For the Birds: indoor rowing & the inner child

A personal essay about water. Plus writing prompts for inner child play + excavation.

Thanks for reading For the Birds! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours.

To my paid readers: Today’s letter ends with “Greeting the inner child: prompts for play + excavation.” I crafted these while wearing multiple hats: trauma-informed creativity coach, neurodivergent writer, and human dedicated to the messy intersection of healing & therapy. Let me know how the writing goes <3

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For two years, my partner and I have attended a weekly indoor rowing class held in a small brown studio at the west end of town.

Legs, back, arms; arms, back, legs. Rowing is low-impact, but formulaic. First you push with your legs, then you lean with your back, and only then do you pull with your arms, before releasing your body back toward the front of the machine in reverse order—arms, then back, then legs this time—and beginning the process all over again.

Picture it: Monday morning, still a little dark out. If it’s a guided class, Mary J. Blige might be blaring through the overhead speakers, or 80s rock, or songs I recognize from Zumba. If it’s an “open gym” class, I put my headphones on, sync my phone, and choose what kind of day I’d like to try to have.

Almost always I opt for endurance, rowing for 25, 30, 35 minutes at a time—a little over 6,000 meters, once. When I arrive at the studio I am bundled in layers, none of which can be removed once I’ve started, not without dropping the handles of the machine and interrupting my flow. Rowing shorts, sweatpants, socks pulled up high; sports bra, tank top, t-shirt. A lumpy purple sweater that makes the bottom edges of my shirt squish outward, like a tutu; or a salmon pink wraparound thing that, when the hood is pulled up, has a Dune chic aesthetic, a phrase I must’ve heard my partner say.

Legs, back, arms; arms, back, legs.

The machine measures our timing, our speed, and our power, spitting out numbers as I force the water in its front vessel round and round. I have a personalized card—a bright yellow thing, which glows in the room’s black lighting—that the instructor gave me. I affix it to the top of my screen, and it helps me translate the machine’s data according to my body’s.

Each card lists four categories: Paddle, Steady, Race, and Sprint. They have as much to do with power as they do with speed, influenced most directly by the force with which I use my legs, then my back, and only then my arms to push away from the machine. The force with which, were I on the Columbia River, I would be muscling my little canoe forward, oars lapping the water behind and beneath me.

The numbers on my card, of course, are different from the numbers on my partner’s card, which are different from the numbers on the cards of anyone else who attends the Monday morning class or the studio in general.

That’s the nature of body positive exercise: There is more context—more personalization—not less.

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were I on the Columbia River, I would be muscling

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A few Mondays ago, I found myself falling out of sync with the rest of the class. This isn’t uncommon. We were tasked with staying at or below 24 strokes per minute, a reasonable-to-slow speed, and keeping our power within the “Paddle” range. Except in order to remain in Paddle pace that morning, my speed had to rise to 26, 27, 28 strokes. I had to go faster, and then a little faster still, to keep up with a lighter amount of strength.

This thing I’m trying so hard to describe here, to pull from action and push into words, isn’t so cut and dry. I could’ve slowed down, for one thing, and accepted that my pace was just slower that day. Or I could’ve focused less on speed and more on the initial push with my legs. Or maybe I couldn’t do anything other than what I was doing, because I had slept inconsistently the week prior, and because we were having unseasonably cold weather, and because my period is almost always effecting my energy in ways that, despite years of accumulated data, beguile me, not to mention that the information on my card is the result of testing I did months and months ago, meaning the numbers came directly from my body, not a textbook. Numbers change. Meaning the card—not my body—can be more or less accurate on any given day.

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Legs, back, arms; arms, back, legs.

Suddenly, a memory: I am small. Second grade? No, smaller. I’ve been enrolled in swim lessons. I don’t mean to be linguistically passive; I have no memory of the impetus, whether it was something I had asked for, or something that my parents thought would be good for me. I remember being in the water, being near other small bodies in the water. I remember the edge of the pool, that calloused cement.

I don’t remember the teacher. I do remember the feeling of people around me being taught, guided. I remember the feeling of slipping through the cracks in the surface. The cracks in the water? I clung to the side of the pool. Was I so scared because no one was helping me, or was no one helping me because I was so scared?

It occurs to me that the purpose of creating this newsletter, and of publishing the 80+ issues I’ve written over the course of the past two and a half years, and then plopping down on the couch one late winter afternoon and writing the 50 or so sentences I have written here today, has been leading me, this whole time, to writing that last sentence.

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I did not advance to the next level of lessons, and to this day I cannot swim. I remember hearing someone say to my mom, not without pity, “her legs are too short." Adults are always saying things to other adults about the children around them, thinking we don’t hear, that we aren’t impacted. Our brains might still be forming, but they’re also full of radioactive attentiveness, picking up details because we can’t help but notice the world. Maybe it was the instructor who’d said it. Or maybe my mom told me the next day. Or maybe they’d said arms, not legs. Or maybe someone said, efforts, that my efforts were too short. (How does one make them longer?) Maybe it was a dream, though I don’t think so, not like the “memory” I have of being told, also by my mother, that mountains move backwards as you move toward them, remaining always the same distance from you.

Background as permanent. Body as unreliable. No peaks or oceans for this girl, just the quiet safety of the page and her head where, short as she is, she’s managed to stay afloat at least 50 percent of the time—quite the improvement!—and is starting to feel bored by what the adults are saying.

She will admire the mountains from afar for as long as she can.

She will eventually grow brave, or tired, or both—thank gawd for the fizzy power of both—and approach the taller, wider things, a taller wider way of being, to see for herself how malleable distance is.

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Greeting the inner child: prompts for play + excavation