I hate exercise.

No. I don’t think you understand. I mean, I seriously hate, loathe, abhor, revile and despise exercise. I hate exercise with a white hot passion rarely rivaled in life.

Which is part of the reason self-care is so hard for me. I can do healthy diet for about 3-6 months before my ADHD kicks in and I get bored [or decide I hate the food…I’m looking at YOU, veganism].

I’m doing a lot better on sleep since I stopped all sleep meds and psych meds [I was taking Wellbutrin and Strattera, both of which cause killer insomnia, and when all my sleep meds either started causing awful side effects or stopped working, I had no choice but to figure out how to live without them. I’m doing okay with no antidepressants, and I’ll start again if I need to, but since I stopped working, my stress level has dropped to almost nothing, which helped my depression a LOT].

Which leaves the most evil of the Evil Trifecta: exercise.

If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I am not fond of exercise.

Which leads me to the point of this post.

My hatred for exercise goes beyond what should be reasonable. I’ve been thinking about why that is the past week or so, and my brain keeps circling back to a memory from elementary school, which probably means I need to explore that memory and all the shame and humiliation associated with it.

Problem is, the memory kinda hurts. Along with countless others from elementary school, all of which seem to center around either recess or PE.

I was not an athletic child. I went to school in the 80s, and back then at least, PE class and recess were specifically designed to humiliate non-athletic children. When we played team sports, the teacher would choose team captains, who would then choose their teammates according to who was their friend, or who they thought could help them win the game.

I was always the last child chosen. Even after I made some friends, I was in the last 2 kids picked for my friends’ teams. Our PE teachers often [as in, almost always] chose competition type activities for class. If being good at a task meant you stayed in longer, I was always the first kid out [unless I was near the end of the line, since some kids ahead of me might get out on their first turn, too].

If it meant you got out earlier the better you were, I was always the last kid to be allowed to stop. PE was torture until I finally got old enough I didn’t have to take it anymore. The teachers eventually would allow people who didn’t want to participate in whatever horrible game we were playing to walk on the sidelines, and I always chose that option when I could.

Anyway, the incident that stands out to me [although there were many, like the time I was running on the soccer field and tripped over a tall clump of grass in front of the entire class, causing my PE teacher to quip that I’d tripped over a chalk line on the field] happened in elementary school.

I can’t remember what grade I was in anymore, but it was probably between second and fourth grade. Mr. Houchens was the PE teacher, and he stands out as my most loathed PE teacher because he wore those horrible polyester coach shorts, he had a pot-belly and was NOT physically fit at all, and he never missed an opportunity to laugh at or make fun of the kids who sucked at sports.

On this day, we were running lines in the gym. It was a game where the first one to complete running across the gym got to sit out, and as usual, I was the last kid running. We had run a LOT of lines that day, and when it was finally down to me, I ran the last line, and as I reached the end, I hit muscle exhaustion and my legs gave out. I stumbled, hit the wall, and landed flat on my back.

As I lay there, gasping for air, wondering if I’d injured myself seriously, the laughter of my classmates reinforced the feeling I’d always had that I would never fit in. I was humiliated and genuinely scared that I wasn’t okay. I had never just collapsed of exhaustion before, and it was scary as hell.

I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I do know that there was no compassion from my teacher that day. I don’t know if he thought I was being melodramatic, but he didn’t check to see if I was okay. I think he yelled for us to line up at the door to walk back to class.

Deep down, I still feel that exercise equals humiliation, trauma, and physical and emotional pain, and I avoid it like the plague. So much of what I hated about school can be traced back to PE class and recess for me. For so many of my classmates, they looked forward to recess and PE. I remember hating to go outside when it was cold, and my classmates would be downright angry when we had to stay inside.

They loved running, playing games, racing, and burning off energy, but I just wanted to stay inside and read a book or work a puzzle or talk with my friends.

I feel like there’s still a little eight year old inside of me who thinks of doing anything physical with abject terror. I don’t WANT to exercise. I don’t want to feel the humiliation of not being coordinated, strong, energetic and athletic.

Cognitively, I know that with practice, I can at least develop energy and strength, but the thought of putting in the work and getting through the part where I’m weak and lethargic just feels too terrible to contemplate.

I’ve managed to equate any physical discomfort with something being horribly wrong with me, and the fact that I’ve reached a point where I hurt all the time just sitting around, and my hips and shoulders have muscle spasms strong enough to cause my fingers and toes to tingle part of the time, just means [in my mind, at least] that I’m just not well enough to do exercise.

I KNOW these things will lessen as I consistently move around and stretch, but the deep-seated belief in my soul is that it all just hurts [both physically and emotionally] and pain of any kind is bad and to be avoided at all costs.