My chin grazes the bar as I pull my body up towards it, a heavy weight wrapped around my hips. I crunch my knees in towards my chest, bracing my core and leaving space for the imaginary orange in the hollow of my neck. I load the barbell, screwing the balls of my stocking feet into the ground like the instructor tells me. Exhaling, I push up from the earth.
I come here most days, hauling weights around this small studio while drum and bass blasts through the speakers. I am obsessed with getting stronger, going heavier and heavier until I feel the shock of lactic acid burn through my shoulders.
I have always been an insufferable teacher’s pet. The unbelievably charismatic instructor with the aquiline nose praises my shoulder press - well done Sarah, you are looking strong - filling my body with a warm glow that buoys me for the rest of the afternoon. Always an intense desire for the approval of authority figures. Is he impressed by me? Do I stand out?
Sometimes there are women much stronger and fitter than me in these classes, and this makes me deeply uncomfortable. I stare at their rippling lats and abs and feel dejected. I assume an automatic position of inferiority and begin to try less. I am not the best and therefore must disappear completely.
I am doing a new type of therapy, the latest in a series of interventions to try and make me feel less constantly and insanely neurotic. This type of therapy involves recognising patterns and beliefs within my relationships and working to interrogate them.
For what feels like the hundredth time, I explain to an empathetic young woman that while I can intellectualise my way of a paper bag, I feel unable to change the issues that plague me in any meaningful way.
My therapist tells me she has observed a pattern of control in my relationships. Because I believe there is something fundamentally deficient about me, I must contort myself into impressions of perfection and excellence to avoid the rejection I fear so deeply. Control is the only way I can love myself, and trick others into loving me too.
She emphasises that this perceived inadequacy is a belief, not a reality. But to me, it is equivalent to a law of physics - something that keeps my feet on the ground, the wheels turning.
I am not sure where this all comes from. It is no one’s fault, but simply the way I have trained myself to feel okay as I move through the world. If I am exceptional, I will be loved. If I am not, I will be lonely.
I remember being six or seven years old, doing piano practice. Every time I made a mistake I would slam the backs of my hands hard on the keys, the concrete of the bond between failure and punishment setting inexorably within my little brain.
Several years ago, I was a finalist for a prestigious award, one that would have sent me to Oxford. This, in my mind, became the ultimate test - if I could achieve this, surely I would feel okay about myself forever. I could finally refute the suspicion that something had been wrong with me all along.
My plan failed. I failed. I was taken into a room by the Governor-General who informed me, very kindly, that I had not been awarded the scholarship. In an extremely uncharacteristic and even more embarrassing moment of rage, I went home and (attempted to) punch the wall. My anger was white-hot and purely directed towards myself. Why couldn’t I be better? Why did I always insist on coming just short of the mark?
My inability to deal with rejection or criticism has become crippling. At work, I avoid meetings with my manager at all costs, in fear of the slightest piece of negative feedback. I exit relationships the moment I feel the slightest flicker of insecurity, releasing the blade on the metaphorical guillotine in the name of saving face and staying in control. I avoid any situation that might reveal damning evidence of my own worst fear - I am inadequate, and have been audacious in trying to pretend otherwise.
My therapist and I are setting goals. These goals involve me learning to become more comfortable with the prospect of rejection, not immediately bidding adieu to any situation that poses a threat to the frenetic hummingbird of my ego, manically beating its wings to remain airborne.
What do you think will happen if you lose control? She asks. What about it makes you so afraid?
I have been flirting with this idea, trying to imagine my life as a very different type of person. The kind of person who skips the gym for a few weeks and feels only slightly guilty about it. Who moves to Europe and works in a pub, lies in bed all day with a lover, who yells during arguments. Who means to take their lunch to work in small plastic containers, but always ends up buying a sandwich instead. Someone who would never (understandably) piss off all of her friends by complaining about getting a B+ on an essay. Who tells people how they feel and lets their heart get broken. A happier type of person, I suspect, than me.
The irony is, I am deeply unexceptional and decidedly average in most ways. I drink too much and have a poorly-paid job and have to eat something sweet after every single meal. I take far too many selfies and my average daily screen time is devastatingly high. I don’t do cold plunges or work at the UN and I don’t think that I will ever run a marathon. Most of my friends couldn’t tell you what exactly I do for a job or what I studied. They could tell you, however, that I love cheap prosecco and Persian cats and talking at length about every person I have ever been romantically involved with. So this hamster wheel of achievement and validation and ego, ultimately, has no real rhyme or reason. I know this and yet I still fear disembarking.
Even writing this, I think, is an indulgence of those megalomaniacal impulses. I am exposing and carefully exposing myself - my neurotic, annoying, egotistical self - so that no one else can. I know! I say. Don’t worry, I see it - no need to point it out!
I find this quote from a commencement speech given by Joan Didion, and set it as the lockscreen on my phone:
“What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.”
Next week, I’ll read it to my therapist, and hope that she's impressed.