My underwear drawer provoked me this morning.
When’s the last time you purchased something new? No, not the boring stuff you toss in the cart at Target. The silly stuff–the brightly colored pizza slices or cactus or sloths or the silky, strangely cut stuff that prompts you to squirm in your desk chair. When have you bought one of those?
By my count, at least five years had passed since I bought one of those. This is a story about that, and speedos, and of all things, taking oneself seriously.
To start, let’s go back seven years. Following my divorce, I created something of a monk existence. I journaled a lot, meditated a lot, went to Crossfit, tried to keep my job, and removed anything in my life that might lead to reckless behavior. Firearms came out of the house (different story), alcohol was poured drown the drain, and women were avoided and not engaged. It lasted about a year.
At the end of the year, I was motivated to get back out there. I was willing to take the selfies, download the dating apps, and to try texting, meeting, and dating. Even then, I sensed dating was no longer a valid concept, but it illustrates how out of my element I was. While I was willing to do these things, I was also terrified. I hadn’t done anything like it in years and I questioned my relative value in that ecosphere. There were so many guys that went to the gym more often, who had bigger incomes, homes, and retirement accounts, or who had contexts free of divorces and children.
My confidence booster was to go buy a few pieces of clothing that I felt good in. And, to sign up for MeUndies. I didn’t know it would matter when I signed up, but it did. There was something hysterical and charming about having a Santa Claus for my erotic life. There was also some kind of magical incantation in deciding–if only for myself–about whether cactus, shark, or possum energy was best for the meeting I was setting out on. And on the rare occasion when someone other than me would actually see what I was wearing, it became this thing that prompted surprise or a giggle and relieved some of the horrible tension and awkwardness that I felt in those moments. It was perfect.
But, it wasn’t the first time I had used skimpy clothing to bring about magic in my life. That would have been a few years earlier. (Yes, we are flashing back within a flashback. Hang in there.)
Following a bet with a buddy over a beer, I began participating in triathlons. Initially, I was just the cyclist in the relay portion. But before I crossed the finish line that day, I had decided to try doing the whole thing myself. It seemed like a great idea up until my first race the following year.
That race was supposed to be a cakewalk. It was early in the season, so it featured a particularly small (and foolish) group of people who didn’t mind cold MN lake water. The swim was only a quarter mile in length–a fraction of the distance of most triathlons. Finally, the organizers had boats in the water on the lookout for struggling swimmers. If anything went bad, a swimmer could simply take off his/her/their cap, raise his/her/their hand, and a boat would be on the way to the rescue.
I had trained at the gym and in the pool all winter. I believed I was ready. I was wrong.
When I got into the water, my heart raced much higher than expected. It was so bad, I couldn’t put my face down in the water long enough to complete a single stroke cycle. I’d just end up taking in water and coughing. I ended up on my back, staring up at the clouds, trying to calm myself as other swam around me. Every time I thought I had calmed down, I would roll over and start swimming only to be quickly overwhelmed again. I ended up veering all over the course doing the backstroke. Had I not had another bet with my friend about this race (and had I not needed to wait 90 minutes for him to finish) I likely would have quit, packed up, and driven home never to swim with a group of people again.
Instead, I embraced more training and more races.
Books and tapes on swimming were studied. Private swim lessons and swim workshops were attended. Practice–at the gym and at the lake–was attempted over and over again. Very slowly, improvements were made. But, not fast enough for me.
One of the challenges for swimming improvement was crowding. Some believe swimming is best learned by practicing a series of precise, repeatable muscle movements at slow speeds. The argument is that the stroke is too complex on its own, but it can be mastered by individual elements that are eventually reassembled. That’s the koolaid I had purchased and was trying to imbibe. It’s fine when you’re in a swim lane by yourself. But if the lane at the Y is crowded, this flies in the face of accepted swim etiquette. The norm is for everyone to swim in a circle at a similar speed so everyone can get his/her/their laps in. It’s not unlike our expectations that people clearly stay in a lane or travel at an acceptable speed on the freeway. The problem was, I swam like a drunk driver who slid all over the place at a very slow speed.
My solution: a speedo. I chose to start practicing in a speedo. I was already bringing a bag of paddles and fins and a script/program outlining what I would try to do in the water. A speedo was the final piece of the dork out trying way too hard puzzle. And, it preyed upon the fears of beginning swimmers which I understood. Beginning swimmers don’t want to be in the lane with serious people. They are afraid of being too slow, or swimming offline and bumping into another. By donning the speedo, I thought I’d get quickly skipped over by anyone who’s only looking at the suits (as opposed to the quality of swimming in the lane). And, that would give me the space to go slow and learn.
But, I didn’t choose any old speedo. I chose the most outlandish speedos I could find.
One had a black background with hot pink colored skull and crossbones centered on the front. On the back in the same hot pink it read “ARGH!” in large print.
Another suit was royal blue. Centered on the front was a large, chocolate colored donut with sprinkles. “I swim for donuts” was the message on the back.
And my favorite was another black number. The front had a large, kelly green shamrock. The back invited people nearby to, “Kiss me, I’m Irish”
Maybe it was just my imagination, but space at the pool was never a problem when I was in my speedo. The ridiculous outfit also put me in a silly, fun, relaxed mood which made practice fun. Slowly, my swim times improved too.
And then one day when there were very few people at the pool, a very funny thing happened. A young Somali man jumped in to my lane. When I got close, he tapped me on the shoulder. He wanted to know if I would give him lessons. Somehow, the suit, the fins, the program, and time had turned me into a real swimmer–something I didn’t ever believe possible.
None of this is really about swimming or underwear. It’s just a long windup for these points.
- I have a tendency to downplay and discredit critical aspects of myself. It can be because this aspect doesn’t measure up to some external standard–like the physique and athletic ability of my buddy Kyle who I once completed triathlons with. Or, it can be because of some internal standard–the younger, leaner version of myself who once bought silly underwear for dating. Internal or external, the pattern of comparison and discrediting is deeply harmful to myself.
- The things that matter, matter. In one case, it was the need to test myself, to become competent in a new skill and arena. In another, it was the need to believe that I had attractive qualities and that I could be a valuable companion to another.
- Whatever you and I might believe about God or the Universe and why we’re here, could we agree that these needs we all have are Holy? Could we agree that they arise from the deepest parts of us. That they make our human experience compelling and worthwhile. No particular theology or divination tool is needed to buy into that, right?
- If the needs truly matter, then doesn’t it make sense to act like it? To be generous with yourself, to figure out a way to show up and attend to those needs?
A few weeks ago, I had this meditation about PLAYING BIG. It rolled around in my head all day and it uncovered a few aspects of my life I wanted to influence and change. One of the ideas that arose in that space was around my sex life. It was important enough for the desire to be clear and yet scary enough for me to stuff it down and try to block it out. I actually had forgotten about it until the underwear started talking to me this morning.
I’m not going to get into the details of what my sex life has been or its future. Today, I just needed to own up that it matters and that I’m going to start treating it that way. Writing this story is part of that, and the delivery of some orange underwear later this week is another part. (Orange is Tanyia’s favorite color.) I can’t wait to see what magic it unlocks for us.