I agree with Joe Rogan when he says many people are averse to initial discomfort when it comes to exercise. But discomfort is interpreted differently from person to person. I have had a lifelong anxiety about exercise, especially rigorous activities and activities that are social or require a lot of coordination. I am a survivor of childhood trauma and I have been variously diagnosed with autism and anxiety disorders. For me, physical discomfort equals pain, pain equals injury, and injury indicates both social failure and the fear that something’s changed and it will never go back to normal.

Many forms of exercise, at least the ways they were introduced to me, did not take advantage of my learning differences and instead they made me feel dumb and confused. I could never take the time to understand the physical tasks involved in my own way. And I’m also very sensitive, so I have a time-consuming process of rationally understanding how to complete a new task and how it connects to what I already know, as well as the emotional component, which requires a time-out to assess and express how I feel. In this context, activities like running, jumping, and climbing were prohibitive and I only came to approach them in my late teens. Then of course I’m socially anxious and have a difficult time with teamwork and group learning – both in terms of getting generalized instruction BECAUSE I’m in a group and also imitating a peer in a group. I don’t know to what extent this stemmed from a fear of disapproval or that I rarely found explanations or demonstrations to be sufficient for me to feel confident trying something new. I’d like to believe it’s the second one. Either way, exercise had a pernicious way of bringing out my lifelong risk aversion and really exploiting it in ways that most academic and creative activities did not. Most. What really sucks about all this is that from an early age, I associated attempting physical activity with verbal abuse, cognitive frustration, and social exclusion. And that means I have to work extra hard to be physically healthy, because every time I learn a complicated exercise or participate in games or suffer a minor injury, all the fear and all the anger swell up in me. I feel like I’m back in elementary school, like nothing’s changed.

Many people associate getting healthier with self-discipline, goal setting, perseverance, and keeping to a schedule. But I don’t want all that. I want to feel more expressive and show it in my body language. I want to feel excited to travel somewhere new and explore on foot. I want to cook and craft. I want to use my body to make new things and share what I’ve learned with other people. I want to use exercise to lean into my strengths in ways I couldn’t when I was younger, rather than keep trying to learn exercises that I spent much of my life envying people over, the ones that didn’t acknowledge me.

Thanks for reading.