Kate Bachus

I have to preface this in ways I don’t want to, because it’s relevant but also not relevant. I was sexually abused at a young age, for a long time. We are not going to have this “zomg you are so brave” or any other conversation like that right now. That part isn’t actually relevant. It was a lot of time and therapy ago and I’m pretty much good to go, see what I’m saying?

But it is still relevant to the issue I’m addressing here.

*

I came to fire because I was looking for a place where I could express and hone my power around people who were also powerful. I came to firefighting because I needed a heroic context in which I could express my own heroism and also in being surrounded by heroes, be safe.

It didn’t work out.

Fire didn’t fail, I did. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t believe in myself in ways I needed to, and I didn’t actually understand what “strength” and “hero” looked like.

I went to the wrong people for the wrong things, and worshiped false idols. I’m still grateful to the men and women who brought me in, tried their best, and followed my command anyway.

*

Hockey was the real proving ground. I started at absolute rock bottom, where I was fat, depressed and didn’t know how to skate. When I got to the place of real prowess and strength, I’d walked the actual path and knew my success, knew my ability, knew my failure intimately. I’d learned my lessons of self-isolation from fire, and stopped pushing people away. So the people around me helped me, coached me, pushed me.

I remember being on the ice, guys skating around me politely when I sat there asking myself if I even had the strength and balance to make it back up onto my skates.

I remember later, a guy spending an entire pickup hour harrying me.  Harrying me, jostling me, elbowing me, and finally rapping me so hard I lost my skates and hit the boards. Yeah, a check. I fumbled at first and was startled and then I started pushing back and then I really started answering him.

I remember him at the faceoff, to his center: “you take the puck in. I’m going to lay out their winger.”

It was one of the hottest things anyone’s ever said to me. Ever.

By the end of that hour, I knew I could take a hit. I knew I could take a hit or an elbow or a full on check and keep in it, not be rattled. I knew because he’d given me the opportunity to test myself that I’d take any hit a guy could give me out there and just get harder, more determined, stronger.

These are lessons.

That guy watched me like a hawk out there, mostly kept his comments to himself but I felt his gaze and knew he was invested in my progress.

There have been people like that along the way, who have pushed me without relent or remorse, or who have encouraged me or both.

They have earned the right to knock me sprawling, and I’ll thank them for the attention.

*

This is about respect.

*

I am an imperfect creature. I usually have to wind up to something by doing a lot of pissing, moaning, and crying. My toughness is sometimes uneven. Swearing is an essential part of my process.

I am so fucking grateful for the people who put up with my shit and see me for all of who I am. Good and bad.

When I’m comfortable around people I open up, I flirt, I say outrageous things. I close distance. Because you’ve made it safe to. Because you see all of who I am and accept the entire complicated mess.

Because you get the larger picture.

*

Context is everything.

I can do 240, 310 pushups in a day because someone put a challenge in front of me and then told me I could do it. I follow through because there’s people there with me every step of the way, success and failure.

I am not alone, but more so I am known and in that place, I can ultimately do anything.

*

If anyone made comments like I get from friends on Fitocracy cold in the real world, I’d punch them. Flat out. Male or female.

You have earned the right to be that close to me.

That’s what I’m saying.

Not everyone gets to be there.

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We followed this Earth Day Moss Garden Terrarium Tutorial done by our lovely friend Sarah.

What a nice project. The glass containers came from Savers, for a couple of dollars apiece, as did the little bag of glass rocks and crystals.

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Most of us in my town use the local dump. It is not a usual dump, it is an event, a thing to do, it is… as you would say, an occasion that one does not miss here in our little town if one is ANYONE of not or, you know, has trash and recycling to dispose of.

Our little landfill has comprehensive recycling, also trash, also a bookmobile, also a swap meet. It has yard waste disposal, big item disposal, electronics disposal and hazardous waste disposal (all on their appointed days and times). On a Saturday you take the kids and you plan to spend several hours there.

Why?

