I exercise daily, including visiting a gym twice weekly for an hour each time. That began in 2015, when my then-employer encouraged me to take it up to make me physically stronger for the gardening work we did. I quickly came to love doing gym work, and I've been hooked ever since. It's a good, healthy addiction to have. In my case it helps with maintaining socialisation and motivation alongside the obvious medical health benefits.
But since last month, particularly thanks to the revelation I had in July which I posted about then, while working out at my gym I've been asking myself a very specific and deep question: are my past experiences of being body-shamed a subconscious reason why I work out so much? I now think that's increasingly likely. Today I sincerely don't care much about how others perceive my physique, but the harassment about that from when I did clearly never fully left me. Hell, in high school we had a students' gym which I used quite frequently during lunchbreaks in the early grades when I was still being teased about my skinniness (later in high school that finally stopped). A pattern could've begun there.
How much negativity from our formative years do we truly let go of? How much of it do we subconsciously retain? I'm really not depressed about this, although I'm definitely not nostalgic for it. This recent question that's come to me about it has simply come as, I suppose, a revelation from that previous revelation, and the answer to that question is currently one I'm still stewing over. Yet, I feel it's a necessary question for me to answer about myself, and maybe I was meant to get into exercising so I could be presented with it.
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