The Body is Never an Interloper

How the gym cured my "imposter syndrome"

What made me braver was an odd craving I’d never experienced before. My body wanted to do more, wanted to try other things, and when I’d leave despite this, I’d feel a profound disappointment in my stomach. It felt a lot like being hungry at a table but being too afraid to eat the food in front of you. I wanted to do more, and to be there longer, and most of all to feel like I was “allowed” to be there.

As a writer, everything in one’s life becomes easy fodder for an essay. Yet for some reason, despite the fact that I can turn even the most minor moment in life into a piece of writing, it’s been really hard to write directly about the gym.

This is despite the fact that I’m at my gym eight hours every week (four days of two-hour sessions), which is the equivalent of an average workday. Add in the other time devoted to gym-related activities — getting there and back, getting my stuff ready, planning out my meals — and the time then becomes closer to 12 hours. And this doesn’t count all the time I spend thinking about the gym and lifting.

A massive part of my life now revolves around a single activity and a single place. So, why has it been so hard to write about directly?

It’s not that I don’t refer to it quite often. Looking back through the pages of my recent book, I noticed I wrote about it quite a bit. Here are just a few of those references. From of the Two of Pentacles:

There are two lessons anyone starting a gym training program or sport learns quite quickly from experience. The first is that muscles must be used and strained in order to grow, and the second is that the actual growth of those muscles only occurs in the times when you aren’t using those muscles and are instead resting.

From the  Eight of Pentacles:

The Eight of Pentacles is the mystery of work, the deep bodily joy that springs from our efforts whenever we stop focusing on the hoped-for results. It’s going to the gym, making a large and complicated dinner for friends, re-organizing a room, or taking on long projects not because you’re hoping to get something out of these things, but instead because you really enjoy them.

From the Three of Wands:

Beginners starting a weightlifting program benefit from a strange phenomenon that often makes long-term lifters quite jealous. “Newbies” can often gain twice or even three times more muscle in their first few months than experienced lifters can. That’s because the body responds faster to stress it hasn’t experienced before than it does to stress it’s more familiar with.

That early bump is quite exhilarating, and it also occurs for many other things outside the gym. And this kind of early acceleration is what the Three of Wands is all about…

Also, I’ve referred to the gym several times in essays, so I’ve no real difficulties there. But writing directly about the gym didn’t feel right, like there was some shadow over it. And I finally figured out what that shadow was this morning, and it’s both equally embarrassing and relieving.

I’ve never admitted this before, but I had a very long struggle with what some call “imposter syndrome.” I’ve never really thought that was the correct way of describing the phenomenon, though. Sure, it’s a bit like feeling like a fraud, or like you’re out of place, or that you don’t merit being where you are, or that you don’t have the right or the expertise to speak about a thing.

However, the word “interloper” fits a lot better with what I felt.

An interloper is an uninvited guest, a person somewhere he’s not wanted or allowed to be. Etymologists think it probably derives from the word “leap,” by way of an earlier term, “landloper.” A landloper was a vagabond or trespasser, someone who had leaped a fence or other boundary onto someone else’s property.

The more you study etymology, the more you start to see certain historical patterns behind the development of words. When a word is first used in writing, or when a new meaning of a word suddenly appears, it’s usually a sign that a new phenomenon had arisen for which no previous word sufficed. You can see this quite easily in recent English, like when “photocopy” suddenly became a word. Before then, there was no need to describe what a photocopier does, because there was no such thing as a photocopier. Then it’s invented, and people need a word to explain what it’s doing.

Both “landloper” and “interloper” were created in the late 16th century, along with hundreds of other words (and thousands of words in the next century) relating to criminality, property, and commerce. As with the photocopier, something new had arisen which no previous words sufficiently described.

That new thing was capitalism and its new order of class and property relations.

Landlopers were people leaping fences, walls, and other boundaries onto property where they were not allowed. Not long before that, though, there were no such boundaries, and the new regime of land ownership was itself in the process of being created. In many places, a person accused of landloping might have been only recently evicted through Enclosures, and thus climbed a new wall built around his or her previous home.

“Interloper” came a little later, and was created to describe people who were trading or otherwise engaged in commerce without an official (government) license. This was the historical period of trading and merchant ventures like the East India Company, companies given monopolistic licenses (“royal charters”) to exploit the resources of a certain region. An interloper was someone buying and selling things without such a charter, acting as a competitor to the monopolies.

Interloper describes how I’d feel much better than imposter did, and I suspect this is true for most others, as well. “Imposter syndrome” (originally “phenomenon”) was first used by a clinical psychologist to describe the experience of women working in stressful professional positions. Though all highly successful, the women in the study reported feeling inadequate and intellectually “phony.” Especially, they worried they were not really supposed to be in the positions they were in.

