I looked in the mirror. My face was ridden with pimples. My skin tone, uneven. My hair was greasy, and looked like black barbed wires strung together. One of my eyes looked punched in and the other magnified. I didn’t like my dilating nostrils. I didn’t like my neck looking like it had just been strangled. My shoulders pulled at my body from each side, hanging low and loose. My chest caved in and my stomach bulged out. My legs pointed in opposite directions.

I joined the gym. The time I came in to check on it I was overwhelmed by the size of the coaches, and the difference between my body and theirs made me question whether I had lived a human life at all up until that point or not. They were enormous. Every muscle in their body stretching the skin. Nothing about them looked weary. And so were some of the people, too, that came to the gym. The same people I used to get up and down the bus with during my shift had carved their body into something enduring, while I, in the same time and place, had let it rot.

The body to me is a reflection of one’s state of mind. I haven’t seen physically fit people get injured or sick too often, even though they are the ones that place themselves more repeatedly in situations that make them more prone to them. The tightness, the iron-like ferocity, their muscles being the transformation and manifestation of their action, had a certain attractive veracity about it. A well-maintained body, taken care of daily, is especially radiant.

To me the gym was only a means to achieve some satisfaction with myself, through lifting weights and a daily attendance to something, not necessarily because of a boss or authority hovering over my head, but due to a carefully curated self-discipline. I needed a routine, an anchor, some place I could be proud of. It was more sustenance, of course, than a zest. The mirror showed me that explicitly. I didn’t have it in me to look at myself deteriorate any further.

On my first day I was shown around the gym and told to do some stretches. I couldn’t care much for that. But immediately as I got out of bed the next day, I felt sore in the places I had stretched. The fat and laziness on my body was a decayed carcass that the stretches were feeding on as insects. It was painful, but still I was ready to do what I did that day everyday. I finally had some personal surety. I could live my life feeling secure about my health, since I had made it predictable.

Every day after that I kept at it, without missing a single session. By the end of the first two weeks I had a completely new split, with two muscles being targeted in a day, and my rest of two days got reduced to one. Week three and four had me controlling and monitoring my sleep, calories, protein, water intake, and mealtimes from morning to night. I didn’t drink more than two coffees a day. I didn’t eat more than one sweet treat in a week.

When I did have to work past my usual bedtime I made up for it by sleeping for an hour or two between my coming back from the office and going to the gym. Nothing shook that rhythm. I could already feel my shoulders getting rounder and poking out of my body by the end of the second month. I had only missed a day, and it had been because of an air conditioning problem in the gym. I didn’t allow myself any rest beyond the singular day, and didn’t seem to want it anyways.

It was a chest/back day right around the start of my third month, and walking in, I saw this person do a preacher curl standing, practically putting all the weight on his body rather than focusing it on his bicep. I saw quite a few of these people. What a waste. I’d come here for the past three months, and my eye for spotting bad form was sharpening. I saw it as an indication of my own growth.

By the end of the third month I had only taken three leaves in total. One was the AC, and the other two were consecutive. I had a strange pain in the back of my shoulder. I know that if I hadn’t been hitting the gym, I would stretch my time with an injury like this, or even a cold or a flu, because I didn’t have a discipline to attach myself to. My weakness would serve the purpose of me not having to go to the office. It is such a shame, now, to think that I used to ransom my body for such meagre, inconsequential things.

I had developed a habit of puffing up in front of new faces at the gym. I never bothered to stop when I did notice. It was deserved. I could relate to the past in this way. I would always look at my body not as my own self, but as an intricately painted portrait that I had made for my eye, and yet this eye would compare the portrait to those of other artists. Slowly the mirror I had loathed looking into took the shape of a chiseled, symmetrical, and consistent figure.

I had slowly come to realize that the advice the coaches gave to people wasn’t complicated, and I could give it myself. I had a good enough body to show for it, and now I wanted to use it as credibility for my thoughts and corrections of people’s exercise. I noticed this become a habit. I was practically a third coach in the gym when I was in.

I was correcting someone with small dumbbells in my hand. I was showing them the proper form to do a shoulder press. I pushed the dumbbells up and as I did, I felt something tear or twist in my left shoulder. I tried not to show it on my face, and pushed it up further. Suddenly my forearm hung back and the dumbbell almost fell on the person’s foot whom I was demonstrating to. It was a disaster. The entire gym saw me fail with two baby-sized dumbbells in my hand. The pain in my shoulder and elbow was unbearable. The coach came in and the receptionist called an ambulance. Every person that had seen me, talked to me as a friend, asked me how long I’d been hitting the gym, showed me respect, even some colleagues that joined the gym with me after seeing my progress, everyone saw me fail that. The ambulance came, and they took me, half-dizzy, to the hospital. The eyes of all the people, all the respect and validation I had accumulated in that half year, looked at me with pity. Like I was smaller than them. Like they could help me while I had always been helping them. It was rubbish, insane! How I wished I could tear the cast away from my arm and throw it on the nurse’s face, and then tear my arm away and grow a new one in its place! Everything I had built was being flattened against my will.

Soon I was discharged. A few months went by before I could reason with or understand myself. I didn’t put the blame on anything, and altogether I just tried to stop thinking about it. I was feeling better 2 months in, and the doctor told me again to wait a whole month before I took the cast off. Every time I went to redress it I saw my hand shrink, my fingers especially. I joined the gym again four months and thirteen days after the incident. Everyone was enormous. I didn’t have any desire to be healthier or feel better any more, I only wanted to look like them and feel how they felt looking at me again. The life I had lived was different from the one they did. I looked at the weights and I looked at their chests and their legs. I went to the washroom to change into my clothes. I looked at my shoulders tucking my body in, my eyes sullen, my stomach bulging out, my tailbone visible on my back, poking out…