Because in addition to doing your trash and recycling – a fabulous affair in and of itself of tossing plastic into HUGE MASHERS and watching it crushed, or taking glass bottles and FLINGING them into a big closed dumpsters and watching them SMASH into millions of pieces – in addition to all that one must buy baked goods for whatever local drive or charity is going on, one must sign petitions of local politicians and canvassers for Good Things and the Environment (because that’s where they all go), and then spend lots of time at the swap meet looking for things like vintage cross country skiis or toys or who knows what other treasures.

That’s not counting the hour or so you spend talking to your neighbors or the dump guys, who are local celebrities.

I don’t know why, with a facility like that, ANYONE would get their goods picked up at the curb.

And for this?

We pay… wait for it… wait for it..

$256 a year.

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(For Nikki, who is not giving up either.)

It’s no fun anymore.

Starting working out is always great. You go from zero to YES I CAN DEADLIFT A HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE POUNDS and you feel awesome and you feel like there’s always a little more you can give, working out. You’re tired, you’re sore but it goes away and then you jump back in and make this great progress, great effort.

It’s wonderful to start anything, for just those reasons.

Embarking on a knitting project, with a skein full of promise and a pattern and you’re not at the twenty seventh repeat of the lace section yet, and you haven’t had to tink back to that one problem spot with the black hole a stitch keeps disappearing into, ten times.

It’s not fun anymore.

I had some great PRs last week, felt great about myself and working out, and while I’m not going to be thin from this, it’s not my goal, my double chin has all but disappeared and I’m getting some nice, nice lines.

This week?

Well, this week is crap. The honeymoon is over. I’m tired, sore everywhere, I’m having constant “wait, why am I doing this again?” moments, I’m sick of working out and that part of my brain made of giveup is saying “fuck this, this accomplishes very little. You’re too busy for this crap. Stop.”

*

Some days everything is a struggle. Both my back tires are mostly flat, there’s seven different plumbing issues in my house and one of them is leaking water through the bathroom floor down into my dye studio. Warm weather has brought ants. My wee grey cat still has PTSD from his 45 mile escape march and will still barely tolerate being petted.

My truck’s making “185K miles is too much, you know what happens next” noises.

Everything’s stressing me out.

The gas station guy takes my credit card for the gas and tells me I have to pay seventy-five cents for air. In a snippy tone. I tell him I don’t have seventy five cents. Equally snippy.

I go over to the convenience store to get some cash and break a twenty. So I can put air in my flat tires. I get up to the counter with my twenty dollar bill and my coffee cup and the guy says “no charge for readheads.”

“What?”

“No charge for redheads.”

I stand there staring blankly at the cup of coffee, and look up at him again.

“Okay, I lied, it’s free coffee day. Special promotion this week. No charge.”

“Can I get change for this twenty?”

“Sure.”

I thank him for my free coffee and go over back to the gas station, where the guy asks me “you have seventy five cents?” and I say “yeah, I’ve got seventy five cents” with the “fucking” part of it clear in my tone.

I go over and he wants to know if I can do it myself, in fact wants to know “do you know how?” which only pisses me off more because yeah, I can put air in my tire, in fact I can change a goddamn tire and spark plugs and oil and air filters and a gap the plugs and a bunch of other stuff, all by my little redheaded self.

When I fail to get air in the tires, he does it for me.

He makes another customer wait, while he carefully checks and fills all my tires.

*

So I got on board for this 5000 pushups by May 1 challenge. Pushups are one of the things I can do, or I thought I could do until I started this. I’m fat and out of shape – less so now, but still, let’s be realistic, I have a ways to go – but somehow my small stout physiology makes pushups easy, and I have wide strong shoulders so I confidently said YEAH I AM ALL OVER THIS and then goaded everyone around me to also join.

It’s fucked.

Actually.

I’m super sore, I hate pushups now, it’s no longer fun and I no longer feel like the Pushup Queen What Can Do Pushups til Armageddon.

This is Armageddon. I wake up dreading pushups, and I’m only three days into the challenge.

This is the quit moment. This is where friends go “yeah, I wouldn’t do that, it’s not good for you.” Or “why would you do that? You’re just asking for a repetitive injury.” Or they roll their eyes. I think other people on the site are even dubious.

There’s a few things that save me.