What I felt for a very long time was similar, though it didn’t apply only to my intellect or to work. In fact, for me, it was primarily social. I’d be at parties sometimes and feel like maybe I’d only been invited out of politeness, rather than a desire to have me there. Or, I’d go to a coffeeshop, a bar, a club, or even a protest march and wonder how long it would take before someone “official” noticed I wasn’t supposed to be there.

The range of places in which I felt like an uninvited guest was really quite broad, and again mostly involved social events. Hardest were places in which people seemed already to know each other, or to know '“the rules” of a place. When I’d arrive, I’d try really hard to observe everyone’s behavior so I could blend in unnoticed. If I was at least acting like I was “supposed to,” maybe everyone else would be too busy, or too drunk, to realize I was even there.

I’ve read some people identify this kind of social awkwardness as a sign of autism, and I’m sure for those who see this as a meaningful category I’ve just outed myself as such. But as I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t find this kind of explanation very meaningful. What many describe as “neurodivergence” or autism can really apply to almost anyone at various times of life, and my experience of feeling like an interloper had much more to do with something besides having a “different” brain.

Instead, I’m certain it had much more to do with my relationship to the body, rather than my brain. That’s because the feeling started going away when I started lifting weights.

Not immediately, of course. In fact, I’d never felt more like an interloper than I did the very first day I walked into a gym.

Really, that first day was maybe one of the most awful experiences of my life. It was a cheap corporate gym, popular in France and Spain, called Basic Fit. Everything’s all colored orange, even down to the splash guards in the urinals. The 20 euros you pay monthly get you exactly 20 euros’ worth of a gym. They’re crowded, they smell bad, the music is awful, and not a single dumbbell is ever put back into the place labeled for it.

That’s at least part of why I chose the place. At twenty euros, you’re risking nothing. Also, it was big enough that I thought maybe no one would notice I was there. I could sneak in, work out a little bit, and then sneak out without a single soul marking my presence.

That first day, I lasted about 25 minutes. Someone said something to me in French, and I didn’t understand him. I muttered something back that I’m sure made no sense, and then waited for him to walk away before getting off the elliptical I was on, gathering my stuff, and walking out as casually as I could so no one would notice I was fleeing.

Somehow, I went back the next week, and then the week after. But it took me months to be brave enough to do anything except the elliptical machines, which were anyway the only thing I knew how to do there. I’d surreptitiously look around to see if there were other stations free, and if they weren’t too crowded, and then leave without trying anything else.

What made me braver was an odd craving I’d never experienced before. My body wanted to do more, wanted me to try other things, and when I’d leave despite this, I’d feel a profound disappointment in my stomach. It felt a lot like being hungry at a table but being too afraid to eat the food in front of you. I wanted to do more, and to be there longer, and most of all to feel like I was allowed to be there.

I wish I could tell you I figured this all out that first year, but that would be a lie. Sure, I felt a little more comfortable after the first six months, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone else there belonged — and I didn’t.

Making this all more difficult was the fact that I was in a foreign country, and for at least some part of that time, I actually wasn’t allowed to be there. I’ve not told this part of my story before: not only had I overstayed my visitor’s visa in France, but I’d even lied about my visa status to a landlord in order to get a lease. In this way, I guess I was a bit of an imposter, or definitely a landloper. I’d jumped a fence to get somewhere I wasn’t allowed to be, and then somehow managed to escape notice long enough to get an official place to live.

Let me tell you — this all fucking sucked. Worrying every time you are walking around in public that a French police officer might stop you and ask for your papiers is really awful. So is hoping your landlord’s commitment to his short-term profit is greater than his fear of being fined for housing an illegal. I did a lot of magic during that time that I didn’t really like to do, and I’m glad I’ve never needed to again.

Yet, it’s wild to me that I was honestly more worried about being caught out as an interloper at the gym than an illegal immigrant to France. Sure, that latter issue could have led to deportation and a permanent ban on entry to the European Union. But after just a few months of working out, such a fate felt much less worse to me than being ejected from that gym.

To be clear, I didn’t even like the place. But I was really starting to like how it felt to be there. I liked the initial nervousness when I entered, and my own impatience to get as fast as possible from the locker room to the machines. I liked the early stress of my heart trying to keep up with what my legs were doing, and the sudden rush when it caught up. I liked the burning sensation during and especially after. I liked the sweat blinding my eyes, dripping from my skin into puddles on the floor beneath me. And I especially liked how, at about halfway through each session, I forgot I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Not long after, my visa situation got fixed. My landlord never even knew I’d been for a little while not allowed to be there, nor do I think he ever would have cared — my rent was always on time. Not long after, though, I moved to Luxembourg, and had to start at a new location of the same corporate gym and struggle with all those feelings again.

