knitting your abdominals

set it on fire

If there's one thing amongst a sea of things I take issue with in the wellness industry, it’s the idea of holding your core and knitting up your abdominals. I know there’s a science behind this, but it still makes me rageful. I would like to start a formal petition to eliminate the word core from every fitness class moving forward. I would happily make saying core, knitting, and abdominals in the same breath illegal if that weren’t fascist behaviour. If you’re really, but I mean really honest with yourself, do you even know what your core is? Can you locate it on a map? Can you point me to it? When I envision what it means to knit one’s abdominals, the picture isn’t pretty. It sounds like it involves knitting needles, which could hurt.

When an instructor gives that cue in a fitness class, I want to scream in their face: ‘Don't you understand that my abdominals have been cut in three places?’ It feels like strengthening my core is a total impossibility (which is likely untrue, but that’s what it feels like). Deep mounds of scar tissue have formed in and around my abdominals. I have a mesh that lives underneath the flesh of my solar plexus made up of pig skin (no really, pig skin).

It makes me feel like a bionic woman, like maybe I'm not fully real. And when I'm in a fitness class, and I'm asked to do mountain climbers or hold my head up and pair that with bicycles, I feel attacked.

I want to scream

I want to stand up

And I want to run around the sterile walls of the fitness studio blaring bad Beyoncé remixes, and I want to set it on fire.

But I don't :)

I make my little modifications, and I keep breathing, and I feel the tension in my abdominals as my hernia reforms. The little lump that lives beneath my skin, heaving under the weight of the pig mesh (technical term) which didn't quite fix it in the way I’d hoped. The truth is that surgery was never going to fully fix it. I pushed to do it so I could look less like an alien, be more attractive, more desirable. Figure out how to have the washboard abs I always wanted. I got it fixed at the height of the pandemic when no one was making good decisions, least of all me.

And so what do I do? What are my options? Do I hide in a room? Do I go for long walks never getting my heart rate up for more than 10 minutes? Do I stop participating in the fitness culture that I’ve come to know so intimately? Do I do whatever it is this guy is doing?

Credit

When I ask fitness professionals about what I might be able to do about the hernia or how I might modify for it, none of them have an answer. Never have I witnessed more of a blank stare than when I utter the words ‘incisional hernia’ to a fitness instructor. When I asked the doctors, none of them had an answer. When I asked my acupuncturist, they didn't know either. When I look at the internet, I have heart palpitations and shut my laptop immediately because it’s psychotic to think you might find anything good by Googling that.

And so I'm left wondering what exactly this mound of flesh underneath my solar plexus does for me. What is it telling me?

One of my teachers told me to ask what my body was trying to tell me. When I sit with that question, as it constricts my breath, travelling from my chest down into my belly, I don't really get a reply. It just says: ‘fuck you, I do what I want.’

I ask again, in earnest this time. It says: ‘Slow down. Unsubscribe from fitness culture. Ctr alt delete the body you’ve been aspiring to since 1996, and look at how beautiful your breathing body already is.’

It says: ‘Let yourself go for walks and swims and be alive without striving so hard to be something that you're just not. That you maybe never were. That you’ll definitely never be now.’ Bit rude, you’re just a mound of flesh. How’d you get so poetic?

I protest. I hate that it sticks out, and I feel like a deformity. I take a horrible tone, one I don’t think my teacher intended I take: ‘Please just retract in on yourself. Shrink yourself down to zero. Can you just fuck off already?’

I ask my body for forgiveness so that I may understand the madness I've been driven to. And it reminds me how quick I am to self-loathing. It reminds me how brazenly ready I am to constrict and conform and twist my female body into something that it's not. I ask my body for forgiveness for contorting it over and over and over again. It reminds me how many long years I’ve been at this game.

At school, I used to go for lunch on St John's Wood High Street with my friend Nadia. I’d order the soup and spelt bread because that was the ‘healthier’ (skinnier) option. I’d read in some toxic magazine like Grazia or Heat that Gwyneth Paltrow ate this fabled spelt bread and she seemed to be the appropriate amount of skinny. It was 2003, and waifs ruled our consciousness. Spelt bread and soup for lunch. It never filled me up, and I was constantly hungry, suppressing my appetite with cigarettes behind the school. On weekends, I’d make a pilgrimage to a macrobiotic deli in South Kensington to figure out exactly how steamed my vegetables had to be to achieve the level of skinny that was required of me. I was 16. I’d sit outside the deli with my mum and her friend Maurice, smoking cigarettes and eating lentils, all of us striving for thinness for different reasons.

I practiced yoga at Jivamukti in Kensal Rise and did reformer Pilates in Fulham, the dullest places on earth for a teenager. If I’d known then that I’d still be attending fitness classes 20 years later, I’d have done something more age-appropriate than cosplaying a fully grown woman as a child. I did it all in the name of being as skinny as I could possibly be, I’d be lying if I said I’d had other motives. I'd wear tiny little miniskirts in teetering heels out to the clubs on Friday and Saturday nights in the West End and get blind drunk, my skirt showing my ass and my heels getting scuffed from stumbling around the dancefloor.

Nights out held a place to put the enormity of my pain into numbing, pain I didn’t even really know was there. It was just what you did in my world as a teenager. We all pretended we were grownups, and I wrapped my worth up with how much I might be able to disappear into a tinier body.

Now, I contemplate my female body and how much more interested I am these days in being strong and healthy

And I wonder about

how we continually hurt ourselves in the name of beauty.

Now that I’m getting older new fixations present themselves — the one on my hernia and the one on my greying hair. The one on my sagging neck and my thinning skin.

Do I dye my hair?

Do I stop shaving my legs?

How do I acquire a 10k grant just for Botox?

Do I get a neck replacement?

Do I grow a beard?

Do I let myself go?

Do I become unacceptable?

Who am I doing it for, and why? Tell me how to become unacceptable. Tell me how to throw off the burden of beauty that keeps me from becoming more myself. Tell me how we shift focus from eliminating our waist rather than growing our brains. Tell me how to do that, and I’ll tell you that I’m only human, and the things I do in the name of looking good may be based in shallow waters. But I’ll take what I can to feel good. And that means still doing the fitness class but silently protesting when they say knit your abdominals, smug that I’m unacceptable in one small way.

With love,

Nora x