PE ruined my relationship with sport and my body

It’s a miserable Monday morning in September. As your PE teacher stands in front of you and your peers wearing a thick, fleece lined jacket, she tells your class to brave up and brace the cold. Shivering in your short sleeve t shirt and Lycra leggings, you anxiously await her instructions. She picks out two students, well known amongst the class to be athletically talented and popular amongst the rest of the year and tells them that they can choose from rest of your class on who gets to be on their team. They pick, one by one. Staring at your feet as your face flushes with embarrassment, your classmate says your name. You lift your head only to see you are the last one standing. As you walk towards your fellow students, you are met with eye rolls and belligerent glares. You are picked last.

It’s a common tale every unwilling participant of PE knows well. The memories of sheer humiliation and embarrassment experienced by the anxious teenage mind during PE was soul crushing. Despite the nearly universal situation making its way into many coming of age dramas for comedic effect, it’s important to recognise that PE horror stories are more harmful than just your typical adolescent moment of awkwardness.

From as far back as I can remember I have always had an issue with my body. I vividly remember the first time I was dubbed fat by a boy in my class when I was eight years old. From then on, it seemed that label was all I could see when I saw myself in the mirror. My previous happy, confident, carefree attitude was compromised by the judgemental stares and hateful remarks I received from those around me.

 As time progressed, the way I perceived my body had a python like grip on the way I moved through the world.

A few years later in year 5 I remember our class being filmed performing a dance routine. We were made to watch it back on the projector and I remember seeing myself and being absolutely distraught. Was that how people really saw me? I cried myself to sleep that night. From then on, I refused to be in any pictures out of fear of how my own body looked. I only wore baggy clothes and I avoided the scale. I still do today.

By the age of 13 I started self-harming. Living in my own skin was daily torture and it came from the frustration and anguish I felt at every waking moment.  I couldn’t look in the mirror without being totally repulsed. I couldn’t walk around in public without being fully convinced that people saw me the way that I saw myself. Even when I received compliments, the voice in my head couldn’t let me believe their words. The seeds of self-hatred had been already been planted long ago and by then the roots had plagued the soil of my self esteem to the point where no kind words could extinguish the way I felt about myself.

And then came PE.

I had to undress in front of the entirety of my class. I know they saw the scars on my thighs and arms and my stretch marks my stomach, my rolls everything about my body that I hated. I could see their bodies too and it fuelled my own hatred. They were slight, no stretch marks, no scars, no ugly. Countless nights I spent crying, living in the prison I called my body. In my mind I was disfigured, disgusting, abnormal. Growing up with social media only made matters worse. Seeing Victoria Secret models parade down the runway, flouncing their airbrush smooth skin and perfect figures only reminded me how different I was and how I’d never look like them. They were an unreachable paradigm of the female figure I could never achieve.  How could anyone ever see me as beautiful when I look so different to them?

With my hatred for PE and contempt for my own body, I guess it’s hard to believe that I used to want to be an Olympic swimmer. I enjoyed swimming. Progressing through the badges and going to galas: I was a keen and apt swimmer. When upon reflection my unrealistic goal wasn’t quite achievable on the account that I was quite slow, it didn’t take away the fact that I was an eager, enthusiastic participant and that I enjoyed it. In primary school I was one of the strongest swimmers in my class.

Then I moved away and the local pool was now too far from home yet with the growing hatred of my body, the thought of being in only a swimsuit was mortifying.

Despite my somewhat athletic past, when it came to secondary school PE I was a fish out of water. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t catch, I couldn’t do anything. Being in a room full of girls screaming at you to catch a ball and then failing is nothing short of humiliating. I realise now that there is a fine line between competitiveness and hostility. If anything made the war with my body worse, it was the venom in that gym hall. I remember running and falling over and not only did the whole class laugh at me but so did the teacher. As someone who feared to look even look at myself, being made into a spectacle for everyone to laugh at made me want to disappear.

Being the sensitive teenager I was, I ran to the bathroom in tears. On one occasion I insisted that my period cramps were too severe to participate. Instead of being able to sit out, I was forced to run around the pitch alone while the rest of the class watched because the teacher told me that “exercise was good pain relief”.

