GNT #172: What transformation really is

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read time: 2.5 minutes

In January, my husband Ed couldn't do a muscle-up.

He'd hang from the bar at the bottom of the motion, pull, and stall right at the part where you have to flip your body over the top. I'd seen him work at it. The fight to get from below the bar to above it is a crazy challenge both physically and mentally, and for a while it just wasn't there.

Last month I watched him do one. Then another. Like it was nothing.

He started CrossFit a little over a year ago. Between January and April he lost thirty pounds and somehow put on muscle at the same time, which I'm told is really hard. There's a before-and-after version of this you can picture. Heavier lifts. And all of his pants are too big now.

I keep reaching for the word "transformation," and it keeps not fitting.

Not because it's too big. Because it's pointed at the wrong thing.

Here's what I actually watched, and it took me a while to see it. For years Ed fought his body. He tried just about every diet there is. The potato one was the roughest to watch him go through. Nothing but plain potatoes for 2 weeks! Years ago he worked with a health coach and planned every meal and every workout, all of it logged, all of it deliberate. It worked the way white-knuckling works, which is to say it worked until it didn't. From the side of the room, what I saw for a long time was a man at war with himself. Disciplined. White-knuckling. Enduring.

And then somewhere this winter it stopped looking like a war.

I can't point to the day it flipped. But the grind went out of it. He started setting goals he was genuinely excited about, the muscle-up, then the ring muscle-up, and you don't chase a ring muscle-up grimly. You get up wanting it. The discipline didn't increase. It stopped being the thing. He finally wanted the actual thing, and once that happened the fight just sort of left.

That's the part the photo can't fully grasp. He didn't become someone else. He became more like himself, the version that was in there the whole time, underneath the weight and the years of trying.

The thirty pounds is real. The muscle-up is real. But those are just where the change finally showed up on the outside.

Which is why "transformation" keeps slipping. It's a word built for the outside. The before and the after. And I wasn't watching his outside change. I was watching him stop enduring his life and start being pulled forward by it.

I don't think I need a better word. I think reaching for the word is the trap. The specific thing I watched is truer than any label I could put over it.

What I keep coming back to is this:

Real change isn't the part you can measure. It's a shift in how a person stands inside their own life.

So I've been looking at my own. Not the goals, those are easy to list. The places I'm still white-knuckling, calling it discipline, when the fight has nothing left to give me. The places I'm enduring instead of being pulled forward.

Where in your life are you enduring something you could be pulled forward by?

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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