Experiment in the Essay #14: Just Almost
"Just a few more, you're almost through," the trainer encourages, two reps into the set.
These days, I feel like the queen of almost: almost got the job, almost missed the train, almost burnt the toast. A palm-reader would frown at my life-lines and declare: "Almost!" But Justin isn't talking to me, in particular. He is talking to the camera, his buff-ness redoubled in an off-screen mirror. What he says doesn't have to be true, it just has to sound convincing. The way muscles convince us of strength despite invisible vulnerabilities.
"Almost there!" he repeats, like "almost" is a scarf of indefinite length being pulled from a clown's throat. And if you're wondering, you're the clown.
And: No, we're not almost through. Personal training is all about accepting motivational lies, and using them as a reason to carry on in the face of something hard.
Anyway, this is not personal: he's leading a workout video on youtube. He doesn't even know I exist. He doesn't know if I'm exercising along with him, or just watching him perform, standing there in the living room, surrounded by toy cars and scattered Legos and a balled up diaper, in my billowy lace nightgown, picking my toes.
Which I'm not, I'm trying to keep up--and I don't and never will own a billowy lace nightgown-- but still. "Just a couple more, we're almost there, c'mon, sweethearts!"
What? No, we've just done three reps. Three out of maybe twenty? We're not almost anywhere.
The trainer has comically sculpted arms, and a delicate mustache, which looks like an accident he then made the best out of. And while he's clearly bench-pressed his arms until they are as unmissable as a cathedral dome, he's plucked his mustache with converse intentions, until it's as subtle as floss in a mound of newly fleeced wool.
Being hugged by him would be like getting hugged by a trash compactor: too much muscle, not enough tender places. But he's not going to hug you; he's going to work you, so c'mon.
I chose this video because it is low impact, which my inflammation-prone feet require. It's got a brand name to indicate: LIT. The shorthand promise is that Justin- that's his name, and no, I didn't make that up for literary resonance with my essay title, m'kay? -- will light you up. He's got two slender women behind him, doing the workout, just to prove it.
They glow. Beads of sweat make them look like Rockefeller Christmas Trees.
He calls them, singly and collectively, "Sweet Heart."
Dani, stage right, does MODIFICATIONS--you know, the not that hard stuff, NO SHAME IN THAT-- because, he explains, she "just" had a baby.
What? Just had a what?
Now "just" is an unfortunately casual, highly overused, too-many-reps-per-speech-act temporal adverb. It really means nothing, because it means too many things, and like beauty, the time scale intended/signified by "just" is in the eye of the beholder.
For example, 23 months later, I also sometimes feel-- but don't always any longer say-- that I "just" had a baby. My stomach has repaired itself by a lot, but the extra skin and ropy scar tell another story of pregnancy that doesn't end with labor. Mostly, things are in tact down there. I stopped doing postpartum-specific workouts only a few months ago, and almost by accident did the word leave me behind. My identity loosened as my abdomen tightened.
But hold on there; if Dani "just" had a baby, like, literally, why the hell is she doing this workout at all? With her imaginary hand weights and sweat-slicked face, slightly reduced range of motion. I can see the new moms cringe at her, or even, god help us, try a few of the modified moves themselves, baby in a football hold in one arm, or draped over the shoulder puking on a cloth-- that baby, the permanent hand weight, skewing the neckline, fatiguing the trapezius.
Even minor exertion makes tissue we didn't even know we had throb, like an ice cream headache in the uterus.
Most new moms lose any concrete, objective sense of time and duration, desperate too soon for their body "back" (that doesn't happen, not in the way we think we mean- some things change you permanently) or their old routines, a familiar self, or to do reps like Dani-- no, no way, she did not "just" have a baby.
But also, we're not "just" doing a few more until the set's done; the set has just begun.
So what is this, the rush to have (hard) things be over, before they've hardly gotten going?
And what is this other thing, how we redefine ourselves in the wake of transformative events (say, a death or, say, labor-- or God's labor, whereby we get the grand calendar markings of AD and BC), and count time from there, in quantum?
By this logic I am still new to the universe; because, you see, I "just" got born, 37 years ago.
Give me all the ab-strengtheners you want, trash-compactor, Justin. There is some damage you can do nothing about. There is still a larger hole in the tissue behind my belly button. I can palpate it, sink fingers into it. It's where the micro-tears on the transverse abdominus amounted to the muscular separation that precedes postnatal separation. Diastasis recti.
You can correct the condition, of course, with consistent targeted exercise. The exercises are subtle and repetitive, ad nauseam, like blinking if you squeezed where the lashes touched, every time. Eventually your eyelids would become very, very strong-- but you'd lose your mind in the process.
