When I was in my third year of college, I joined the rowing team. The incredibly expensive boats gliding down the Charles River enchanted me. But something else also attracted me: I had heard that the crew was brutal. After a chaotic adolescence, I constantly felt on edge. What healthier way to burn off the hot poison feeling in my veins than with a fitness movie montage, walking up the stadium stairs in a visor? In a tunnel of fire, he hoped to find relief.
I didn’t crave just intensity, I wanted pain, a sensation that would distract me from my emotional turmoil. This desire was nothing new. When I was 12 years old, living with my mother in Minneapolis in a squalid house filled with waist-high piles of garbage, I scratched my wrists with safety pins. A few years later, in my room at my foster home, I pulled down my Levi’s and slashed my thighs with a pair of children’s scissors with blue plastic handles, until relaxation washed over me.
When the adults found out, the school nurse, my adoptive parents, put their hands to their mouths in shock and then reprimanded me. I knew self-harm was a capital B Bad and embarrassing, despite the calm it offered me. When I entered Harvard, against all odds, I had decided never to do it again. Instead, I took up jogging, then joined a CrossFit club and discovered, to my delight, that intense exercise could calm me down in a similar way to my old habit.
If the cut was mental illness made visible, the oar represented the pinnacle of health. As I got fitter, I felt more and more disdain for my younger self, who had clung to a gross, vulgar habit that made people cringe and recoil in disgust. No one would see me in my uniform and think I needed help. I enjoyed that illusion, despite its dangers: I wouldn’t seek professional therapy for years, a calculation that might have come sooner had I adopted a less sanctioned coping mechanism, like alcohol or drugs. Smug about my supposed well-being, it became easy to blame those who were managing stress, anxiety, and depression in more obviously destructive ways. My contempt for my teenage self blinded me to the pain of others and the risks of my new supposedly healthy approach.
It hurts the crew, from the boring routine of training to the lactic acid hell of racing. The first time my coach gave me and the other rookies an erg test, to see how we performed on a rowing machine, I braced myself for the breathless exertion that caused me to pass out, then held on with all my might as my oxygen-starved muscles screamed. . With each stroke, he reflected on all that he had lost and pulled harder. I got the best score. So I looked around at the high school recruits and decided that in a sport built on suffering, I could take more than they could.
I would run loops around Fresh Pond in the mornings before practice. I woke up so sore I could barely walk. I believed I had found the cure for the depression and trauma that had plagued me for years: start running and just don’t stop. And unlike cutting myself, which got me scolded, my athletic efforts were rewarded. I made it to the NCAA Division One championships that first year. The coaches praised me. I walked with the confidence of an athlete and took pride in wearing tank tops.
The only people who were skeptical were my more experienced teammates – they rolled their eyes at my extra workouts and warned me I would get injured. A year and a half into my rowing career, I agreed with them. After a particularly aggressive erg session, the muscles along my spine throbbed. I took three ibuprofen, applied Tiger Balm, and went to my second normally scheduled workout: a five-mile run followed by a yoga class. The next day, I returned to the erg. My back still hurt.
The trainers, the doctor and the coach examined me, but obviously nothing was wrong. Like most injuries, this one was from overuse. The only real treatment was rest. But almost as soon as I switched to low-impact workouts, I stopped being able to sleep through the night. I woke up in my bedroom in a panic at 2am and stayed awake for hours, spiraling. My extremities felt red and itchy, and it seemed like the only cure was training.
Unlike many college athletes who are pressured to perform while injured, he had a choice. Harvard financial aid had nothing to do with sports. My coaches were wonderful women who cared deeply about their athletes.
The back pain eased but did not go away; I was finally allowed to row. I went back to the national championships. After my last race, I got in the car and found sitting unbearable.
However, I did not stop. After graduation, I worked at Google, where many of my fellow software engineers were fitness-obsessed. For the same reasons many people drink or use drugs, to deal with tension and anxiety, we walk into a conference room at 5 pm for abdominal routines. Even though my spine stiffened after the deadlift, when the stress got worse, I worked out even harder. I got my best Peloton scores when I was miserable, which made me believe that, once again, my pain could be my strength.
This fantasy was so much more dangerous than anything she’d thought to cut. Hacking myself was simple self-harm, with no silver lining, so it had been comparatively easy for me to stop. Leaving overexertion was more difficult because it was praised rather than pathologized.
Even when my exercise had obvious negative consequences, people responded completely differently than when I cut myself as a teenager. During a ski trip after college, I fell between black diamond runs and suffered a concussion, hitting my head on the packed snow. My doctor warned me not to do anything that could result in another brain injury; six weeks later I went to a yoga class and got kicked in the face. I had to start wearing glasses, followed by therapy to learn how to refocus my eyes.
During my post-concussion break, my back swelled up; after an MRI I found out I had degenerative disc disease and several herniated discs. “This is normal with aging,” the doctor assured me. He had just turned 27 years old. I floated these anecdotes as funny party stories about my bougie misadventures rather than clear warning signs that I had a problem. Meanwhile, I avoided wearing shorts, terrified of the disgust my scars would cause.
When my friends in trouble turned to alcoholism and eating disorders, I avoided them. I had no idea how to deal with them or how to sit in the presence of an anguish that seemed so unproductive. I surrounded myself with professionals who used the job to distract themselves from their demons, until the endless hustle and bustle consumed them.
My skiing accident occurred when my workouts were reaching a breaking point. I had developed such a high tolerance that at the end of a six-mile run I still couldn’t shake the hot, tingling sensation. After years of not considering self-harm, I longed for the relief a razor blade would provide. That impulse horrified me, providing a wake-up call.
I went into exposure therapy for PTSD, where I replayed the worst moments of my life over and over again. The point was to get as angry as possible and then sit with it, prove to myself that eventually the fire ant feeling in my gut would dissipate.
Facing my story head-on, I began to see that I could never undo what had happened. No achievement, athletic or otherwise, no prestigious job or expensive hobby would turn me into someone who didn’t grow up in a dumpster and then face the despair of a child navigating impossible systems. I could enjoy the power of my body, but I would never be reborn. Hurting myself would never deny the ways other people had hurt me.
I live with the consequences of my extreme exercise regimen every day. I have taken obscene amounts of painkillers, including muscle relaxers, medical marijuana, and opiates. A year’s health insurance from my tech job paid five figures for acupuncture, physical therapy, and chiropractor visits, options that hadn’t been available to me before because of their often staggering cost, treatments that kept me from doing desperate things to deal with my discomfort. My skiing and yoga accidents shrank my short-term memory. I still have trouble sleeping through the night, sometimes because of the memories, sometimes because of the pain. If I don’t move enough, my back swells up, forcing me to walk a fine line so neither exercise nor my injury dictate my days.
But unlike when I was a struggling teenager, when my mother chided me about how much money my mental health care cost “Minnesota taxpayers,” I face no additional shame or social consequences for my questionable decisions. That fact gives me empathy for my younger self and anyone else who doesn’t have a $40,000 boat to row and tackle however they can.