Bench ball was one of the worst. The teacher would let your classmates single out the worst player to give to the other team. It came as no surprise to me when I was regularly picked to join the other team. As someone with little confidence, the teacher gave the opportunity to my classmates that already made remarks about me behind my back, to humiliate me publicly. This cemented my belief that I was terrible at sport and this belief is one that I still find difficult to overcome. It seemed to me that most PE teachers encouraged this vile behaviour which made it a breeding ground for passive and even explicit bullying. Instead of making me feel comfortable and actively encouraging me to enjoy sport, I felt out of place, a burden to the rest of my team, a failure. I think I speak for many when I acknowledge the clear divide between those that were athletically capable and admired by the rest of the class, and the ones that struggled who were regarded as physically pathetic. This only fuelled the detest for my body further as in my mind, my body was the weakest out of everyone else in my class.

In year 11 one sports prefect in particular called me a spastic during a game of netball. The same girl that pushed me into oncoming cars when I was walking home. Upon reflection I wish I had reported it. I wish that I could have made her feel as bad as she made me feel. I knew however, that the school’s favouritism of school athletes as well as her many friends and position in the school hierarchy would mean that my words would be ignored and I’d set myself up as even more of a target.

With the bitterness prevalent in every PE lesson, I wondered why it was a surprise to my PE teachers that I didn’t try. Why would a teenager subject themself to this adverse judgment? To the sneers and snide remarks of other girls? Why is my unwillingness to participate so unfounded and disrespectful? I was a conscientious student and the only mark on my report that was below average was PE.

Although I have only experienced PE as a girl, I’m sure this is not exclusive to female PE. In discussion with my friends, boys are just as vile and cruel.

This is a problem that seems too widespread to not be addressed. PE teachers actively encourage hostility. It should not be shrugged off as being competitive. As adolescents with severe self-esteem issues they should feel comfortable not pressured and judged while exercising in front of others when just changing into that PE uniform is a challenge.

Instead of teenagers being classed by lazy or misbehaving due to their unwillingness to participate their teachers should be questioning why.

Teenagers need to be given the opportunity to root out the reason why they feel so scared to partake so that they can overcome the mental block around sport in adult life. Encouraging them and help them when they fall instead of laughing at their weakness. I would hate that anyone like me 5 years ago felt the feelings that I felt. My PE lessons have tarnished sport for me forever.

If I could go back to my thirteen-year-old self I would tell her that there’s people that love her for her kindness, her intelligence and her humour. I would tell her that at her funeral no one would say “remember when she fell over in PE” No one would speak about her stretch marks or her scars or how her body looked. Even if I could tell her this, I know she wouldn’t listen. I know that at that age we are learning how to assimilate into social norms and figure out who we are and how to navigate what normality is. This of course means that everything in the teenage mind is amplified and what may seem trivial to the average adult has detrimental ramifications to the teen psyche.

Although my experiences in PE will seem petty and vapid to some, the memories have tainted sport for me for life. I still carry the self-hatred ingrained into my head at a young age today. I find it difficult looking at pictures of myself, wearing clothes that aren’t two sizes too big. I haven’t looked at the scale in years, yet I know I’m most likely overweight. The problem is PE has ruined my relationship with sport and exercise forever. I can’t walk into a gym without thinking everyone is looking at me, judging me, thinking that I’m worthless and terrible that I’m too bad to attempt sport or exercise and I’d embarrass myself doing it. The reality is the first step to taking care of your physical self is concentrating on the boundaries put in place by your mental health and I wish more people would see that.

Despite all this, I do remember one of the only good experiences I’ve ever had in PE. At the end of year 11 my friends and I were the only ones left in the class as everyone else was absent to revise. We were allowed to listen to music on my friend’s speaker and play basketball and I actually participated. I knew that I was in my circle of friends who wouldn’t judge me, who wouldn’t shout at me, who wouldn’t make snide remarks behind my back or glare at me. I could finally feel comfortable doing sport with the people who encouraged me and loved me and felt happy around.

 Although it will take time to fully heal the wounds secondary school pe has left me. I hope that one day I reignite a love for sport and that I finally learn to love and appreciate my body.