shorthand

My body wasn't made to be strong. I have fat thighs that make biking up hills a shitty time. My knuckles crack too easily. The bags under my eyes are their own pillows.

In high school, I was the kid who couldn't remember her freshman year. Forget that I started at a new school, rode the bus for the first time, experienced being thirteen with a fresh set of teenagers--literally, forget it all. None of this made an impression on me. I don't even remember the anxiety of my first class. I think I might have been late.

Or perhaps, the changes confused me so much that I retreated into myself, erasing an entire year of my life.

My body wasn't made to be strong.

Now that I'm twenty-three, I try to summit a mountain once a week, or at least make it out to hike. When I bike to work--which is every day--the ride is always uphill. I rock climb so often that my climbing shoes have holes after a month.

I'm making myself stronger, and I do it by tearing myself down. Sometimes I prefer the bodily exhaustion, while other times I revel in my emotional misery. How intensely can I feel something? How much can I struggle?

I have a blog that consists entirely of pictures of my face. After five years, I can now spend hours going through my face in stages. They show world travels. They show nights at home in bed with tea. Some show various states of undress. A lot of them are me at my most miserable, crying, afraid that I'm pregnant, having just failed an exam, suffering from a breakup. They're beautiful portraits of myself, and I study them with unabashed vanity, trying to dissect if I've grown through these broken versions of myself, if I've made my body stronger.

And I think what I'm most afraid of, is that under all this, all these masks of misery and struggle, I'm just a weak person struggling through all of life's different complexities. That at the end of the day, I haven't gotten any stronger. I'm simply miserable and afraid.

But I keep tearing myself down, telling myself my muscles will build back harder, and that the struggle will make me stronger.