I crawled my deflated body over to an isolated corner and tried to will myself to disappear into the floor. Disappointment and embarrassment were in a tag team battle royale with aches and pains to see who would break me first.
I had just gotten my ass handed to me. In public. And, on Facebook Live.
For a gold star-seeking praise junky whose personality trends toward vanity, this was fairly humbling.
I was participating in the third week of a five week team competition at my gym, Crossfit Jane. I had done well in week one and I had even surprised myself with my performance in week two. The third week was in my wheelhouse…until the wheels came all the way off.
A lot, but not all, of what went wrong was a mental collapse. Once there was a crack in my mentality, my harshest critic was able to slip her way inside. She’s the one who tells me that it doesn’t matter how hard I try because I don’t deserve to be there if I’m not “winning”. In a hoarse whisper, she reminds me that at my core I will always be nothing but a loser.
That’s who was talking to me in that lonely corner. And, I was listening because…well, because I deserved it. I had failed. Just like I had failed to make my parents stop screaming and beating each other. Just like I had failed to shield my siblings from the horrors of addiction that swirled around us. Just like I had failed to keep my mom and brother alive.
Then I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. It belonged to Jaime, a woman who, from the moment I met her, felt like slipping a well-worn sweater over my head – warm and comforting and familiar. With her empathetic heart and gypsy soul, she has become one of my best friends and most trusted advisors. She balances me.
She wrapped her strong arms around me and I tried to assure her that I was fine because isn’t being vulnerable the one thing that is worse than being a loser? My friend talked over my critic. Jaime said, “I know that you’re disappointed. I can see it in your eyes. They don’t lie.”
I smiled weakly at her and then buried my head in her shoulder and cried – just for a second. She finished with, “You’ve got five minutes to be disappointed and to finish beating yourself up and then you’re done. You don’t deserve what you’re doing to yourself.”
I wanted to explain to her that I most certainly did deserve it, but she had anticipated this and moved away. Other friends came to offers words of encouragement. My first inclination was to lash out at them…you know, because hurt people hurt people, but I didn’t. I accepted their balm and let it seep into my wounds.
However, it was tampons that healed me the most.
This week, members of the gym brought in tampons, pads and other personal hygiene products for A Child’s Place, a Charlotte, NC non-profit that works to help ease the impacts of homelessness on children and their education. I looked over at these boxes of tampons and again started to quietly cry, but this time it wasn’t over my performance in competitive exercising.
It was over the kids who would benefit from these products. I was one of those kids. I’ve used dollar store dishwashing liquid to wash my hair and my blood stained underwear in the same shower. I’ve wrapped single-ply toilet paper around my panties when I was on my period and didn’t have money for tampons or pads. I’ve kept my arms close to my sides in hopes that they wouldn’t allow my body odor to fly away.
Hygiene is expensive and considering feminine hygiene products are now subject to the “pink tax”, they are particularly pricey. Tampons and pads are classified as “luxury items” because nothing says “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” like the lining being ripped from the wall of your uterus.
It’s something that most of us have the good fortune to gripe about over coffee with our girlfriends or sigh heavily before dumping a giant box into our shopping cart. However, imagine being a teenage girl who isn’t sure where her next meal is coming from and still having to figure out how to take care of the blood flowing from her body.
I stood up leaving my sweat stained imprint against the wall and told the voice in my head to shut her foul mouth. I deserved to be there because my gym and the people in it build me up and bring me joy. They don’t give a damn if I’m in first place or dead last. I mentally hugged the little girl who thought that she could save everyone by being smart enough, athletic enough, good enough – just enough. I reminded her of how far that we had come in that our biggest issue of the day, the week, the month was not exercising fast enough and that it was our turn to help others when we could.
I assured her that we were safe now.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
