I saw these “vanity plates” this morning, and thought, Well, there’s an analogy about life and social media if I ever saw one…
I’m calling them “vanity plates” because, well…take a good long look at them.
This is the size of a 45 pound plate. I stared at them for a solid two minutes, trying to make it make sense. Seriously, two minutes. (I know two minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but set a timer, then stare at something for two minutes. You’ll see.) Then, to confirm that I understood what my eyes were telling me, I reached out and lifted the plate. Yup. Confirmation. I’m sure there is some legitimate training purpose for these that I’m not aware of, so that’s my disclaimer.
To me, this is what social media seems to be all about. It’s not being satisfied with where we are at, thus maybe we feel pressured to put on a front to the outside world to hide the progress we know we need to make. If I had a picture of myself lifting a bar with these weights attached, I’m sure I’d look like a total badass. But I would know the truth. And the truth is the weights I have on the bar in the picture at the bottom of this post are the same weight as these monsters. Not very impressive, huh?
Lifting and working out is damn hard for me these days. It’s easy to become discouraged when I remember how fit I used to be, because of how much I worked out (HaganaH Monday and Wednesday nights, CrossFit Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Combat Fitness on Saturday mornings). I loved it and hated it at the same time: loved it because of how much stronger it made me physically and mentally, hated it because I was sooooo sore ALL the time.
Then, some pretty tough “life stuff” happened that almost destroyed me…physically, emotionally, spiritually, and my workout habit fell by the wayside.
But now, several years after that tough “life stuff” and three babies later, I’m back at it. I’m in a good place spiritually and emotionally (most of the time 😉), but the muscles I used to have kinda atrophied…which means I gotta be careful when I train, and not lie to myself and try to push-press 90 pounds over my head, just because I used to be able to. It’s gonna be a process to get back to where I was, but it’ll happen, eventually.
Bottom line: tell the truth, y’all. Because other people may not know the difference, but you will.
Leave a Reply