My Personal Escape

Journaling, hiking, reading, cooking, listening to music, fishing, playing video games, watching television, and practicing meditation.

The listed actions are fairly common hobbies among young adults, ones that can even be called an escape.?

That escape is that mental break you need before you spiral. All of the stress, hurt, and pain of everyday life can’t reach you when you have entered that “escape”. During whatever block of time you begin this activity or action, nothing else matters in the world. It is simply you and what you are doing. You are fully present.

For me, I resonate with a different hobby. A hobby and activity that has exponentially gained popularity with the rise of social media, acting as a catalyst to inspire people to take up this hobby.

My escape is the gym.

All of my life I have not been the most physically blessed individual. While always athletic, before my Junior year of high school I was always in the bottom 5% of both height and weight of kids my age. I was extremely skinny, not unhealthy skinny, but if you looked at my legs you would wonder how they wouldn’t snap when I took a hard tackle in soccer.?

I found the gym during my senior year of high school. I had been doing workouts for both basketball and soccer but never truly fell in love with the atmosphere and process until after the pandemic. During the pandemic, I began my journey at home, and once the gyms opened back up I was quick to make my debut.

Something about putting my body through insurmountable amounts of pain and stress calms me in a sense.?

For me, I feel that it is simply the acting of self-improvement that initiated and has kept my love for the sweaty germ-filled establishment. As previously stated I was always smaller, I never really had muscles and would get pushed around on and off the field.?

I also was known to talk a little trash and needed the measures to back it up if it took a turn. ??

When I started to eventually see progress, it lit a fire within me that still has yet to be extinguished. Once I got to college it only got better. I started to take my diet more seriously, create different workout plans, and hold myself accountable for going and doing recovery afterward.?

As I write this now I have made bounds and leaps from when I first started. I have a new sense of confidence within myself that I never previously had, and I have a new sense of self-love I also never found in high school.

As much as I enjoy the physical aspects of bettering my body, the gym is my escape from what it does to my mental health.?

I know that I am here to improve myself, I want to be better than I was tomorrow. The gym gives me a sense of competition within myself, and someone who runs on competition never wants to lose.

I know that I am never going to walk into the gym and be the biggest/strongest one there. And when I started out that scared me, but once I got past that it was nothing but a blissful experience.?

And a few shoulder injuries. But we ignore those.