January Letter

On arbitrary rituals, gym and body stuff, and upcoming writing

I hope your new year has been good.

I know it’s an arbitrary date, unaligned with any actual solar, lunar, stellar, or earthly phenomenon, yet there’s still something rather powerful about billions of people celebrating the ending of something and the beginning of another thing. Rituals are rituals, regardless of their moorings.

Of course, for those in northern climes where January is really the hardest and coldest month, the rootlessness of the New Year’s makes that resolution part of those rituals a bit of a cosmic joke. Trying to eat less? Really? In the coldest part of the year? Swearing off alcohol during the greyest and dreariest of the year’s days? Oof. And really — joining a gym in January is practically a guarantee you won’t make it to February.

Better to do all that in March, around the equinox. Or if before, maybe Imbolc, where at least the earth starts waking up. So if you made a resolution and already fucked it up, it’s not you. You just did it at the wrong time, and you’ve got my permission to start again in a few weeks.

I did resolve something: to travel more. Went to Strasbourg with my husband just after New Year’s Day. It’s a city we’ve both known well from our younger years, and it made us both feel young to be there again. Winter’s an easy time to feel old, and January particularly, but this helped.

Also resolved to work out my abs daily, not just when at the gym. You already know how that’s going. Again, wrong time of the year to start something like that.

But speaking of the gym, which is increasingly the primary thing I ever really seem to speak about in my non-writing life (and more and more in my writing…), I hit a few personal goals in the last few weeks. One of those was doing unassisted pull-ups, which at 99kg is not quite the same thing as doing one at 70kg. That success was actually an accident — I was showing a younger friend that I’m mentoring the correct form for them, and then only noticed an hour later I’d actually done them in front of him.

Another was to max out my gym’s chest press machine. To help my shoulder heal, I’ve moved primarily to machines rather than barbells and dumbells. Certainly any CrossFitter reading this is rolling his or her eyes, but the usefulness of machines is that they limit the potential movement of the body, preventing you from enlisting certain stabilizing muscles and forcing you to rely only on primary ones. Basically, you concentrate on what you’re trying to build, and don’t get held back by weakened tendons or ligaments. While other frameworks encourage you to do compound exercises (and fast, and under social duress, as with CrossFit), the kind of weight training I prefer is flexible enough to let you get insanely strong without wearing out parts of your body decades before they should wear out.

And the other personal goal was something I already mentioned. Years ago, when I’d just started, a more experienced friend offered to show me everything he knew in the gym, and it changed everything for me. Since then, I’ve always wanted to get experienced enough that I could confidently do this for someone else, and this finally happened.

Time for more goals, of course. I’m ending my “bulking” period in about six weeks and will start going the other direction. I’ve gained 4 kilos in this cycle, probably half of it muscle. Now I’ll drop off another 8 to 10 over the next six months, hopefully little of it muscle (though that’s impossible to avoid), and then start bulking again.

There’s something I know some of you are wondering (I get asked about this in emails occasionally): the matter of extra skin. When you were previously quite fat as I was, losing weight results in quite a bit of it. Besides being aesthetically unfortunate, it’s really an uncomfortable feeling. And alas, filling that skin with muscle isn’t just a matter of equal exchange, either: fat has a lot more volume per kilo than muscle. And unlike fat, there’s a hard limit on how much muscle you can actually have, though most never come close to that limit.

I was fortunate enough to know a guy who went from 150 kilograms (330lbs) to 110kg (240-ish lbs). As part of this, he’d actually lost 60 kilograms of fat and gained 20 kilograms of muscle. And yeah, he had quite a bit of extra skin. I had quite a bit of opportunity to see what this looked like (read: torrid, raunchy, utterly debauched reasons), and he was fucking gorgeous.

That’s all to say that extra skin should really never be a barrier to trying this. Certainly, I’d look a lot more buff had I never accumulated unhealthy and unwieldy amounts of fat. But that can’t be changed without really terrifying skin removal surgeries, and “looking buff” is hardly a sustainable drive to build your body.

That brings me to something I’ve noticed quite often recently. I’ve run into scores of men doing surgical enhancements like hair transplants, and have seen in some of the forums I still regularly read an increase in men getting surgery to remove gynecomastia (male breasts). What interests me particularly about this isn’t a moral judgment, but rather a larger concern about the increase in body dysmorphic disorder among young men.

This is already what’s happened to women for decades and it’s only gotten much worse for them through social media. It was inevitable that young men would also fall victim to this, including straight males admitting to using tape to reduce the prominence of their tits, just as many young females identifying as transmen or non-binary have been doing.

This is all so wild, and so tragic — and also so understandable and inevitable. How could the societies we’ve built from industrial capitalism possibly have resulted in any other way? How else could a relentless barrage of disembodied images flooding through addictive machines of alienation affected humans except in this way? Why wouldn’t people shell out scores of thousands of dollars to slash up their flesh, so to conform to algorithmically-created forms of the Ideal and the Perfect and their “heavenly body?” Zuckerberg is Calvin is Paul is Plato, and this is still their world until we make it our own.

I’ll take the path of actually liking myself, in all the selves it’s been and is and will be, thanks very much.

Anyway, so it’s a new year. And I’m quite happy, though chomping at the bit for spring. We’ll have a greenhouse in our garden this year, and I’m just about to engage in that most guilty of exorbitant pleasures: ordering seeds. Everything I planted last year — except for watermelon and ashwaghanda — did quite well. I’ll plant those all again this year, and I intend to add quite a few more medicinal and magical plants. I’m especially trying to get to a situation where almost every medicinal plant that I use is something I also grow. Of course, some are just not possible here (coffee is a medicinal in my mind), but most of the others definitely are.

And of course, there’s work to do. My writing’s been sparse the last weeks on account of the holidays and the vastly increased editing work I’m now doing. Our new publisher, Sul Books, is going fantastically. We’ve 14 books scheduled for release in 2025, with another four already slated for early 2026 release. Especially, it feels like the work I’ve been doing for little and often no pay the last ten years is finally really meaningful, and not just because I’m getting paid for it.

Also, I’ve two books of my own coming. I mentioned previously that Here Be Monsters will be getting a well-deserved update and re-release. It’s going to be expanded and also likely rename. That’s coming in November, and I’d absolutely love to hear from those who read the first edition what they’d love to see in this new one.

And by the way, one likely title for the new edition will be “Are We The Baddies?” which is the title I used for this now-unlocked essay:

Secondly, I’m finally working on Other-Song again. You’ll start seeing chapters published here in the next few weeks, and I’m hoping to have the manuscript complete by mid-summer.

And there’s still The Mysteria, which is really turning into quite a research project. I’ve no idea when this will be completed, but I’ll keep writing essays based on its research here, as well as more essays in The Cult of the Raven King Series.

I do hope you’re all quite well, and again that your new year has been great so far. Thanks as always for reading my work.

Love,

—Rhyd