Stregnth

I just read this wonderful piece by Dvora Meyers for Jezebel, and I was really struck by a few of the things that she says about doing gymnastics as a child and struggling with how to make the sport compatible with her other, especially her religious, values.  


She says this about athletics and feminism:
"My mother, who had been the first in her family to go to college, intellectually conveyed her ideas about feminism to me, insisting that if I got an education, I could do whatever I set my mind to. But what about whatever I set my body to?

Through gymnastics, feminism was communicated physically, which turned out to be much more powerful than its intellectual demonstration. If ideas about inferiority or separateness of women are rooted in our different bodies, then the best way I found to overcome these ideas was by using this same body to accomplish feats of strength."

And this, THIS, is what I have been feeling about running but have been unable to articulate.  I have always felt, thanks to my wonderful parents and grandparents and teachers and my own innate stubborn streak, that I could do anything I put my mind to.  That I could be a doctor or a paleontologist or a professor or an astronaut, or, if I want to settle, a lawyer.  But I felt limited, limited by the perceptions and pressures of the world, limited by my body and by circumstance... just limited.  And when I run, that goes away.

I have been religiously watching the olympics, marveling at the greatest achievements in human strength, speed, grace and precision, and so I appreciate that I will never, never be a world-class athlete, or even a good athlete!  But the physical communication of feminism, the well of strength that comes from working my muscles, putting my feet on the road, going far, that does create a sense of limitlessness.  It is so easy to shrug off the silly ideas of what I should look like, the sense that my body is not what society deems it should be, when I can USE this body to run 42 miles of trail in three days, or finish a marathon, or just to put some miles between me and whatever is bothering me.  It is also easier to put my mind to things and live out my intellectual feminist principles when I am rooted in the physical strength and I feel like my body is an ally, rather than an enemy.  I feel whole.

I think the most pernicious thing about our society's beauty standards, diet culture, and the unrealistic and objectifying views of women it perpetuates is that it makes a woman's own body her enemy.  It breaks her down into component parts and renders each one a separate foe: her thighs are her tormentors, her stomach her opponent, and her ass an obstacle.  And that is tragic.  Because a woman cannot be anything but limited if she must battle herself, divided.  How can she have any energy left to triumph over the other myriad obstacles of life? 

Anyway, thanks to Dvora Meyers for her writing and reflection.  Its timely, as I'm watching the Olympic women's gymnastics final right now, and I can feel the strength of those women, see the hours and hours of dedication reflected in every movement, and see that even under pressure and in pain, they trust themselves and their own power.  Sometimes they fall, that isn't the point.  The point is that they trust themselves to fly.