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Aug 10, 2023

The Exercise That Changed My Relationship With My Body

Advertisement Supported by Letter of Recommendation When I was diagnosed with a chronic illness in my early 20s, a local pool helped me find new ways to move. By Jenn Shapland In the locker room,

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Letter of Recommendation

When I was diagnosed with a chronic illness in my early 20s, a local pool helped me find new ways to move.

By Jenn Shapland

In the locker room, women’s voices discuss the temperature of the air (too cold), their gardens (the weeds!), their sisters (impossible). I eavesdrop as I pull on my one-piece and flip-flops, grab my bag of toys. Blithely I bypass the lap pool; not once in my adult life have I craved more repetitive activity. Instead I set up shop on the side of the warm-water pool — foam weights, kickboard, noodle — and, slipping into the 92-degree water, I sense a holy transition. The others arrive by way of a long ramp, discarding canes or walkers, hoisting themselves from wheelchairs, fingers trailing in deepening water. It’s a runway, but no one looks at them. The Santa Fe Community College warm-water pool is not a place to be seen.

Like many of these women, recovering from surgery, injuries or the vicissitudes of life, I’ve had to learn a new body: In my early 20s, I was diagnosed with POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), a chronic illness whose symptoms include extreme physical fatigue. I’d always fainted — from standing too long for the sixth-grade class fish dissection or running a mile in gym class — but now I was fainting while sitting in a chair, woozy every time I stood. The cardiologist offered me salt pills and sent me on my way.

POTS was then understudied, like many ailments found chiefly in women. But astronauts had long reported feeling dizzy as they returned from space, and NASA investigated the underlying cause: orthostatic intolerance, or a struggle with standing up, of which POTS is a type. Five years after my diagnosis, I told a student of a NASA-funded researcher how I was unable to stand for my eight-hour bookstore shift without leaning most of my weight on the counter; how I fell asleep on my lunch break. She responded with my personal nightmare: an exercise regimen.

At first I could barely manage five minutes on a rowing machine or a recumbent bike. With POTS, I felt so heavy. Mornings, I’d moan to my partner, “I’m in the well!” Unable to lift my own head, I propped myself up on a series of pillows to get out of bed. Pathetically, valiantly, I worked my way up to 15 minutes of recumbent exercise, to 30 minutes, to walking on a treadmill. I read a book the entire time — dense poststructural theory, so excruciatingly bored was I by the foot-smelling university gym. Still, it astonished me I could do any of this with my Grinch heart. I graduated to walks outside in the Texas swelter and swims in the neighborhood pool. Something shifted during those first dips, treading water and dodging toddlers. I wasn’t weightless, but gravity had less of a hold on me.

If I started going to the pool because of POTS, I keep going back to be surrounded, blissfully, by what the poet Lisa Robertson calls she-dandies: women past their childbearing years who are finally free to be useless to capitalism, to be “improductive” with their bodies. In Santa Fe — which, if you squint, resembles a lesbian separatist retirement community — most creatures of the pool are postmenopausal women; I’d place the median age at 70. Robertson might be describing one of my poolmates when she writes: “She has entered an undocumented corporality. Excellent. Now the scintillating research can begin.” I, too, feel my corporality is undocumented. As a 36-year-old queer woman who isn’t having children, I have a deep affinity with the postmenopausal. My body, now that I’m able to use it, is for me to enjoy.

I make up the exercises as I go. The sound system blares hits of the 1980s, from the resplendent (Tina Turner) to the abysmal (Tom Petty). I test my strength against the water with the foam weights. Astride our noodles, we paddle past one another with a nod, a smile, maritime voyagers held aloft by neon foam and salinity. The women often bounce in small circles together, where they trade recipes or describe birds they’ve seen. Once, a few months after my mother died suddenly at age 72, I heard a group of them planning to meet at Starbucks after their swim. I considered following them, showing up to coffee. I’m sure they would have welcomed me.

I suspect that the she-dandies are in the pool for the same reason I am. Whatever burdens their bodies have borne over the decades, in the water they find lightness, suspension. None of us are counting laps or reps. We are transported by immersion to a different realm altogether. I watch someone wind her new shoulder in its socket and see the amazement on her face: Who knew I could do this?

The ethos of the pool reminds me I am meant to move more slowly, in the water and out. My body is temporary and my job is to relish the time I have in it. In the pool, time slows down. On bad days, cardio is a struggle; bolstered by the water, I can do things impossible on land. Surrounded by other timeworn bodies, I feel sublime. I am an astronaut, an intergalactic wanderer recently arrived on Earth.

I balance on one foot, hold a headstand, flip my tail in a dolphin dive, float on my back, gaze at the rubber ducks glued to the ceiling beams and kick my way across the pool. The coven and I conduct our research, finding new ways to move. Each of us gently, instinctively, makes room for one another. We imagine, for once, that no one can tell us what to do with our bodies.

Jenn Shapland is the author of “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” (Tin House Books, 2021). Her essay collection, “Thin Skin” (Pantheon, 2023), comes out in August.

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