Two other women doing it, who can kick my ass with one hand tied behind their backs and who are not allowing me to do this alone, which I might actually fear more than failure. I also look at the sets they log – more, faster than I could dream of doing right now – and I realize, as much as I think I’m giving here, as much as I think I’m doing, there is still more.

The other thing keeping me in it is that it’s important to finish. Finish school, finish an agility test, finish the knitting project, finish a challenge you arguably should never have started. Because the cost of failure, that psychological cost of giving up is just too fucking high. We lose a million battles in our heads, every day. We yield, too often to what is comfortable and easy. I do. I’ve failed so many goddamn agilities simply because I failed to fucking dig deep enough. I’ve failed a lot in life, on that account.

Pushups are stupid. I mean, really.

Stupid.

And I’m not done yet. Not by half.

*

I looked for any sign, on the store. Any signs that said “FREE COFFEE THIS WEEK! ALL WEEK!’ or “COME ON IN FOR FREE COFFEE” or even “FREE COFFEE FOR WIDE SHOULDERED GIRLS WITH RED HAIR!”

There were none.

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I dunno, guys.

I want to say this stuff doesn’t matter, I want to say I didn’t take seventeen pictures or thirty or more and never posted them, I want to say it’s easy to just join in -

it’s not.

I know. I know I’m strong, I know that I don’t break when most of the rest of the world would have broken hours ago. I know… all kinds of good things.

About myself.

I’m not going to diet. I can’t, I can’t go there and I won’t anymore, it’s just not a good or healthy place for me and I can’t and I watch you all admiring your bodies and each other’s and I do too. Admire.

But it’s not going to be me.

I’m going to be powerful. I’m going to be ferocious and strong and braver than all kinds of people, I’m going to do things other people don’t do, I’m going to be the one that stops, at the wreck, or goes into the water I’m the one who gives a shit when others often don’t. I’m the one who puts my life on the line for someone else; I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. And again.

But I’m not the one showing my body off because I just don’t have that.

And I can’t try and measure my worth that way anymore because my head turns inside out and I come up short and I end up hating myself and I’ve worked really hard in my life to not get to that place.

It doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed.

It doesn’t mean some part of me doesn’t want to be the princess.

It just means I grew up and moved on and forged better paths, better steel for myself but sometimes, yeah.

Sometimes I want all that and it’s a bit like being outside looking in, and I don’t know if that makes sense or not.

Because it’s not about you, it’s about me, and I’m always, always ‘mirin.

No matter what, hey?

Love you all lots. Lots.

K

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It applies to everything.  To writing, to sports, to anything you do.

You will never be good enough.

I did not start out awesome at hockey.  I took it up when I was 35 and failed pretty miserably to get a job as a paid firefighter after trying for three years, volunteering, doing any number of pretty awesome things including commanding a division of some 30 volunteers and being a firefighter instructor.  I’d responded to calls, been in a wildland burnover, done a bunch of EMT work but it wasn’t good enough and I finally had to quit. I was burned out and demoralized.

So I took up a highly physical sport that I had no experience with, presumably as self-flagellation.

No, so seriously. Picture me, my first day on the ice. “Beginner boot camp,” it was called but it was me, the lone beginner, and a class full of mostly Russian and Canadian guys, all of whom had come at 0700 to play hockey not because they were beginners but because the class time didn’t eat into their Saturday plans and it was the only time their wives and girlfriends would let them play.

So me. In borrowed gear, none of which fit and all of which smelled like cat piss.  Shoulder pads riding up around my ears, stumping out on the rubber on the ice on skates which felt bulky, awkward, wobbly, unfamiliar.

All the guys skated around.  They flew through drills I couldn’t even complete.  I’d skate a few feet then fall down, stick flailing.  They’d skate around me, like another pylon.

I’d look at the clock each week and say to myself “one more minute.  Just stay one more minute.”  Then the next minute, I’d say “another minute.  Hang in there another minute.”  I’d promise myself once I was off the ice and out of gear, I could cry.

And I would, I’d go out and sit in my truck and bawl. About feeling like that, fat and uncoordinated and lacking skill and strength, and about more general and deep personal failure.

*

You think that moment is over.

You project ahead to some future, idealized you.  You place your own value on some future person you want to be, instead of this person here struggling and failing.