Thunder Thighs: The Part of My Life I've Been Waiting For
He stood before us in loose shorts and a T-shirt, blue sneakers, white socks pulled taut up the length of his shins. His moustache gleamed silver in the muted twilight. A boom box sat on the concrete next to him. He stepped closer to the lip of the pool and brought his hands together in front of him.
“And so it begins,” he said.
He bent down to press “play” on his boom box.
We spent the next 45 minutes dragging our arms through the water, kicking our legs out and in, slow-motion hopping in our one-piece bathing suits with side ruching as dance music floated on the air. At one point, we twisted from side to side, swinging our arms with us, pressing the water from one side to the other, a move that would later wake me up in the middle of the night, muscles screaming. It was a move we sometimes did in yoga classes to loosen up our bodies. But in the pool, my arms gliding through the water, the sky darkening, it felt different.
I felt like a kid again.
I felt free.
***
This past year has been a rough one. I’ve spent much of it swallowed up by anger and anxiety, slipping in and out of exhaustion so intense I could barely function. When I injured my ankle last summer and had to limit my yoga practice, stop going on walks, stop using my rowing machine, things worsened. I grew even more tired. And there was nothing to distract me from the ugly thoughts rushing through my head.
But then I began spending more time with embroidery, moving away from hoops to embroider tops, mend jeggings, create wreaths and 3D flowers. I signed up for online classes that taught me hand sewing techniques and I plotted to get myself a sewing machine and start making clothing.
I stopped teaching yoga from my living room and went back to an in-studio practice for the first time since 2019. I moved through classes with the goal of feeling good rather than attaining the most challenging expression of each posture. I modified poses to achieve rest, release, stability. I listened to my body.
I put a bird feeder in my backyard, where I could see it from my home office. It sits in the middle of a garden teeming with basil and sage, flowers and zucchini plants. I love to watch the blue jays arguing with the grackles, see the sparrows lined up in the branches of a young maple tree we have growing in a pot. When I look down at the ground, I see doves and pigeons mingling with squirrels and chipmunks, scrambling for the seeds that have fallen into the dirt. I literally gasp with excitement when the red-bellied woodpecker shows up, his black-and-white-striped wings tucked close, his orange mohawk a blaze of color in the midst of all that brown and green.
Who even am I anymore?
(Or, as I texted a friend the other day after spending 10 minutes taking photos of the birds, “It seems impossible that I was once a person who went dancing at Doc’s every week.”)
Writer Cindy DiTiberio wrote this great piece on how women are often divorced from desire. She starts by focusing on sexual desire, on the difficulty of taking or asking for what we want. But she eventually wends her way to all the forms of pleasure we do not allow ourselves to experience.
“We are capable of feeling good, throughout the day, with no cost to anyone else and yet we rob ourselves of these moments,” she writes. “We get so caught up in productivity, crossing one more thing off the to-do list, throwing in one more load of laundry, that we forget to stop and tend to ourselves. What, in this moment, could I do to make myself feel good? How could I make myself more comfortable?”
She goes on later in the piece to point out that “[w]hen we learn not to want, we learn not to hunger. We tamp down our appetite - for food, for pleasure, for freedom. … Maybe we are unfamiliar with pleasure because we haven’t allowed ourselves to be hungry.”
What am I hungry for?
I’m still figuring that out, but I know now that it includes the pull of thread through fabric when I’m sitting in on a Zoom webinar. It includes sun breaths during an outdoor yoga class, trees shivering in the breeze, birds singing. And speaking of birds, it includes me capturing a video of the ridiculous proliferation of birds outside my window, editing it down, and adding a dance track, just because I think it’s silly.
***
At the end of my first water aerobics class, our instructor ejected his dance mix and placed another CD into the boom box. He looked out across the lanes of the pool, where we stood bobbing up and down, all anticipation.
“It’s time to put it all together,” he said, and we waited, leaning into that silence.
Finally, the first strains of Jacques Offenbach’s “Galop Infernal” (also known as the Can-Can song) danced on the air.
He directed us through a choreographed series of kicks—front, back, to the side, across, front, back, to the side, across. I bumbled my way through the sequence, dropping counts, falling over in slow motion, making a glorious mess of things.
“Kick! Kick! Kick! Kick!” he yelled at the climax, as the song drew close to the end, as our legs pressed out in front of us over and over again.
As we hurtled toward that final chord, we all knew what to do. We planted our feet. Flung our arms into the air.
“Ta-daaa!” we shouted, the water erupting into liquid fireworks.
It was perfect.
All the love - Steph 😘
P.S. What are you hungry for?
On the Internets
A federal judge in Florida blocked an attempted ban on gender-affirming care for trans kids. Thank god.
My mother grew up in the thick of diet culture, and it shows. So I appreciated this issue of Virginia Sole-Smith’s Burnt Toast, which dug into the question of whether older folks really do eat less, and why. Reading this also led me to this older, fantastic issue about how to get older parents to stop talking about diets in front of their grandchildren.
This interview about “marital duty” (and what we owe our partners when we are feeling touched out and the lack of support for care work and and and…) is phenomenal and it makes me so excited to read Amanda Montei’s forthcoming book.
This TikTok post about indoctrination by author and podcaster Don Martin made me weepy.
Elon Musk (ugh) has banned use of the terms “cis” and “cisgender” on Twitter, claiming they are slurs. Here’s an easy-ass explainer on why Musk is an idiot.
And this last link is outside the norm for Thunder Thighs, as it is not strictly about health and/or sexuality, but it does touch upon the question of objectivity in journalism, which is an issue that comes up again and again for someone who uses her writing as a tool for advocacy.
Everything I Accomplished Despite Life
The fam and I watched the final season of The Owl House, and it was glorious, but it deserved better.
I did up a new batch of posts for Pure Romance, including this one on managing infertility frustrations.
I spent a whole day at the Passaic County Book Festival, where I sold copies of my book, talked about my writing life, and quietly embroidered.
I also repped A Dirty Word on the Sex Ed Book Review podcast.
I decided to return to in-studio yoga teaching, albeit on a limited basis. Because my life is chaos, I’ll just be a sub. But I’m excited to get back to it. If you’re local to me, my first class (atm) is at Verona Yoga on Tuesday, July 18 at 5:30 p.m.
Looking even further into the future, I’m going to be doing a talk for the Sex Ed Lecture Series on August 16, aimed at educators, about cultivating sex-positive parents (basically, transforming the parent/educator relationship from adversarial to collaborative).
Finally, I recently put out a call for new readers for Hippocampus Magazine. Check out this Instagram post for more info.
Necessary for My Sanity This Past Month
Frosés from De Novo (though I'm determined to figure out how to make them my own damn self at home).
The return of Black Mirror (yessssssss….).
My continued obsession with embroidery, mending, etc. Right now, I’m embroidering a big-ass version of one of my Dirty Word promotional stickers, plus I’m making some Mabel-from-Gravity-Falls cosplay for this fall’s NYCC.
The Passaic County Book Festival. We couldn’t have had a more beautiful day, plus some old college friends of mine surprised me by showing up, despite the fact that they live out-of-state (!!!).
The small joys of passing things on via my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook. Is this… my hobby now?
A Yoga Rocks event, where I got the chance to see some of my original yoga fam for the first time since before the pandemic.
Archie Bongiovanni’s Mimosa, a queer coming-of-age graphic novel.
Blythe Roberson’s America the Beautiful?, one of my favorite reads of the year so far. It’s a road trip memoir that hilariously explores why all road trip memoirs seem to be written “by white men who have no problems, who only decide to go to the desert to see what having problems feels like.” 😂