A personal essay on the impact of conditioning.

You get used to things gradually.

Like stepping into a cold pool. You dip your toes and feel your entire body shrivel into itself in immediate protest. Then you wade up to your bellybutton and find yourself letting out a squeal as your stomach caves inward against the unwelcome chill. 

But once you find the courage to dunk your head — after the initial burst of cold passes — you find yourself adjusting. Your organs pump hot as you swim, limbs pulsating under the surface. How quickly you adapt so that when you emerge from the water and feel the wind on your damp skin, you long for its warmth.

The same is true in reverse. There is the metaphor of the frog swimming in warm water, not realizing it’s being boiled. It relaxes up until its own demise because it comes on slowly. You might clock the hyperbole, but you sit in the cool base of the bath and slowly fill it, adding steaming water not with bodily protest but rather comfort. Yet you would never undress and plunge right into temperatures that turn your skin red. 

The same principles move beyond water. Consider hard labor, the tremor of the untrained hand compared to the steady beat of the veteran worker. The body works wonders to adapt, muscles taking root in the proper places for their ideal functions. You build the necessary strength from tearing and rebuilding until muscle memory is ingrained. Perhaps pain persists, but labor becomes routine. 

You can try it out yourself. Carry a manageable amount up a hill on day one and gradually increase the heaviness. If you add just enough extra weight, by day 30, you will find yourself able to bear a far heavier load than you could when you started. Little by little, the body adjusts. 

That’s why they say to learn something new for just fifteen minutes daily; in a year’s time you will have scraped together your spare change of time to stack up close to 100 hours. Then you can call yourself an expert if one is to believe that the mind also is able to stack. But isn’t that how knowledge is built? 

There are so many examples of small, seemingly inconsequential, and perhaps unnoticeable pieces that add up to something far more colossal in proportion. You just must multiply time, increase numbers, heighten the rate. 

Have you ever climbed a mountain one step after the other, watching your feet move when the distance doesn’t seem to budge?

It’s been said that barring physical disability, all it takes is determination to get to a destination, no matter the seemingly implausible physical demand. 

You can train your body, reshape your mind.

Thicken your skin to form hands that don’t callous. 

Not realize the normalization of a gesture, a touch. 

Lose track of when the boundaries are being pushed back just a little further. 

Because your “no” wasn’t met with outright protest. 

Because of course it didn’t start with a slap.

You didn’t realize how the level of what you would tolerate was being careful moved further and further. 

Having boundaries crossed and recrossed until you convinced yourself it was you who broke them. 

How could you stop to question when you were gifted soft words and heartfelt promises following every broken plate, each bent finger.

You didn’t even have to search for excuses because you were given them, fed the words to tell others, instructed the thoughts to tell yourself. 

Had it stamped into your skin over time like a mantra. 

Something that was stenciled upon you so gently at first so that you didn’t realize when you had it branded. 

So you find when you look back that you have not, in fact, climbed a mountain. 

And time did not impart you with the ability to carry a tremendous load. 

The only mass you’ve attained is pressing on your chest. 

Not just the blows your limbs retreat from on impulse. 

But the weight of the words you’ve come to absorb. 

Because you find that the idea of muscle memory can also be applied to organs, how your skin has learned to take lashes, how your lungs have learned to fight for air. How your brain has trained itself to process it all. And how that processing has led to short-circuiting.

These are the patterns indented into your character, maybe even your DNA, the teeth that never lost their edge but perhaps dulled their surprise with their newfound regularity.

What’s finally become clear at the end of your reflection is the realization of how numb you’ve become, how normal it all feels. 

How what you were told was untenable, unallowable at age 11 has become routine at 21. 

Things that would once break you are now just another Monday night. 

So that the hand wrapped around your throat on Tuesday is the one you hold on to on a Wednesday. 

The one that lays you down on a Friday and shakes your limp shoulders when you can’t wake up when Saturday rolls around.

Continued Reading: You’re Being Abused. Now What?