Movement, Eventually

On reluctantly becoming a fitness person.

It took me a long time to commit to working out regularly. The problem, rather annoyingly, wasn’t discipline. And despite the nature of production schedules, it wasn’t time either. It wasn’t always accessibility, though memberships and eating well certainly add up. For me, it was a PR issue.

In Los Angeles, one is surrounded by every imaginable permutation of exercise. One is marinated in waitlists and branded water bottles, steeped in forms of movement you did not know required a waiver. If you can dream it and it burns calories at $40 per class, it exists in LA.

You want to do yoga? Beautiful. Which kind? There’s vinyasa, ashtanga, kundalini, bikram, hip-hop, sculpt, yin, aero, wine, puppy, goat. There is yoga that makes you sweat, yoga that makes you cry, yoga that introduces you to the concept of your hips as a storage unit for ancestral grief. There is yoga with animals. There is yoga with alcohol. There is yoga that feels like spiritual laundering (which is a polite way of saying: cult audit).

Pilates? Of course. Walk with me.

We have the earthy East Side mother coven, where the women arrive in heirloom linen and Elizabeth Warren merch. They pulse with civic responsibility. You suspect they compost.

There is the invite-only, all-white-reformer WeHo Pilates where the application process feels like joining the Illuminati. The lobby feels like a Scandi design lab. The receptionist appears to have been 3D-printed.

And then there is the essential Pilates Princess franchise: an army of matching sets under a neon decree, Good Vibes and Tight Thighs, performing wheelbarrows to Sabrina Carpenter.

You want a class where you dance violently, chant and expel your demons? It’s called The Class. Emma Stone goes.

Perhaps you prefer something more outwardly punishing, the kind of place that compensates for emotional damage with eucalyptus towels. Allow me to introduce you to Barry’s or Equinox.

There is spin, barre, boxing. Dance, rowing, indoor surfing. Outdoor surfing, paddleboarding, running clubs. Red light soundbath, ketamine microdose meditation, a silent disco.

And yet, despite this endless buffet of abdominal awakening, for my first fifteen years in LA, I hovered at a B-minus baseline of fitness but never identified as Woman Who Works Out. I had a CorePower membership, sure, but who doesn’t? I hiked Runyon with my dog, but that was more for her than for me. If she does not walk two hours each day, she threatens to reorganize furniture with her mouth¹.

For one thing, I felt an enormous, humbling shame in those LA classes. Everybody was so good. They were so effortless and composed. I could not assemble a respectable Crow to save my life. I existed firmly in the world of modifications. If there was an easier version, I had already requested it in writing.

It also didn’t help to live in a city where half the population’s livelihood depends on their physicality. Often enduring a brutal uphill professional climb, these people made the front row of Yoga Sculpt their stage. There is nothing quite like being next to someone aggressively doing handstand pushups when the teacher has asked for a modest Cat-Cow, to free the mind from distraction.

But even more than the material reasons, I simply could not see myself as a “fitness person.” I prioritized creative work over exercise because, in my mind, the two were spiritually at odds. The latter would take valuable time and energy away from the one that mattered.

Being a “fitness person” belonged to a different species. People who referred to certain months as “wedding season.” People who had plans about where they were watching the Super Bowl. People with matcha recipes. Plural. Fitness people meal prepped and drank homemade broth. Fitness people owned air fryers. Fitness people considered a Medjool date the height of indulgence.

I fancied myself a rumpled insomniac, distracted by feeling, blissfully enjoying food groups like caffeine, crafty and Red 47. I had convinced myself that the alarm required to make a spin class was incompatible with the midnight flow required to finish a screenplay. I could not picture any of my heroes on a treadmill. I could picture them chain-smoking, yes. Arguing over a glass of wine, absolutely. Napping? As needed. But incline walking? Narratively incorrect.

It never occurred to me that discipline is discipline. That the same muscle that wakes you up to run might also sit you down to write. I had so thoroughly separated the two that it felt like doctrine.

Over the last three years, my life has changed so dramatically that I sometimes feel like everything before was a dress rehearsal. Friendships dissolved. Career reshaped. Family dynamics shifted. I briefly even moved overseas. The material changes (and losses) forced a complete recalibration. Recently, I attached this to its name: ego death.

It sounds dramatic but it’s less a lightning strike and more a humbling realization that the identity you defended so fiercely was perhaps just a costume you were afraid to take off.

One of my greatest joys in this new era has been (brace yourself) exercise.

I know. The woman who once treated a yoga membership like a trial in character-building now possessed actual enthusiasm. I joked last January about resolving to become “sporty” and by repeating this often, it materialized. The larger umbrella under which “sporty” came to life proved a quieter, longer metamorphosis that had nothing to do with obliques and everything to do with self-respect.

