Yes, The Olympics are Inspiring

Gabrielle Douglas Enacts the Human Experience

Feeling evil and watching the Olympics with my family, I accidentally did the thing I always try not to do, which is to go on a loud long bitter rant denouncing everything I'm jealous of. "I hate the Olympics. What is the point of the Olympics? All these young, beautiful, healthy people spending their entire lives in the pursuit of a meaningless goal? Fourteen-year-olds flinging themselves around bars, young Asian men with synchronized concussions, people making their bodies hurt when their bodies don't have to hurt. If I was healthy, I wouldn’t waste it like that! I mean, what's the fucking point?" 

My dad, who loves sports, answered my rhetorical question. "It's about being alive," he said simply, and turned back to the TV.

"I guess I just don't know what that's like!" I said, and stalked off into my room, feeling like a stereotype of a stereotype of a stereotype of an embittered invalid and a reverted adult living at home.

The weird thing is that half of the time when I make these out-of-control public rages, what I'm saying is actually the opposite of the truth. Honestly, I'm inspired by the Olympics. It's an appreciation that I've only recently acquired, and only fully recognized as I lay on my bed where I had tearfully flung myself after my teenage outburst. The Evil, i.e., my bitterness and jealousy, would have me not be able to take any joy from the things in the world of bodies I can no longer do. But there’s some good left in me, too, letting me get over it and begin to connect with something that's always been alien and opaque to me: sports and their mysterious meaning.

I've never understood them before. Perhaps there's a joie de vivre about moving your body that I don't have anymore. That's true often enough, but I didn't get sports even when I had a healthy body. Sports always seems so pointless to me. Get sweaty, hurt, lose, all to put a ball in a certain place a number of times. Of course, I've heard the "metaphor for life" theory before, that sports are about teamwork and strategy and hard work paying off, and outlet for warfare and survival in this tragically civilized society. But it wasn't the kind of metaphor I connected with. I am still a teenager; it's jocks versus art kids, and you gotta know where you stand. I always got picked last, never got the ball passed to me, never made friends with any of my teammates, and if you want a metaphor, write a fucking poem. 

Of course, this line of thinking isn't exactly sophisticated. I think it's more symptomatic of my tendency to elevate the intellectual over the physical, a tendency that is by no means the cause of my illness, but has tripped me up over and over again when I try to take care of my body. I'm not good at sports, and I don't understand sports, and if there's one thing I hate it's things I'm not good at and don't understand. I'm still the nerdy kid hanging out in my high school's gifted office, desperately looking down on the popular kids, channeling all my warfare and survival drives into the highest SAT scores and the most nuanced direction of No Exit. My economy didn't value moving your body for the sake of moving your body.

I guess it's the classic lesson learned too late, or scarcity creating value. Now I think it's bizarre to like art and not like sports. They are both about pre-intellectual motivations, about the defeat and glory of being human. Why would the arc of a dancer's leg move me, but not the arc of a perfectly executed spiral pass? Why is one method of contacting and expressing the subconscious better than another? Particularly when the athlete has to be so disciplined and rigorous in the pursuit of her goal, when so many artists (and I'm talking about myself here, obviously, illness aside) are really deep down lazy narcissistic bums? If I had even a fraction of the dedication and perseverance as these athletes, do you know how many novels I would've written by now? Do you know how many, uh… blog posts I would've written by now? And comics I would've drawn? And pugs I would own, and friendships I wouldn't have let slip away?

And so, slowly and very much from the sidelines, I'm beginning to have a genuine appreciation of people moving their bodies competitively for no intellectual reason, and drawing real inspiration from the Olympics. I'm sorry if this sounds like a 90s Nike commercial. Of course I'm ignoring the money, egos, exploitation, drugs, and concussions, but right now I'd rather just buy the Hellenistic Ideal that can't be completely destroyed by being sold so vigorously. And perhaps I can take even more direct inspiration from these athletes, not even filtering it through the language of metaphor. Because our bodies aren't just metaphors. If there's one thing I've learned from illness, it's that sometimes bodies just mean themselves. I can learn to joyfully move my body, for no reason, even now on such a humble scale.