09/They Sent My Father a Video

Somebody stood in that gym and filmed me squatting, and sent it to my father.

It was summer. I had been at the gym that afternoon and come home and known nothing about it. My father came in from work that evening and told me that some people had sent him a video of his daughter lifting that much weight on a squat, and that he was not going to tell me who they were.

The message that came with it was that this is too much weight for a woman. That I was going to end up looking dabsheh, which is the Arabic for it, blocky, heavy, built wrong. That I was going to look like a man if I kept lifting this way, and that I needed to stop.

My mother was in the room while he told me. She was on her phone playing a game, listening from the back of it, which is what she does when my father is the one handling something. As long as one of them is saying it, she is content.

I do not remember my exact words back, because it was seven years ago. What I remember is the shape of them, and the shape was begging.

“I am not going to stop lifting this way. Please do not stop me. Please let me keep doing what I want to do.”

That was where I still was at nineteen. I could argue, but everything I said came out as a request, because it felt as though they were holding the whole thing in their hands and could close it whenever they decided to.

They could not. That is the part I did not see for years. Nobody could actually have made me stop. I was the one in control of it the entire time, and it did not feel like it for a single second, and the distance between those two facts is where the next several years of my life took place.

I never found out who filmed me.

That turned out to matter more than knowing would have. If you know who it was then it is a person, and people can be avoided. Not knowing meant it could have been anybody in that room, which meant that after that it was everybody in that room.

My training did not change. My focus did. It went in and out for months, because part of my head was permanently doing a sweep of the gym, checking who was looking, working out who had a phone up, deciding which of them was going to be the one to call my father next.

They were not there, and it felt exactly as though they were watching me anyway.

On a street like ours a girl doing something unusual was never a private matter. It was something to be reported, and somebody reported it.

And that is the thing I would tell you about that year if I were only allowed one sentence. Not that they were ashamed of me, though they were. Not that it hurt, though it did.

That a girl who is watched for long enough stops needing anybody to watch her.

She takes over the job herself. Then she carries it into every gym she walks into for the rest of her life, and it is a very long time before she works out that she is the one holding the camera.