This year, instead of a new year’s resolution to exercise more, I settled on just harboring a negative body image equivalent to a 15 year-old girl with an eating disorder. This self-loathing has worked in a way that resolutions never have. I am now playing volleyball several hours a week and even volunteered to coach a boys club volleyball team. I highly recommend self-loathing as a motivational tool.
I am sure the Germans, the people that brought us schadenfreude, have a word for “motivational self-loathing”.
I am sitting here on the couch with ice packs on my knees. I have floor burns the size of silver dollars on both knees and my right hip, and I can’t lift my right arm higher than my shoulder. My right index finger is jammed and swollen to twice its normal size. It hurts, but in a pleasantly nostalgic way. I have spent a good chunk of my life like this, jammed fingers, ice packs, floor burns… it feels right.
Do the Germans have a word for “pleasantly nostalgic pain”?
I am thinking that learning German will help prepare me for this “washed-up former athlete” stage of my life.