The long, slow hours with nothing to do but read were probably the best part of the job. Sadly that best part was easily outmatched by the worst, if not in duration, certainly in severity. The worst parts were spontaneous, violent and scary. I was a security guard at a hospital for a short to long period of time. I have grown incapable of accounting for how long now many years removed. I learned a great deal from the books I read there and even more from the persistent recurring calamity of broken people chasing their demise. Eventually I learned enough from the worst parts to move on.
Being a security guard in a hospital is like being the opposite of a bouncer. Bouncers kick drunk people out of bars. We are not allowed to kick drunk people out of the hospital and instead are charged with keeping them from leaving. This strange tipsy void under medical care is what became of the police-controlled proverbial “drunk tank” after it was learned that the most severe of alcoholics can quickly plunge into an equally severe detox which can involve sickness, seizures and death. The hospital, with its doctors and such, was a better option for the majority of the parties involved. The security guards responsible for the supervision of said drunk people comprise the minority. Many of these patients did not want to stay in the hospital but were unable to leave until legally sober. Many spat and swore and some tried to fight their way out, see opening paragraph. Those that fought, by some invisible empowerment bestowed upon security guards, were strapped down to the bed; making their stay not only mandatory but also something additionally worse that ranged from demoralizing to traumatizing and from time to time amidst the overpowering odor of their liquid demolition, you caught the sense that you were torturing people.
Second to the alcoholics, and mind you, this was pre opioid-epidemic time, were men under the urging of two specific solicitors. Not that I would or should put this on any resume but I have helped to strap-down numerous steroid and cocaine addled men. This happened often enough that I began to wonder why this specific combination of drugs? How did steroids and cocaine join forces to become the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of bad ideas?
The Steroids Work
The steroids have only gotten better. It would be great to say that all recent advancements in fit and physique are the result of our own evolution or at the very least through unlocking the secrets of training and nutrition, but sadly, this is not true. The steroids have only gotten better, more prevalent and more accepted.
After my stint as a security guard, I worked at a gym adjacent to a single person occupancy residence that housed many programs, one of which was a non profit that cared for those in the community stricken with AIDS. I am old enough to see the evolution of this disease from petrified demonization and death to accepted hope. Part of this turning point from the wasting away common in the dying of any ailment was forged by steroids. Steroids were/are prescribed and used to slow down if not prevent the loss of lean weight. In many cases this prescription did more than prevent the loss but actually transformed the bodies of its users. There was one individual that frequented the gym and also happened to look like he frequented the gym despite his apparent disinterest in exercising. His intentions were to sell the steroids he was prescribed. He did not lift. He never lifted. He just did steroids and tried to sell steroids so he could get money to buy heroin which, according to him, is how he got infected in the first place. The steroids are a catalyst in no need of a stimulus. They are both the action and the catalyst to the action. The steroids have always worked, and now they only work better and have surpassed the necessity for the long held testimonial of lifters on steroids that the heavy lifting is actually doing most of the heavy lifting in their development and the steroids are purely supplemental.
The Steroids Almost Work
Why get bigger? Why get stronger? Our modern society no longer demands either as a necessity for survival. Perhaps the necessity has changed but not the messaging. What is conveyed by a larger, stronger, harder body? Is it diligence? Maybe. Is it capability? Maybe in a sense. Is it intimidation? Yes. But wait, is that really it? Is that why (most often) men lift and take steroids? Because they want to intimidate others? Well… sort of. You see, intimidation is the defense that keeps them safe. Intimidation wins the fight before the fight. Imagine if you will how the experience of being intimidated, threatened, attacked and or violated can prompt some form of adaptation. Can spur some sense of defense. As thinking, feeling creatures we can not make ourselves impervious but we can imply that we have done so. The facade speaks for us when we haven’t the words or the will. In a world that judges books by its cover, it should be of no surprise that we aspire to the hardcover. Paperbacks; so easily folded, so recklessly thumbed through, marked, torn, neglected, lost, discounted and destroyed. Given the choice, who would ever want to be a paperback?
The attempt to physically transform one’s body into something capable of intimidation makes no promises that said effects will also convince the mind of the same belief. The hardest of covers still houses delicate and vulnerable pages. Cocaine distorts the reality of this contrast, leaving its patron to suffer in sniffling grandiosity. The solution appears to be to lift the mind from insecurity as the steroids have done for the body.
Outcome Sans Process
And so steroids have found their niche beyond athletic enhancement. Steroids will change your body. But we are more than just our bodies. Does changing our bodies also change our minds? Does the content of the book read differently when the cover is upgraded? The crux of most motivational platitudes and also those that sell steroids (and yes also every personal care product that could ever afford advertising) all emphatically answer yes to this question and espouse the ideology of transformation from the outside in. This is an appealing concept as it means we needn’t go to the gym and read, count reps and blessings, sweat and switch to decaf, change our profile pics and our jobs, leave our partners, donate time and money, be a better person or create any other form of active change. It is quite seductive indeed to believe that one hour in the gym will upgrade all the other 23 hours in the day. The concept of transformation articulated in its most remedial and visual sense, as the before and after, is incomplete. At best these two pictures can imply a process and it is the process that changes us, not the result. We like to consolidate the components of process into the singularity of the term discipline and discipline is the driving force behind the development of patterns and the persistence of practices. Yes the day to day practice of patterns lead to adaptations which you may feel tempted to capture in a selfie but it is not that documentation of change that is the actual change. The change is in the belief. So what are we aiming to believe in?
