Heather Hazzan

Previously in my life, my definition of strength was to keep going, to trudge through no matter what. But increasingly, it’s having the ability to change, or to walk away from something I’ve invested time and energy in but that just isn’t healthy anymore. Sometimes, that kind of strength is harder. I think my depression and anxiety have been really instrumental in understanding this, because they’re not going away; this is what I have to work with, and it’s helped make me resilient.

Lifting has saved my life in the past year. Through unemployment, a major depressive episode, and a sexual assault, I could still go to the gym and have a really good workout in a supportive environment, and not feel terrible for a few hours. It’s important to remind myself now, in an emotional sense, what I’ve learned there in a physical one: Strength takes time. It needs building. It’s not going to happen overnight.

For me, strength is vulnerability. It means being honest about my mental health, which definitely affects what I’m able to do physically, and using my platform to reduce the silence around it. But I find strength in transparency, because for so many years, I allowed people to censor me—“You can’t do that because you’re a woman,” or because you’re black, or plus-size, or bisexual. Actually, I can. And I do.

I’ve realized that when I’m open online about not being okay, it becomes more okay. It felt good to speak publicly about being trolled while running last year’s NYC Marathon right after losing twins. I’m generally pretty desensitized to ignorant people—like, okay, I guess they have nothing better to do! But this time was different; one week I’d found out I was pregnant, the next week I miscarried—I’d stopped keeping count of the miscarriages—and then finally the next week, after years of screaming about it and being told I was imagining things, I was diagnosed with endometriosis. So many people reached out to me with similar stories, which was bittersweet; I was glad that my words resonated with them, but also, it was devastating. Why are we still ignoring women’s pain?

I’m always looking for the right mix of activity and rest for me, to maintain my sense of happiness, which means acknowledging things that don’t feel great. There have been many days when, because of my anxiety or seasonal depression, I’ve just hit a wall; I’m out running, or on an obstacle course, and mentally, I’m breaking. Physically, I’m in constant pain because of my endometriosis, sciatica, and disk degeneration. If I didn’t want to run ultramarathons or whatever else, I wouldn’t. Balancing my physical, mental, and spiritual needs is the essence of what makes me strong.

For me, strength is physical: What can I lift? How powerfully can I hit? What can my body endure? And it’s mental: What can I can handle in terms of losses? How do I cope with adversity? It has to be a combination of those things, because my issues are kind of across the board. I live with chronic pain. I had back surgery when I was young, and have an issue with my knee now. I have body dysmorphia and social anxiety. I feel things very strongly. I’m a crier. I used to be really hard on myself, sometimes to the point that I’d act out physically against myself. I can still be overly critical to a point, but Muay Thai has allowed me to appreciate and love myself better, too.

I don’t smoke anymore, I don’t drink to excess, I go to bed and get up at decent times, and I’m not in my head worrying about what other people think all the time, either. It’s partly because, whereas I’ve always felt like nobody understands me, I know I at least have a validating community in the context of this sport—other people who want to improve their skills and make this a priority in their lives. And it’s partly that once you start hitting the pads, you just have to let that stuff go. Building my physical strength has helped when I don’t necessarily have as much mental strength as I’d like that day, and vice versa; I feel much more balanced now. It takes me out of myself, like meditation, but not. It’s meditation for people who can’t sit still.

My definition of strength is being the purest form of yourself, holding your ground, and not letting anyone’s opinions change how you feel about you. Before I found Muay Thai, my life was pretty mundane. I was working in fashion where I wasn’t feeling challenged or driven, and I constantly masked my feelings with drugs and drinking. I was also forcing myself to workouts at the standard gym, like running on the treadmill, and I was so bored.

Then I was invited to a Muay Thai competition, which made me rethink what a fighter could be. I saw women my size getting in the ring and shadowboxing, and I realized, if they could do it, then so could I. After that, I completely changed my life. I used to be really self-conscious to the point that I couldn’t leave the house without a full face of makeup. Now, I don’t care; after work, I wipe off whatever makeup I’m wearing and throw my hair up in a topknot, and I become the rawest and most vulnerable form of myself.

