Soy Boy Fitness Coaching

It feels like a year has passed in about a week. Looking back at the decision we made to come to Europe, it feels a bit like a fever dream. I was, and still am in many ways, feeling very untethered and a bit lost, but I’m lost with a sense of purpose and with a network of people who understand me, so maybe that feeling of being lost is more how it feels to constantly push for growth and change despite discomfort, uncertainty, and despair.

The tragedy of growth is that you can never go back to the person you were before you grew— the person I was before I opened my eyes wider and wider is now gone and I can’t do the same things he did, or I will become a shell of my former self. Usually, people seem to reflect mostly on the positive aspects of growth (and everything for that matter), but I find, like everything else, that growth is a mixed bag, and it doesn’t call to everyone as loudly or as enchantingly, at least not in the same directions. It makes me wonder how much of my choices are my own and how many were just bound to happen given my past, personality, algorithm, etc.

Of course we say growth is worth it, because to stay the same while our wounds and problems fester would be spiritual su***de, but much of how we frame the narrative when we sit down to write captions like this one seem to me to be fueled by a sense of needing to justify all the toil. To be honest, becoming aware of this bias makes me hesitant to write anything at all for fear of looking back and cringing a bit 🫣😂.

I will say this: I think often of the fact that my body will one day be unable to do all that it does now, and the people I love dearly will be dying as I wait my turn and reflect often on what they and this life all meant to me. I fear this inevitable end, but I also realize that if it weren’t inevitable, there would be very little meaning, urgency, and respite from it all. I suppose one good thing about growth is that things become more than 2 dimensional in your mind, because death just used to terrify me, and while that still is a huge part of what death makes me feel, it’s no longer the whole story.

I want to write more, but ig won’t let me 😑

Our brains reason by analogy, which means we empathize best when we have has similar experiences.

This is why people who haven’t been able to hide away from challenges, like being different from what society deems acceptable, feeling powerless, feeling violated, etc are kinder than people who have mostly been comfortable/only dealt with a few kinds of discomfort in their lives.

We cannot ever live the true experiences or feel the real feelings of others, but we should do our best to have similar experiences and sit with our feelings so that we can empathize with them as best we can. At the very least, we should consider that we are going to struggle to empathize with someone when we haven’t had a similar experience or felt anything similar to what they feel/felt in a given instance.

I truly believe we could make this world a much better place if we decided to experience even a fraction of the pain and discomfort others feel, even if only through art, for a moment.

For example, I can’t watch slaughterhouse footage without imagining the pain and fear that I would feel in that position, based on my comparatively very limited experiences with physical pain and violence. Can you imagine being dunked in boiling water? Having your throat cut open and bleeding out upside down? Very few of us have suffered anything close to that, but we know how much it hurts to have bones broken, incisions made, etc. For that reason, I can’t look away and sitting with the feelings it brought up in me brought me to veganism.

I also have never been sexually assaulted, but being groped really did burn into my memory what it felt like to be physically violated as an object of desire to someone who didn’t care if it made me uncomfortable or not.

I’m grateful for that experiences, because being in pain or uncomfortable makes me even remotely capable of imagining how many thousands of times more traumatic a more extreme situation would feel, and I try to use those experiences to find ways to empathize with others about how living in their bodies in this world must feel, in addition to listening to the ways their pain is being conveyed to me.