more in tune with higher truths and at one with the universe, or is the relentless search for certain types of self-improvement an impediment to self-acceptance, a late-capitalist, Protestant-work-ethic dysfunction intended to keep us constantly buying fancy new running shoes? Or both?
The book is broken up into decades, starting with the ‘60s, when fitness had not quite yet got hold of the American imagination. The memoir thus also serves as an interesting cultural history, examining each decade’s fitness trends in philosophical, but loving, detail. Over the years Bechdel gets into running, skiing, karate, yoga, weightlifting, mountain climbing, HIIT, and a bunch of other stuff, although she seems to have had the good sense to swing back around to running before Peloton became a thing.
Bechdel is, emphatically, not a jock, she was a bookish artsy kid and grew into a bookish artsy adult. She is a gym rat, a fitness freak, an exercise nerd–a solitary, ever-searching sort of creature trying to conquer a lot of overthinking about What It All Means and fear about her place in the world by putting her body through a variety grinding disciplines and their subsequent waves of endorphins, in pursuit of some kind of indestructible self-sufficiency. It is extremely relatable to me personally, even though I am not a 60-year-old lesbian with a house in Vermont, and I haven’t drawn anything since like eighth grade.
In addition to her own journey through various forms of exercise–and other coping mechanisms, like bouts of low-level alcoholism, high-level workaholism, therapy, and meditation–Bechdel walks us through the lives of some of the key Transcendentalists and Beat writers who had similar obsessions. I’m a terrible English major and have never read Kerouac, but these historical subthreads provided a broader philosophical grounding to Bechdel’s musings.
There’s probably a lot more that could be said, but I’m just going to think it over instead and see if maybe I can talk myself into getting up and going for a run tomorrow morning.