The pros and cons of this practise are obvious. Pro - be part of an aesthetic that continues to be the adoration of nerds and jocks alike. Con - Be part of an aesthetic that is old-fashioned, western-oriented and irrelevant to an urban dweller. The extra muscle does not confer on me some sort of evolutionary advantage. I don't have to fight or kill in order to survive - well not with brute strength anyway.
But let's face it. I'm a gay male and I love the male aesthetic. I love the swimmer's V on men; one of the defining features that makes the male body - and quite frankly, I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't develop my own.
Truth is, growing up, I was skinny, nerdy and avoided sport if I could get away with it. I was going to be bad at it, so why bother with the humiliation of losing in front of all my classmates? What I was good at was thinking, writing, reading, the kind of activities that win you the respect and adoration of your teachers, but not from your peers.
Post high-school, my low self esteem graduated with me. Beneath the mask of intellectual superiority that I portrayed to the outside world, lied an ugly, overly self-critical, self righteous person, that just wanted to be seen. Clichéd I know, but that was the truth. I was a walking cliché for teen angst.
I don't know when it all changed, or what I did to cause the change in thought. It happened in 2005. It occurred to me, if I feel ugly and insecure, why not just change me? I had spent so much times coming to terms with my scrawniness (and never quite getting there), that I completely neglected the fact that I could just change my body to fit a more socially accepted norm.
At this point, you're probably thinking, "What a cop-out? You should love who you are, and what you were given!"
I had a lot of friends that said I was good-looking, that I was perfectly fine. Self-esteem is a strange beast. The source of its strength only comes from from the Self. The source of its weakness - also from the Self. No matter how many friends or lovers complimented my looks, it was as if the media spoke louder. I had some how befriended something that needed to exist by making me feel inadequate. Men's magazines, movies, porn you name it, those images of men that we come to idolise without real question, started to own me - what I wore, ate and how I behaved in front of others.
I suppose at this point, I should stop. There is no happy ending to this story. The recovery of self-esteem will probably be a lifelong mission for me, and how I go through it, a never-ending process of checking to see whether I'm there yet. I chose to practice the art of weight lifting because I gave up trying to love my skinny self, in favour of loving a new more socially accepted self. Is this a better way to live? To be?
Human beings are unique not because we are smarter than any other animal out there. We're not - at least not uniformly (I'm sure rats, cockroaches and other pests will outlive us quite easily). We're unique because we don't have a natural state of being. We can change our personalities, our instincts, our beliefs and our very reason to live.
And the truth is, I found a way to feel good about myself. Maybe it's the rush from all the supplements I take, or the endorphins I get from being on the treadmill, or the testosterone from lifting weights. I look in the mirror now and I see someone that vaguely looks like those guys in magazines, movies and pornos. And all I had to do was let go of the ugly old me.
