Read on Twitter
okay I would like to have a discussion because this was VERY TRUE for me. I HATED any kind of physical activity until I took a volleyball class in college with a coach/prof who didnât make me feel like a piece of shit for not being naturally athletic /1 https://twitter.com/cavalorn/status/1248925065812598785
It probably does not help IN THE SLIGHTEST that I also had 8 years of PE in a K-12 Christian school where Iâm pretty sure the PE teacher (who also happened to be the basketball coach which I was also in, ugh) was some kind of sadist /2
We had PE every year, no matter what grade you were in 3x/week. It rotated through a random array of sports approximately a month and a half each, except for street hockey which lasted the whole winter and there was a clear hierarchy of which sports were âbetterâ /3
I was a very uncoordinated grade school child, and pretty much the only thing I was good at was just flat out running (Iâve run a half marathon now), but by both the teacherâs standards and, you know, social currency, running was not worth much /4
Anyways, every PE class felt like a shitshow version of a team practice for whatever sport we were in at the time, fully including those âpunishmentsâ for coming in last for drills and things like that. You can imagine how this went. Also, how POINTLESS??? /5
It was overall a very demeaning experience primarily centered around athletic ability and not teaching us anything about health, nutrition, how to actually work out, etc.
I hated physical activity for a long time because it was associated with mean people. /6
I hated physical activity for a long time because it was associated with mean people. /6
It got to the point where I was just generally very intimidated/sheepish in any group sport type of situation until I took a volleyball class my sophomore year of college, which quite honestly changed my life in this respect. /7
She (thank god she was a woman) noticed all this VERY quickly and actually sent a FUCKING EMAIL to the entire class about how we were there to learn volleyball and not compete over athletic ability because there were a few other people in the class in a similar spot to me. /8
We were split into teams for the class, and she actually stopped one of my teamâs games for like a full 15 minutes once because there was a super competitive girl (not a bad thing) who was kinda treating the whole thing like a varsity sport and made her apologize lol /9
THEN (this is kind of embarrassing but important for me nonetheless) she pulled me aside after class once and told me to stop apologizing and feeling bad every time I missed a hit or something like that because we were in a class and learning and not competing. /10
I shit you all not, I left my volleyball class that day and cried because as an 18-year old college sophomore that was the first time I had ever had an encouraging, non-demeaning interaction with a sport or physical activity E V E R. /11
That class became my favorite of the semester and I gave my volleyball coach/prof a PERFECT eval, AND I took the intermediate class the following semester because I felt like I didnât suck at a sport for the first time in my whole life and wanted to actually get better at it. /12
Anyways, all of yâall who follow me here or on Insta know that I run/workout/etc. quite a bit now, but I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say I didnât even feel, like, WORTHY to attempt to do these things until this specific moment in my life. /13
I can only hope that people who are in school to become PE teachers now are being taught with more empathy and an understanding of social power dynamics that I, as a future therapist, have been specializing in, because I KNOW Iâm not the only one with this story. /14
PE class and middle/high school sports DESTROYED my self-esteem for a very long time, and I have to believe there is a better way to have these classes in a way that doesnât play into developing toxic social power dynamics as early as elementary school. /15
I could into so much more about this with embodiment work and other clinically/therapeutically relevant things, but this thread is already so long. What Iâll say is just that I DEFINITELY dissociated from my body for a long time because of PE class and middle/HS sports. /16
In fact, at its absolute peak, I can now pretty definitively that I have blocked out the majority of 8-10th grades. I CANNOT remember anything more than major events from 3 years of my life that happened to be when PE was itâs worst and I was forced into playing basketball. /17
