There is a fierce joy in being sore. I’m one of those people who doesn’t really respond to cardio; I’d rather chew glass than walk thirty minutes on a treadmill. But I love pushing pieces of metal around.
The idea of bulking up never bothered me. I want to look badass! I want to be badass! My life has been, more or less, an extended attempt to attain and maintain some kind of dignity, which I never think I have. Stupidly Sisyphean. But we all have our quirks, I suppose.
So anyway, I love pushing weights around. I love feeling the steering in my car get softer — it’s an old car, with a carburetor and “assisted” steering, a term describing something that is almost, but not entirely unlike, power steering; I love feeling how stable I am getting up the stairs after apparently years of screwed up posture leg musculature out of whack.
Note how there’s no talk of weight, specifically my own, specifically losing it.
Well, I’m kind of done with it, when I’m staring it in the face. It won’t go away for any real length of time, and while there’s benefit in eating well, there’s no benefit in never approaching closer than five paces from a cake the rest of my life. Does that mean I won’t go into a misery spiral when I have to (God help me) go shopping for clothes and can’t find anything that doesn’t look warped in some awful way, even if it’s big enough to “fit”? Heck no. Society is a constant pressure, and I’m no Atlas. The water presses in through the leaks sometime.
And it hurts for a while, but it eventually stops, and I move on, though I know it’ll be back around again. But in the meantime, I take my lumps, and I keep leg pressing twice my weight, and start learning how to do Olympic style lifts. Because there’s a satisfaction in feeling sore, and I like pushing pieces of metal around.