Who Tells You to Rest?

Tuesday 7:48pm, parking lot outside the 24 Hour Fitness on Sunset. The fluorescent lights buzz above you, and the air smells faintly of someone else’s cigarette and the rust of a shopping cart left under a tree. You are sitting in the front seat of your own car with the engine off, the key still in your hand, your shoulder pressed against a soft blue thing you bought two weeks ago for reasons you cannot quite explain.

The thing is cold. Colder than you expected. The kind of cold that finds the sore muscle and pulls it out by the root. Your trapezius is screaming from overhead presses you did not really need to do, and you are pressing a small, dense weight against the place where it hurts, and your hand is shaking a little, and nobody in the world knows you are here.

That is the thing about recovery, isn’t it. It is the loneliest part of the day.

You think about this as the condensation runs down your wrist. You think about how you drove here at 6:15pm on a Tuesday because you wanted to be the kind of person who goes to the gym on a Tuesday. You thought about that sentence the whole way here, repeating it like a mantra: the kind of person who goes to the gym on a Tuesday. The kind of person who goes to the gym on a Tuesday. You are a kind of person. You are a person.

Who taught you that you had to be a kind of person?

The barbell did not tell you. The squat rack did not tell you. The instructor with the microphone and the motivational poster on the wall did not tell you. You told you. You sat in your work meeting at 2pm and felt your chest tighten and your jaw clench and your stomach drop an inch, and then at 6:15pm you drove to a building with mirrors and told yourself you would fix it with a deadlift.

And the deadlift fixed something. It fixed the part of you that needed to be hit. And then it broke a different part of you, the part that now aches, and you are alone in your car with a frozen thing pressed to it.

I know this is dumb. I know you just chose the pain. But I also know that this is what it looks like to take care of yourself, and I think you have not been doing that very long.

The cold spreads. Your shoulder relaxes an inch, then tightens back up. Your breath is shallow in the way it gets when you are sitting alone after doing something hard, the way breath gets shallow when you are waiting for someone to notice what you just did and then you remember that nobody is waiting. There is no one watching you press this soft frozen shape into your body. There is no one who will text you later and ask how the workout was. You are a single body in a single car doing a single small act of repair, and if you stopped doing it tomorrow, the universe would not pause to ask why.

What other kindnesses do you do in the dark?

You brush your teeth so your gums do not bleed in the morning. You drink the second glass of water so your skin does not flake. You stretch your hamstrings on the floor of your bedroom at 11pm because your physiotherapist said to and you do not want to go back. You put arnica on a bruise you cannot remember getting. You buy yourself a frozen thing for your shoulder. None of these are acts anyone will applaud. None of these are acts anyone will even know about. They are the smallest, quietest things you do, and you do them because no one told you not to, and because somewhere deep down you have decided that you deserve a body that works on Monday.

This is not a sad realization. I want to be careful about that. This is not a sad thing.

But it is a strange thing. The strange thing is that the most loving things you do for yourself are the ones no one will ever witness. You are not doing them for Instagram. You are not doing them for a before-and-after. You are doing them for the version of yourself at 7am tomorrow who will need her shoulder to type an email, and that is a love that has no audience.

The thing you bought is blue. Or grey. Or the color of nothing in particular. You do not really remember what color it is because you bought it at 1am in a fog of self-improvement browsing, scrolling past ten thousand products and landing on this one because the description said for tired muscles and you felt addressed. You felt so addressed by a small piece of cold plastic that you typed in your card number without thinking.

Have you ever been addressed like that? By a thing that did not need you to perform?

There is a problem with the way we are taught to love ourselves, which is that we are taught to love ourselves as a project. We are taught to love ourselves as a project with KPIs. We are taught that self-care is a thing you do before you can do the thing you actually want to do. You eat the salad so you can have the dinner. You do the workout so you can have the body. You do the recovery so you can do the next workout. You are always doing the thing so you can have the thing. There is never a moment where you are just having the thing.

The frozen thing in your hand does not know about this. The frozen thing in your hand is not interested in your KPIs. The frozen thing in your hand is just cold, and it is against your shoulder, and your shoulder hurts, and the cold is doing the only thing it can do, which is to be cold against a hurt.

You sit in the car longer than you need to. The parking lot empties. The 24 Hour Fitness light is still on, because of course it is, because it is always on. You think about the people who are still in there — the people who are doing the next set, the next class, the next thing that will require them to do a recovery. You think about how they will all, eventually, get into their own cars and press something cold against something that hurts and sit there alone.

There is something almost holy about this. I do not know what to call it. A silent communion of bruised bodies, each in their own metal box, each holding their own small cold comfort.

Why does nobody talk about this part?

The fitness influencers do not show this part. They show the squat. They show the protein shake. They show the outfit. They do not show the parking lot, the loneliness, the question of why you are doing this, the small moment where you decide whether the cold helps or whether you are just pressing it there because you don’t know what else to do with your hands.

I think you press it because you don’t know what else to do with your hands.

I think you press it because a stranger on the internet told you it would help, and you believed them, because believing strangers on the internet is sometimes the only way to know what to do with a body that hurts.

I think you press it because at 1am two weeks ago, in a fog of self-improvement, you wanted to do a single nice thing for yourself, and you bought a frozen thing, and now it is in your hand, and it is cold, and you are the only person who will ever know whether it worked.

Does it work?

Of course it does. The cold always works. The cold is older than medicine. The cold is what your mother put on your forehead when you were six and had a fever, before you knew what fevers were, before you knew what mothers were. The cold is what you put on your ankle when you were seventeen and twisted it doing something dumb. The cold is what we have always done for each other, before we knew what we were doing.

The frozen thing in your hand is not a new invention. It is just a continuation. A small continuation of the oldest kindness: be cold against the hurt.

You think about the freezer in your apartment. You think about how the freezer is full of frozen things that wait for you — frozen peas you will not eat, frozen bread you will forget, and now this. A small frozen witness. You put it in the freezer two weeks ago and it has been waiting there, in the cold, ready to be cold against whatever hurts next. The freezer is a strange kind of love. It is the love of holding something cold so you can be cold when needed.

You finally start the car. You pull out of the lot. The light at the corner is red, and you sit there, and the ice pack is still against your shoulder, and you think about the meeting at 2pm. You think about how you will hold your coffee with your left hand tomorrow because your right shoulder is sore. You think about how no one at the office will notice that you are holding your coffee with your left hand. You think about how that is fine.

The light turns green. You drive home.

You do not tell anyone about the frozen thing. You put it back in the freezer. You take a shower. You stretch your hamstrings on the floor, like the physiotherapist said. You brush your teeth. You drink a glass of water.

You go to sleep, and tomorrow morning your shoulder will be a little less sore, and you will not know if it is because of the frozen thing or because bodies are strange and generous and sometimes just decide to heal. And you will not tell anyone about the frozen thing. And the day will pass. And you will drive to the gym on Wednesday, because that is the kind of person you are. And on Wednesday night, in the parking lot, the frozen thing will be there, waiting for you in the freezer you brought it from. And you will press it against the next sore muscle, and you will sit in your car, and you will be alone.

And it will be okay. It will be the smallest, quietest okay.

And you will not tell anyone.