Two
years ago I did a fitness program and I fell off. I actually achieved
a lot. I lost twelve pounds, and by the end of it I was slim. But I
didn't quite reach the goals I had set myself. I always wanted to be
toned, to be able to wear slim fitting t-shirts, and to have the kind
of body that means you can pull off any piece of clothing and it
won't look awkward. To not feel dependent on how I present myself, in
order to feel confident about my sexuality and my appearance.
I
was always a fat kid. As far back as I have memories, I eat for
emotional reasons. Sensitive doesn't really do it justice, I was a
proper high-maintenance child. But I say that with affection for my
child self. I was always restless and creative, full of imagination
and I loved parties and opportunities to be the centre of attention.
I liked to entertain other people.
But
when you are a boy, this kind of behaviour is treated with suspicion.
Certainly, the Scottish protestant ethic doesn't welcome emotional
outbursts, especially from young boys. It's unsightly, and anyway,
children should be seen and not heard.
Maybe the best way to be seen,
if I couldn't be heard, was to get fat. Having the piss taken out of
you for being chubby is not ideal, but it's attention. People notice
you, it gives you an identity of sorts.
I
battled this emotional eating, this need to be noticed, all through
my adolescence and my twenties. I even lost weight. I got addicted to
that moment people start to realise that you have lost weight, the
double look they give you. Especially from women. But all my projects
to lose weight were overshadowed by a sense at the back of my mind,
that I hadn't really changed, that the fat kid would still rather be
fat, and that his emotional needs were still not being fulfilled.
I
think this is the reason that no matter how hard I tried, I was
never able to truly fulfill my proper goals in terms of health and
weight loss. I never wanted to be ripped. I'm not interested in being
a body-builder. I want something a little more softer round the
edges. I want to look streamlined. More like a swimmer. More Brando
than Schwarzenegger.
What
keeps me from this, is that last layer of body fat. I have this thing
where I lose a lot of weight, and I can even get quite fit very
quickly. I have a lot of natural stamina, and I am a physically
restless person, so I eventually start to enjoy working out. Where I
lose faith is that last stage, the place where I always plateau. And
of course, it is the very thing that I want to eliminate in the first
place. More important than all the compliments about losing weight,
and even the basic health benefits, is the sense of feeling satisfied
with my body.
Is
it is a superficial thing? Is it a narcissistic thing? Maybe. It's
definitely linked to sexuality, to being confident enough in your own
self-image, so much so that it informs your erotic ego.
But it's more
than that. I truly believe it is a question of self-expression. About
having a body that reflects the authentic truth about who you feel
you are. It's about honing yourself so that you can fully express
yourself through your body, rather than rely on fashion or smoke and
mirrors to get laid or get attention.
Stanislavsky
said that all actors must be athletes, that the body is an
instrument, and we must perfect our relationship to that instrument.
This is a great metaphor. In fact, it is more truth than metaphor. The
body is there to be the manifestation of your mind in the world. But
the relationship of the mind to the world is not simple. It is very
like a musician's relationship to a piece of music. A pianist might
establish a quick and direct relationship to say Rachmaninov's second
concerto, but that emotional connection will not translate into to a
physical one unless the musician practices like a motherfucker. The
authenticity of the connection is one thing, and it is very
important. But it doesn't mean that expressing that
connection is easy. A musician seeks self-expression, she seeks the
truest and most powerful form of authentic fulfillment through her
work. And to do this, she has to sweat, scream, and hammer her
faculties into the right habits.
This
is what we do when we train. Our body is our instrument. But being
able to pull off a few tricks and rudiments is one thing. We can
impress our friends around the fire with a few chords on the guitar,
just like we can pull off fifty press ups and make people think we are
athletes. But being an athlete, like being a true artist, is about
having command over our instrument. It's about having the same
relationship to our bodies that Eric Clapton has to his guitar. At
that level of genius, the instrument is fully available to the
player, it's an extension of himself. And it takes years of lonely,
hard bloody work to get there. There are no shortcuts to genius.
So
that's what my goal is. To achieve a sort of authenticity and genius
between my mind and body, that fully expresses who I am in the world,
and which fulfills my needs. That is, a relationship completely
opposite to the one I have experienced most of my life, one of being
trapped inside a body that does not reflect my identity, that is not
equipped to reflect my inner power and my sexuality and....my genius.
There I said it. If my saying something like that aggravates you,
then perhaps we should part ways here. Because that's the way I am
thinking of it from now on.
Health and feeling sexy, are one and the same thing. You can feel fit and
still not feel sexy. Feeling sexy is a function of being human. Our
sexualities are expressions of our eroticism. And our eroticism is a
word that has biological connotations. It's about connectivity, it's
about relationships, it's about human ecology. Eros was one of the gods of love. The god of sexual union and physical love. Health,
then, is about cultivating the erotic instrument. It's about building
a relationship with the body that means you are the Jim Hendrix of
sex. The Muhammad Ali of love. The Rachmaninov of physical fitness.
Being
yourself. This is the cliché on the tip of everyone's tongue. As if
it was the most natural thing in the world. And I suppose that it is.
But natural does not mean easy, and maybe that's where I have
struggled in the past. It's not healthy to keep hammering away at a
task that is not authentically yours. If it feels wrong, then it
probably is wrong. The New-Agers are right on that front. But just
because something is hard, doesn't make it wrong. However hard the
task is, the real test is how much of a buzz it gives you. If you
don't have that same post-orgasm feeling as you do when you complete
something that you love, then it's probably not right for you. But
just because it's hard, is no reason to dismiss it.
This
is one thing I think women don't understand about men. Whereas men
will never understand childbirth, women will never understand the
trials a man must go through to become a real man. That's because
they are largely emotional trials. All women know a real man when
they see him, but most couldn't put into words. They may say
something like, 'confidence' or 'he stands up to me' but these are
really just superficial characteristics of a man who has got his
erotic and emotional shit together. And what they don't know, is that
most men have to work at it. They have to go through years of being a
fuck up, and an emotional mess, to get to that place. Some men don't.
I have met these men, and I hate them as much as I love them. But for
the rest of us, that ineffable genius that characterises a man, that
means he is the John Coltrane of his own chemical make-up, is a hard
won achievement. It will not happen overnight. And it means being no
stranger to failure.
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