Except this time, it was a lot easier. My body already knew what it wanted to do, and I had figured out a new trick. If I worked out hard enough, I couldn’t actually think anymore. All the oxygen and glycogen that my brain needed would be used up instead by my muscles, and so I’d be too fucking tired to notice I wasn’t supposed to be there. And then, by the time I could think again, I’d already be back home.

This worked, but it still didn’t get rid of the ridiculous belief underlying all this. I still didn’t think I was allowed to be there, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why I still thought this. And now I was in a new country again, and this time in even more foreign circumstances than before. Luxembourg is really a strange place, very conservative and painfully class-conscious. I, on the other hand, was a lower-class American punk suddenly trying to learn how to eat with a fork in my left hand instead of my right.

The oddest thing happened, though. Rather than being the place I belonged the least, going to the gym actually made me feel more allowed to be here. I didn’t understand this until I’d re-read an essay Silvia Federici allowed me to publish many years ago, “In Praise of the Dancing Body.” In it, she discusses the way that capitalism has transformed our conception of the body and put constant constraints on where we are allowed to be and what we can do.

After briefly explaining the many forms this has taken and how she sees dance as a way of liberating ourselves from that control, she then ends with the following sentence:

Since the power to be affected and to affect, to be moved and move, a capacity which is indestructible, exhausted only with death, is constitutive of the body, there is an immanent politics residing in it: the capacity to transform itself, others, and change the world.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, what is being described in “neurodivergence” is probably just the same process of alienation that affects all other parts of our bodied existence within capitalism. As Federici notes elsewhere in that essay, we become at war with our bodies, “we don’t taste good to ourselves,” and we no longer see ourselves as part of the world from which we are composed.

Particularly, the idea that we are not allowed to be in places is a product of capitalism, and it’s directly related to capitalist discipline of the body. We’re taught in our childhoods that there are places we should not be, and this is enforced by punishment for even ridiculous trespasses, like taking bathroom breaks at school without permission. The poor, especially, see this kind of control continue through all manner of interdictions against loitering, or walking into stores you don’t look like you can afford, or being even in public places without a clearly identifiable purpose. But even the rich are subject to this same process.

Oscar Wilde noticed something that is rarely repeated even by leftists: the “duties” of property become burdens to the rich. Likewise, once being allowed in a place became connected to the wealth you have, everyone became subject to it.

Thus, if you want to feel at home in the world, you must accumulate the kind of wealth that protects you from feeling like an outsider: the less of an outsider you wish to feel, the richer you must get. This explains why the rich pay so much for special experience packages for Burning Man and similar events. Everything gets set up for them already, all their food and other needs catered in ways they’re most familiar with, all to protect them from the awful experience of feeling like an interloper.

This belief does none of us good. It definitely didn’t do anything good for me, and instead held me back from countless things I’d wanted to experience. No doubt it probably still does, but at least for the gym, I can finally say I don’t ask whether or not I — or anyone else — belongs there.

This came about specifically because of the body. Nothing in my life has made me feel more at home in the world than working out has, because nothing in my life has made me more of a body than lifting has. And the more body I become, the less the idea that any body can be in the wrong place is even thinkable.

Again, this started slow, and the initial parts of this were quite terrifying. I felt often at war with my body’s desire to be there, like I was trying to tell a child it couldn’t go play. But the longer I let it play, the stronger its drive for more became, and thus the harder it was for me to say “no — we’re not allowed.”

It’s been six years since I first walked into a gym, and now I can barely even remember that fear of being an interloper. In fact, it’s now my primary social activity, the place where I feel most myself and most engaged with others. There’s something about lifting really heavy things around other people — of all ages and all strengths— doing the same thing that really helps destroy any ridiculous beliefs about human separation and artificial barriers.

And though it was at the gym where I first conquered that fear of being an interloper, I no longer feel that way anywhere else, either. There’s now nowhere I think I don’t “belong,” because belonging was never a correct framing. All those rules were internal anyway, self-limitations derived from weak social cues and my own alienation from the body that composes me.

As Federici wrote, the “immanent politics” residing in the body, its “capacity to transform itself, others, and change the world” is rooted in the body’s power to act and to be acted upon, to move and to be moved. That’s what makes us human, and what makes us powerful. She found this power in dance, I found it weight lifting, and I’m sure there are many other places to find it, too. Anything that makes you more body makes you more yourself, and such a body and such a self can never be an interloper anywhere on earth.