“I don’t have anything to prove anymore,” I thought randomly as I watched my reflection jog in time to the music in a recent Body Combat class. My feet stayed low to the ground, and my right knee was encased in a stretchy light brace since stomping on a hard gym floor doesn’t feel great for my mostly recovered leg.
It was a nice thought.
I used to be such an annoying show-off in that class. I cringe now to think of it. And of course I was always obsessed with how I good I looked (even though I hated my body and had a raging eating disorder the whole time). Although I wasn’t staring at myself in the mirror in taekwondo class at the same time in my life, that self-centered obsession showed up in different ways. I sought perfection in myself and goaded others to seek it as well. At one point I also thought I wanted to go through yoga teacher training so I could, I don’t know, boss people around about their bodies with that too?
Screw that. That type of obsession and pressure is exhausting.
I don’t need to proselytize about taekwondo or micro-manage how other people, including other taekwondo students, use their bodies, nor do I need to do it to myself.
My “meh, I’m just having fun and getting my sweat on” attitude in my exercise class led me to another thought.
Do I dare tempt the notion that I have reached what I’d hoped to a few years ago: Giving Zero F*cks by Forty?
No, I dare not. I still give too many f*cks. I worry about what I say or what people think of me. Although I don’t do it nearly as often anymore, I do still worry about things not working out the way I planned exactly. (So much for not micro-managing). However, compared to thirty-nine-year-old me in 2018 who panicked at the sight of her own shadow, I’ve made a lot of progress. It took a pandemic, major injury and hard recovery, mental breakdown, battling an eating disorder, an existential/mid-life crisis and anger-anguish over lost years of potential art-making, and things being topsy-turvy and stressful at work for me to calm the hell down, but…yeah….things are better.
Several weeks ago a leader in my organization shared a quote she’d heard in church: “Sometimes you have to go through it to get to it.” I guess that’s what I’ve done in the last few years.
Maybe it’s not so much giving zero f*cks as it is getting better at finding balance, re-prioritizing, and being more authentic.
We can care about things without fretting over them or being disappointed when they’re not *perfect.* Caring less can help us care in a more meaningful way. Quality of f*cks given over quantity. Maybe I’ll just shoot for “Fewer F*cks Given by Forty-Five.”
I don’t have to be passionate or obsessed or mired in worry to do a good job, whether it’s in the workplace or the gym or my home or the dojang, or even with my small but growing author career. In fact, freeing up my brain from that style of thinking allows me to be more open-minded to differences or change. I’ve started being more vocal about what I like and don’t like in the workplace, and lo and behold, I’m being given more work that I like. In a different meeting, that same leader whom I quoted earlier said, almost as an aside, that feeling like we can be authentic at work positively affects our well-being. It does. I’m also working on two exciting personal writing projects in the first half of this year and may add more later.
Meanwhile, I no longer have to do a “blind weigh-in” at the doctor’s office. I can step on the scale, hear my weight, and immediately move on to thinking about something else. I’m comfortable with what my body looks and feels like now. Today I tried on some clothes at a store. Not fitting into my old size would have sent me into an angry panic a few years ago, but now I’m like, “meh, that’s one less thing I have to pay for.”
At the end of the day, my job is a job, my body is a meat suit keeping my alive, and taekwondo is a hobby. I like and appreciate them, but I’m not going to lose sleep over them, and I like that I can loosen the grip on my relationships with these admittedly big parts of my life. (A plumbing leak, however, will send me into a tailspin of grief. Woe is the homeowner’s never ceasing plight.)
