The Future Starts Now: Part 6

The week before the BODYJAM module, the instructor who was covering the BJ52 launch at my sponsor club contacted me to ask if I wanted to shadow with him. While I felt woefully unprepared as the notice was really short for it, I took up the opportunity and excitedly went onstage with him and two other beautiful Jammers.

I’d had a hard few days. I had published my experience at the BJ53 filming a couple of weeks prior to that, and received a large influx of hateful messages *completely* unrelated to the filming experience. In fact, it seemed like the majority of them hadn’t read my blog post at all, but instead, had found out down the grapevine that A Fat Person Blogs Here and trotted on down to throw some mud.

The swarm of messages was so overwhelming that I turned on comment moderation on this blog, which I rarely do. I’ve gotten abuse about Being A Fat Person before, though this was so highly concentrated, and so thick and fast, that it was tiring. The messages were written deliberately to be hurtful – and quite a few of them even told me that I should do the world a favour and kill myself.

[WARNING: The below content deals with suicide. It contains descriptions of suicide attempts and may be upsetting/disturbing to some people]

I’ve lost one person to suicide, had a close cousin be found out in the middle of a suicide attempt, and... this is hard for me to admit... I’ve held the knife to my own wrist several times. When I couldn’t slit it, I would hate myself even more for being too cowardly. There have been times where the only reason why I didn’t slit my wrist was because someone walked in the room. I’d do something like grab a fruit (as a means of justifying why I was holding a knife) to hide the fact that I was on the edge of killing myself. I didn’t want them to find out and convince me not to go through with it.

For any of you who may be out there, don’t you ever, EVER, take suicide lightly. There is a human at the end of those statements you make, and you don’t know their story.

Those comments brought back some of the dark memories, and I was in tears for days. If it weren’t for Glen Stollery, his partner and Patrick who held my hand through it all, it would have been much harder for me to get through it. I might have slipped back into my old ways and believed those words. Admittedly it’s been about 10 years since I was that close to the brink, though those times affect you in ways that you never forget.

Having the opportunity to shadow the BJ52 launch was a welcome breather from all of the hate and negativity. It was hard to believe that there was so much hate out there in a community that is supposed to be warm, welcoming and inclusive. There were moments when I was tempted to walk away from Les Mills altogether. It was a relief to realign my thoughts to the launch and focus on the choreography.
Let me take you back to the first post in the Beginning Of The Beginning series, where I detailed what it was like to be up there shadowing.

I was planning to wake up early and rehearse the choreography, though a mouse decided to enter my bedroom and eat some of the stroopwafels my Jamming friend Rose brought over (the mouse has good taste), at 3 in the morning, so I was a bit lacking on the sleep side! I did the first half of Carla's class at New Lynn, then jetted off (with her blessing) to the launch class. I felt so unprepared and was constantly thinking about "Which way am I supposed to go!?!?!?", since I knew I could very easily slip back into the participant choreography. The instructor was awesome and really good to me, as were the other two gorgeous instructors on stage (I will say that it was a bit crowded up there though!); even during the class I recall one instance where we were demoing a move and he turned to me and said to the class, "Look at Raina... how can you fault that technique! Perfect!" Awwwww shucks! How awesome did that make me feel!

Never mind the amount of smiles and happy people we saw from the stage; I loved seeing the members getting into it, getting it wrong and laughing at themselves, getting it right and seeing the enjoyment in their eyes, and others just doing their own thing and being so happy and in their element.

I loved it up there, I really did. I felt welcome, and the whole weekend, I had the biggest smile on my face that you could imagine. I knew from just that one time shadowing that I had a lot of work to do, but I couldn’t wait to get started. It felt awesome to be excited about Les Mills again after being so down about things for the past few weeks.

I was more open with my BODYJAM training, though hadn’t gotten around to blogging about it yet. I did, however, publish on my Facebook that I had shadowed for the BJ52 launch and had a wicked time. The instructor gave me some advice on who to talk to to get practice in, and guidance on where I should begin with learning the track that I was to present for the module, all of which I lapped up and was excited to begin working on.

The following evening, however, this comment came through on the blog.

Dear Raina, I am a member at [sponsor club], I read your blog from time to time and was surprised to see you shadowing with the Jam team... I don't mean to be rude... it's really cool that you know instructor friends... who can invite you on stage to shadow... but I and my friends all feel something.. that your appearance makes the Jam experience less appealing.. to be blunt.. the people on stage are supposedly the role models that we look up to.. but we don't wanna be like you... we don't wanna end up looking like you by doing Jam... we try hard to shed some pounds and lose fat... but seeing you up there is like telling us that we'll be gaining more by doing the class... we got really traumatised.... and some have even thought of dropping Jam...

sorry again to tell you this I know this is not pleasant to hear... but could you consider not doing it in the future? thank you...

[emphasis mine]

I told the instructor who invited me to shadow about it, and they couldn’t believe that it was real. We’d seen no unhappy people on the floor, so it seemed totally out of alignment with what we saw from the stage. I know I hadn’t seen any unhappy faces myself, but I could have been swept up in my own adrenaline high.
Whether it was real or not, the statement that ‘some have even thought of dropping Jam’ was a concern, and I felt that the GFM should know about it.

Initially when Matt Thraxton advised me that New Lynn didn’t have any space available on their trainee program to be my sponsor club, I was disappointed. But everything happens for a reason, and while I adore Matt Thraxton like mad, I could never imagine him getting as livid as the GFM of my Now sponsor club did at my receiving that message.

Basically, they were mortified, hurt and upset. They were fuming that I had been treated that way by a member, and determined to find out who they were and let them know it was not cool. The GFM went up onstage the following week, read the comment out to the members, the majority of whom were astonished that someone had submitted feedback like that.

I looked at the comment a few more times over, trying to make sense of it, since it really didn’t match up with what we saw from the stage that day.

I noticed that it said ‘we try hard to shed pounds and lose fat’. Pounds is not widely used in New Zealand as a measure of mass, having been on the metric system for donkey’s years. I also hadn’t even published anything about shadowing BODYJAM on the blog, so it was odd that they submitted their thoughts as a blog comment. In addition to this, a member would ordinarily complain about a class to gym reception, yes? A lot of things didn’t quite add up.

My initial reaction was to get upset. When you’re told that your appearance is traumatising, it’s upsetting, on top of all of the Just Kill Yourself messages I’d been getting. With support from Glen and Patrick, I managed to get reorganise myself and use it as further leverage to get that module certificate and say WELL SCREW YOU to whoever it was.

It made it all the more upsetting when the BODYJAM module was cancelled, because I so badly wanted to get up on that stage again and prove that they couldn’t get rid of me that easily.

When it came to the RPM training, I knew it was my weaker program out of the two. I knew that it was going to be *much* harder for me to get learn and develop into an RPM instructor, and that experience has rung true to date. It’s been far more difficult than I ever could have imagined.

I made a decision. I could either be open with my RPM training and open myself to more hurtful comments which could consume my thoughts, consume my energy, and effect my teaching... or, I could keep it quiet and put all of the energy I had into developing my RPM instructing skills. I would only be open about it until I had documentation from LMNZ saying that I Have What It Takes; that being the module certificate.

It meant that the first few times I taught I didn’t have a friendly face in the room. It meant that I couldn’t talk to people about what I was achieving... and I even had to lie to someone who told me “Have you ever thought about doing the RPM module?” I hated being so secretive, though if I look back now, it gave me the freedom to be more focused and give it the attention it deserved.

It was hard, but it was right.