The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You know, funny story
Many years ago now, when I was a skinny lightweight rower in baggy basketball shorts and an honor's college t shirt, at my college gym. I was working on some internet 5x5 system, and these monster powerlifter bros come in and start squatting MASSIVE weights. At least they seemed massive to me at the time, it was probably nothing all that impressive. And in between sets I'm just kind of absent mindedly watching the show, because I'm genuinely impressed by it. And all of a sudden one of these guys turns to me and says loudly to his spotter "THIS WOULD BE EASIER IF THAT SKINNY FAGGOT WOULD STOP STARING AT MY ASS."
Which, to be fair to him, I guess I technically was; but to be fair to me, you're backsquatting three or four plates banging the rack in a public gym, you're sticking your ass out there.
Before I can even get my mind together to say anything, another of the gym regulars I recognized, a big jacked puerto rican guy, decides to stick up for me: "HEY MAN, THAT'S HOMOPHOBIC, MY BROTHER IS GAY, FUCK YOU MAN"
And I'm MORTIFIED now because I'm not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that!, and I'm just trying to get a work out in and fuck I've just been getting more comfortable coming to the gym and now this shit and these two giant jacked dudes are pushing and shoving and I'm just trying to get them to stop it but I don't know how. Eventually they cooled down and I slinked out in shame.
I guess that's the closest I've ever come to being actually actively mocked or shamed in a gym.
I think I phrased my original comment poorly, given the response to it. What I was trying to get at wasn't so much that people will come up and laugh in your face and call you a faggot, I agree you're right that doesn't really happen. This is mostly something that goes on subtly, in people's expressions, or in conversations they have with other people at the same gym. When my wife goes to a yoga class, I know she's looking around the room, she has her competitors she's trying to match, she has the women she CANNOT let beat her, and if she sees one of her colleagues it is ON she is going to hit every bind and balance to show them up. At Crossfit, I know the guys I never get close to, and I know the guys it would be embarrassing to let pass me. When I spend a lot of time in climbing gyms, the regulars know who they climb with, and there's a hierarchy to who is liked and who is ignored. And in BJJ, it's rigidly hierarchical, and we're all super nice and polite to each other, but we all know where we stand. There's the guys everyone fawns over, and the guys everyone tells "hey man you're doing great" after they tap four times in five minutes. I know who the guys are who I target to practice a new sub at an open mat, and I know who the guys are who I need to be soft on and maybe coach a little through the roll.
I don't think it's helpful on the motte, where we're all about ugly politically incorrect truths, to tell people that no one is judging them. But maybe I'm just used to more communal workouts, as those are the only ones I ever do in public gyms.
Hey, fair enough. If you (the general "you") are so fragile that your will is crushed by the thought of some people thinking you suck, then I guess you should probably just crawl under a rock and die because this fallen world is simply too cruel for you to survive. I don't really have advice for those sorts of people, they have set the victory conditions unrealistically high and made impossible for themselves to win. Personally, I think it's a pathetic cope, a way to rationalize and justify wallowing in your comfortable sty of self-indulgence instead of putting yourself out there and enduring some embarrassment ("those meathead powerlifter bros are just a bunch of assholes anyway! going to the gym is for jerks and I don't want to be jerk!").
Some people really do just want to curl up into a ball of self-pity and wither away into nothing. They , like everyone else, have been given free will, and so ultimately the choice is theirs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link