(music)
Like spelunkers seeking sunlight
we can discover evidence of our own potential
inside the actions of another,
by the imitation of their ambition,
by the using of their maps instead of our own,
we can find freedom.
We can relate to reality differently.
We can borrow bravery. We can learn to wear bigger shoes
and leave deeper prints.
I grew up in a world of unending potential,
a grocery store overstocked with futures
and history's credit card in my back pocket.
Everywhere I looked looked like me
and I have acted accordingly.
Never once have I been hit in the heart by a sideways glance of someone's doubt,
nor never once worried my ambition might paint me unworthy of love.
I grew up in a world of unending potential.
I also grew up with a big sister.
For a time, our world spun on an axis of sport,
the basketball court a textbook from which I learned a simple lesson:
Toughness knows not gender.
I grew up in a world of unending potential,
and every time she hacked past the lazy password of my defense
and drove her shoulder into mine, she taught me something.
Grasping for the buoy of breath on the floor of my first CrossFit gym years later
I lost no pride
in conceding victory to any one of the women who finished faster.
After all, I expected no less.
The playwrights in power have always told the story of female athletes
using the language of men.
But hard fought gains are changing that story,
and the theater of our attention now has many more stages and many more rhetorics.
If freedom comes when we discover evidence of our own potential
inside the actions of another, then a flood of new actors telling new stories of strength
might be the dynamite that collapses these mountains
of common nonsense.
I believe we believe in what we see
and nowhere do we watch more closely than the field of play
with all of its measurable displays of power,
its winners and losers, its shower of data points
that point to who we call strong
and who we call weak.
How many new cartographers there are now to chart our collective course,
to draw the maps that any young lady looking may use to find her way
to a world of unending potential,
that any young lady looking may use to build upon
like an architect of her own making,
that any young lady looking may use to erect her own stage
and recite the monologue of her own taking.
Like words or weapons, the barbell is both a symbol
and a tool.
It is a symbol of strength and a tool of which we reach for
like prospectors of possibility.
It stands for everything a boy is taught to chase:
power and bravery.
But thousands of chalk-filled gyms are chockfull of a new class of athletes
all learning the barbell's lessons of resilience and grit.
With every rep she is rewiring her resolve.
With every barbaric yop at the top of a heavy lift
she is hacking the regularly scheduled program with this important message:
Toughness knows not gender.
In thousands of chalk-filled gyms the barbell sports are a counterpoint
to the story we are told about women,
that they are in need of our protection and therefore in need of our approval.
Henry Rollins once wrote that the best way to kill weakness
is with strength.
In thousands of chalk-filled gyms women are killing the preconception of their own frailty,
and with calloused hands, rewriting the story of expectations.
They are killing our weakness
by the exhibition of their own strength,
like modern day suffragettes of ambition,
like superheroes of potential.