Faith and Trust
Faith is belief in something despite evidence to support it. This is what makes the phrase, “a leap of faith” so bold; to leap without the certainty that you will land safely.
Trust on the other hand necessitates evidence. I trust you because you were there for me that time with the thing in the place. We are aware of the challenge and process of trusting in others but we don't often explore placing trust in ourselves. This is because we shroud this trust, this proof of process in the term discipline and then we use that same word as the banner to our ambitions and shortcomings. The before and after eludes to process. The process of all the discipline it must have taken to go to the gym, the number of days it took to go to the gym habitually and for that habit to create a change worthy of documentation and comparison. We see that and wish we had that same discipline or we are dismissive of said discipline entirely and assume that there is no struggle. “Well of course you look great, you actually like going to the gym, I would look great too if I liked working out”. Let’s side step a tangent regarding the fixed and closed mindset expressed here and instead maintain our focus on how this still falls under the rule of discipline. A word that promises control and I do not care what anyone says, I do not care about how much you seriously want to get ripped or skinny, strong or sexy; what everyone really wants is control. What we want control over is ourselves. We just call it discipline and discipline is actually simply trust. Trust in ourselves. We trust ourselves to go to the gym because we go to the gym. Now I know that seems troubling because if that is true then the opposite must also be true, which of course is a strange twin of logic that insists it is equally relevant. If you don't go to the gym despite your interest in doing so then you are eroding trust in yourself to go to the gym. That is to say you won’t trust yourself to go to the gym until you prove to yourself that you can. You can go on the days you don't mind going and even on the days you aren’t excited to go. That’s enough to foster trust. Discipline in it’s conventional sense will say “no fuck it, go to the gym everyday regardless of how you feel, that is discipline arrrghhhhh”, yes please shout this and then break something expensive to fix. Trust is not based on daily proof. It would be exhausting if it was. Discipline is thought to be the antidote to our guilt and the immunity to our shame. Stop searching for discipline and begin fostering trust in yourself.
It is that trust in yourself that gives you confidence. It is that trust that calms us when we are anxious. It helps us believe we can talk, connect, love, believe and also trust other people. This trust is proof of your concepts. It is the strongest material with which to construct your identity. If you are a person that trusts themselves, there is nothing that will better equip you to be a loving, supportive part of this world. Nothing will help you feel less alone, like being able to count on yourself. Trust is the factory that builds confidence.
Arrogance is the assumption that you will always succeed
Confidence is knowing that even if you fail, you will be okay
The absence of this process-born trust, this earned evidence is the lingering vulnerability that may have led you to the gym in the first place. The steroids work but it's not trust you are injecting and it is not courage that was also being snorted prior to ending up in the hospital being strapped to a bed with all of the lost men searching for solace in the shelter of their bodies.
Change, which is the altar at which I pray (the most convenient of gods are those of inevitability) like most altars, is housed in a church and what brings most people to the church with that altar is often painful. Like a razor blade concealed in the pocket, pain, carried long enough, will eventually turn inward and harm us. The most difficult clients are the people that hate themselves, said pain having carved into them. The conundrum of coaching is that change is hard and why would you ever work hard for someone you hate?
What we know is that the process takes time and time presents opportunities. Opportunities to improve skill, we feel better about all the things we find ourselves doing better. Process thus allows for progress to not only be achieved but internalized and acknowledged as abilities, not just external fragments. It also allows for the opportunity to reflect on the changes we have created and to find a way into the bodies we build. Without this, our confidence is no more connected to us than our clothes. Simply an outer shell, a layer that though on us is not us and can easily leave as easily as it has arrived. The things we earn take time and are part of the process and those things don’t leave as readily if at all.
And so with a catalyst so effective it robs the subject of process, the outer shell, the hardcover defense of a bigger, stronger body does not actually change us. It does not save us from all of the vulnerabilities that drove us to construct such defenses in the first place. We are still exposed despite the layers, we are still small despite the stature, we are still not safe despite the artillery. What now? Where do we go from this failure? Well I hate to say it but for many, more drugs.
During my time working as a security guard and years later as a trainer I witnessed many attempts to align and integrate one’s mind with that of their body. This is of course was often the very unholistic version of what we are all trying to do on some level; feel the connection between how we feel emotionally to how we feel physically. We all inhabit bodies that we spend our lives trying on. The drugs serve a function and hold true to their promise as they always provide something for the everything that is eventually taken away. But as I wrestled with coke-fueled, roid-raddled weightlifters in the hospital I pitied myself first and later all of us for working so hard to clean up a mess that a lack of process made.
The best part of the job was the time to read. On quiet nights when everyone that couldn’t leave slept instead, I read the books I pretended to read in school and I read the books that helped me escape the place I couldn’t leave. The worst parts were grappling with men that had nothing left but the chemicals that brought them there. I have never done steroids or cocaine but I was a skinny kid that always felt he had to fight to prove himself and yes I started lifting weights because that made sense. How much weight would I need to lift to gain enough weight so I would appear sufficiently unapproachable to anyone that may otherwise twinkle in the prospect of my harm? I know that question well. Decades later, I trust I no longer need to know the answer.