The thing is, no real workout is autonomic, and it shouldn't be. Except, you might say, what the heart "just" does without our consent, without a training plan, daily.
9 months pregnant, I would sometimes joke with my husband that maybe my baby would take the easier route out, skip the vagina altogether, and pop through my umbilicus like a chip-n-dale dancer from a white frosted cake. It seemed like there was sufficient diameter in the torn muscle for a head to fit.
In the end, that's sorta what happened.
Back to Just Almost Justin.
And what is this, these lies about recovery that make postpartum women damage themselves, judge themselves, rue their new condition? It's true that a few Amazon tribal woman could-- or must-- handle a workout a few days after child-birth. But it's not the norm.
It "just" what we expect from ourselves, to always look as if nothing has happened to us. God forbid someone can tell birth took effort. God forbid if someone can tell waking up in the morning, pouring the tea, turning on the lights, took effort. And then, of course, we must feign that negotiating with our minds is no effort at all. The seamless sweaty package of our lives is easily lifted.
I want to pull Dani out of the video and give her savory lamb stew, chunks of parsnip, water and green vegetables sauteed in pasture-raised cow butter. But instead I work out with her, wondering. Where are her leaky breasts? Why aren't you knighting her with a gold medal for getting through two reps? Why is there no baby nearby, who might need to nurse? Why is she in form-fitting sexy clothes?
Many of us live starting each thing only to be done with it. And perhaps a workout is meant to echo this-- push yourself, it's almost over.
It's not almost over. Or maybe it is. Depends how you view time. Einstein apparently said that time is not an arrow at all, contrary to pedestrian belief, contrary to the industry that sells you new calendars every year, daily planners. But I learned from a physicist that, actually, Einstein asserted his revised theory of time only after the loss of his beloved, and facing his own death, trying to make sense of his grief and pending destruction of self. If time is not an arrow, then death does not always have the ace.
So Einstein was hoping for a loop, for personal reasons, he did not want this to be the last rep. He wrote elaborate equations to chart a different kind of progression. But in the end, he died.
The post-partum woman is in possession of the most delicate arrow nature ever suggested. She must go through major postural adjustments to hold this creature effectively to the breast, or properly offer a bottle. She positions this creature towards the future, and with her whole body, she shoots.
Justin's arms glisten with new sweat, he keeps sweating, he's working out right with you. Or maybe he's been rubbed down with vaseline, shiny and clotting his pores. In personal training, sweat is testimony. Sweat is evidence that either THIS THING WORKS --OR you are in terrible shape or hormonally driven metabolic flux, m'kay?
Stop picking your toes. Tie your nightgown up in knot so you don't trip. Fake like you changed your socks this week.
Look at Justin's arms-- don't they inspire you to do that final push-up?
The camera zooms in, but we know why, his biceps are meant to keep you just a tad jealous. We live in a culture of Biceps, as a synonym for accomplishment, discipline, pushing yourself to the end.
Women, gather near. Justin will be happy to give you a workout tailored for the sweetheart you know you have somewhere inside you. The one who's not pissed about the dishes being dirty, about the crap all over the apartment, about the number of times we forget the rice in the cooker and have to throw it out, but not until you again google, "How long can you keep cooked rice in the rice-cooker?" and read through the string of contradictory answers.
No, you are just a sweetie with a body, and you are almost there.
Justin's full attention is on your low-impact needs.
Have you ever seen a woman's face when she's pushing a baby out? It's purple-red sweatasfreshplum. It's eyespoppingjawclenching. It's too many words too close together. I never got to push, I never got coached to press the plum through the veil of my body. Just when I felt that urge-- and they say you'll "Just know"-- the ambulance pulled up I leaned against the door of the building trash chute, heavily coated in thick, jet black paint. The paint glistened, feigned freshness. This is how something old stays looking new.
I was burning fat, all right; burning right through each fat motivational lie meant to make you think you can forge the impossible and move a baby through objecting bones, using muscles you're only partially in charge of. In the face of this repetition, well-meaning people say things like, "Just breathe," or "Just one more” and “you’re almost there!” When what they really mean is that there are few things to say that actually help, so they are just picking one, because they have to say something. An almost truth. Just for now. One small lie to move the needle. And then just one more.
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Etymology:
just (adv.) "merely, barely," 1660s, from Middle English sense of "exactly, precisely, punctually" (c. 1400), from just (adj.), and paralleling the adverbial use of French juste. Just now "a short time ago" is from 1680s. For sense decay, compare anon, soon. Just-so story first attested 1902 in Kipling, from the expression just so "exactly that, in that very way" (1751).
And this infographic:
https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/question/how-to-use-just-can-you-explain-the-meaning-of-this-adverb/
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