Victor

I don’t like the word victim.

I guess I associate it with weakness, attention seeking and co-dependance…all of the things that are the opposite of how I want to be. I don’t think that you can be both strong and weak, independent yet desperate for validation. So I can’t be a victim…can I?

I went down this personal rabbit hole when I asked my staff member to write me an Instagram post outlining her WHY (as in why she is a trainer) so I naturally started thinking about my own, for the purposes of another (this) post. Turns out when you’re a business owner not much goes through your head that you’re not instantly associating with something to do with your fucking business. Which is why, on a Sunday afternoon, I’m sitting here writing this while my brussel sprouts cook in the air fryer behind me.

I guess on the surface my WHY is pretty generic. Had unpleasant experiences in gyms, decided I wanted to create something better, boom there she is. It wasn’t until I started doing some actual digging into my own shit with my life / coaching / everything mentor that things have started to get a bit deeper.

We talk about everything. As in, EVERYTHING. It’s like having your head opened and the parts of your brain mixed up like an unsolvable Rubik’s cube. Then you spend the next several days deep in some kind of existential crisis that makes you do things like miss the turnoff to your girlfriend’s house and drive a whole hour in the opposite direction. Then you sort of come right for about a week before your next session then it’s BAM let’s expose all your hypocrisies, rinse, repeat. It’s like therapy, on clenbuterol.

We’ve talked a bit about boundaries recently and what’s the most I’ve let mine be violated. Without getting into specifics (because we talk in headlines nowadays) the answer is pretty dark (this is where we circle back to the victim stuff, in case you were hanging out for it.) My earliest memories are of being a strong willed and independent kid, and when we’ve delved into the who are you stuff, this tends to be underneath everything. I don’t like being told what to do, and I’ve always had a pretty hectic sense of injustice when I deem treatment of myself or someone I care about to be ’unfair’. (Hence being basically unemployable.) The yuck stuff that has happened to me in the past has been at such odds with the person I truly feel I am (fuck-you-I-won’t-do-what-you-tell-me) that it’s almost like I can’t accept it, and like, maybe, if I create this badass avatar who runs a gym, who lifts weights and who has Values and Hard Conversations, then I’ve basically cancelled all that old me shit out. Has it worked yet??

When I bang on about helping people find strength, I don’t think I really mean in a deadlift. I think it’s more like, I wasn’t strong enough as a person to stop things happening to me that I really didn’t want to happen, and this is me making up for that, vicariously. If I really think about the victim stuff again, it feels like the term implies a sense of passivity, like let me just lie here and let this shit happen. I think that’s why I H-word it. Victim doesn’t say: “Yeah some shit happened but look at this bitch NOW.”

VICTOR does though. I’ve never thought of those words as being so similar, until I started writing about this stuff. My friend and I refer to this stuff as Dark Journalling, not to be confused with Light Journaling, which is more cute goals and musings that don’t freak anyone out when you share them. Think angry scribbles in black marker vs unicorn and ‘BOSS LADY’ stickers from Kmart.

Anyway. This is my why, which was intended to be ‘cute and chill’ but is obviously not either of those things at all. Neither am I though (although I am feeling my hair at the moment), so I feel it’s probably exactly how it should be. You’re welcome.