It began innocently, as most things that have staying power do: longer hikes with my dog that gave me time to think. I would wander for miles sifting through a yard sale of former selves until movement became a form of metabolizing. I resurrected my home workouts, ones that started during lockdown, and treated them less like a long-procrastinated siege and more like release. They were onto something in the ancestral grief storage cabinet class. Somewhere in the middle of mountain climbers, an epiphany would appear. Apparently, enlightenment just needed better circulation.

And then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.

Suddenly, I became unafraid to book back-to-back Pilates classes in advance, something I didn’t fully trust myself to do before. Rain or shine, crack of dawn, I’d be there. The woman who once required FBI-level mental negotiations was now treating this like brushing my teeth. All of it began to feel like proof of that larger thesis: I can do hard things.

Despite this having been a years-long internal renovation, in the last few months the results started to show. Compliments rain down in a way that is both flattering and a little disorienting. Acquaintances resurface to ask what I “did.” “More Pilates and less booze?” I respond to a friend (a filmmaker, mind you) because it sounds concise, attainable. It isn’t untrue. But it also isn’t the whole story. It wasn’t one hack. It was everything.

Last year I worked on a show with dancers, people who tell a story while executing something just shy of impossible with their bodies. This was perhaps an extreme, more on-the-nose version of my own experience but I found myself thinking about how much time I’d wasted litigating a false binary: body versus mind. Athlete versus artist. Executor versus creator. Dancers create and they move. There is no separation. The body is not a distraction from expression; it’s the instrument.

It also occurred to me that being in the body fully, as a practice, is often the fastest way out of the mental labyrinth. The one that tells you you’re not a fitness person, or even the one creating a gratuitous symposium to untie a knot in your creative work. We spend years talking around problems we already know how to solve. We ruminate, intellectualize and workshop the obvious. The answer lounges patiently in the gut, like a woman who arrived early and already ordered. It’s the mind that drafts counterarguments. There’s a particular kind of busy work that flatters the mind while postponing the decision the body has already made.

I think I always wanted to be “a fitness person,” even if it wasn’t the prerequisite I thought it was to do fitness. Not for the optics but for the feeling: I wanted the schedule and the structure, but also to feel clear and alive. I wanted a sense of accomplishment to catalyze the day’s momentum. My intuition told me this was possible, that discipline wasn’t the enemy of creativity but a precondition.

Most Eastern European children are enrolled in either piano or ballet. I did both because apparently my parents believed in range. They say that everything you do should be for your younger self. I think about that child, hair scraped back into a tight bun, attempting a low cambré to impress my Russian teacher, who seemed carved from the same material as winter. Or the version of me running through woods upstate, lungs aching from the brittle New York air. Or even the skeptic in those early LA days, rolling out her mat but showing up time and time again, claiming she hated Sculpt but secretly hoping the teacher would scream “let’s gooooooo” during cardio like a drill sergeant.

I had wanted to move all along. I like moving. As humans, I think we all do. But there is so much branding and identity attached to our view of modern exercise. It’s wild that to feel comfortable in most workout classes, you have to already be in shape. In my case, there needed to be an entire lifestyle attached. It begs the question: what else do you stop yourself from doing because you don’t think you’re the type? There are many forces that would prefer we have a personal brand, a niche, to be legible on paper. That makes us convenient, easier to sell to. Social media has taken marketing from something businesses do to something everyone does, as a form of supposed connection, every person flattened into a lifestyle brand. This is why it is crucial that we embrace our perceived contradictions. So that we cannot be bamboozled. So that we have a rich, textured life that’s not easily explained. So that we possess conviction, charisma.

Today, I own a Stanley and many stupid grip socks. I did not realize the Stanley was a polarizing cultural artifact; I was under the impression it was a water bottle. I am slowly training myself to wake up at 5am because I would like the extra time and extra peace before the day begins. I’m currently at 7, which, if you know anything about me, makes me Alysa Liu.

I have dabbled in the idea of cold plunging, despite its recent PR. I choose to picture my sweet Swedish friends in a winter lake, not the cursed image of RFK and Kid Rock in damp denim. I drink electrolytes. I eat chia seed pudding. I will not learn about seed oils. I refuse zoodles on linguistic grounds alone; I also distrust foods imitating other foods. It’s dishonest. I have boundaries.

The other day, I sat next to a college-aged girl while grabbing coffee. She complimented my bag and then said, “I wish I could get something like that, but my friends would make fun of me. Because, you know…brown leather.” Then she left. Excuse me, what? No, I don’t know. I hope she dabbles in brown leather someday.

1. Greta would never actually do this. But she would side eye me and get listless quickly.