I feel like I’m living more genuinely now. I have a passion that I want to focus on, that compels me to try and be as good at it as I can possibly be. I’m channeling my energy differently than before—setting goals for myself in training, and competition, and just in how I treat my body—and it’s brought me peace of mind. Finding myself and my inner strength has been a long process, but ultimately, it took finding Muay Thai to love who I truly am.

I’ve never really identified with being an athlete, even though I swam on teams through high school and college. And I’ve realized that for me, ideally, swimming isn’t competitive. For me, there are other, more important things it provides: strength in showing up, strength in silence, and strength in numbers.

So many sports narratives are told in the context of some big victory, but for me it’s much more about the commitment. When I was younger, at big meets, I would sometimes throw up from performance anxiety—but today, asking myself simply to be consistent and show up, rather than to set a record or win a medal, makes it more okay when I have an off day. That said, I have a lot of anxiety in my life, and swimming is one of the only times that I can find total quiet. Peace but also very literal quiet; I’m not looking at my phone, and all I have to listen to is the water. If I go swimming in the morning and feel anxious later that day, then I can reflect on that quiet, strong moment later again.

Finally, there’s the team I belong to now, which is specifically for LGBT people and allies. Some people on it are 50, some just graduated college, and we all come from lots of different backgrounds, but it’s such a universally amazing, supportive group. We eat meals together, hang out together; some of us go to the beach together, where we can swim uninterrupted for miles, or let the current guide us. It’s good to be in nature, breaking free of old competitive anxieties, and it’s good to have a community. I’m so happy to have them in my life, and if it wasn’t for swimming, I probably wouldn’t have met them.

Strength gets misconstrued a lot. People think that not crying, not showing any emotion, is strength. But for me, strength has been perseverance; when I’m just about to throw in the towel, finding a way to push through.

I was a sporty child. I think without me even knowing it, being active became my escape from kids at school, or what was going on at home; getting recognized in athletics was a confidence-builder. I had such a wonderful pregnancy, but I’ve experienced depression before and I had a feeling postpartum might be rough. Sometimes it sucks to be right. I was in a dark place after my son was born, but eventually I realized I could turn to [bike] riding and yoga to help me climb out of it.

To be honest, the challenges aren't completely over. I’ve been in that dark place again; it was a long winter, and now I’m dealing with the aftermath of losing a baby. I’m struggling to get motivated to hop back on my bike, even though I know it will make me feel better. It's exhausting when you seem to be going backwards, no matter how hard you’re trying to trudge forward—but luckily, having a kid has finally taught me to be easier on myself. That's the thing about strength. It comes and goes, just like hardships in life, and I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet.

Strength is something meaningful to me, which feels important to say because I spent so long convinced that it wasn’t, at least speaking physically. Before I started weightlifting, I got a lot of negative messages about athleticism and what my body was capable of; sexual trauma, being a woman in this society, and being a queer woman and a woman of color especially can all make your body feel not fully your own, but more like a piece of property controlled by others.

The only way I thought I was allowed to be strong was emotionally, intellectually, and I became someone who wore the mask of that strength. But at a point, I got tired of not being confident or feeling present in my body, and not knowing what it was capable of. At first, it was just me kind of being a gym rat, going to a gym and taking up space in an environment that was super masculine, super white—the establishment that had been telling me all along that I couldn’t, or that I “wasn’t.” Only once I started working on the physical stuff did I realize that I had some huge mental and emotional hurdles to jump, and I was forced to confront those demons; my different strengths began growing simultaneously.

I’m a weightlifter now because the sport is beautiful and technical and challenging. But it’s still a very white, male space, and I see my role as being an advocate not just for my own body, but also for other women and gender nonconforming people of color who want to participate. I’ve started carving out a space on social media, with an Instagram account that highlights women of color in the sport. Someday, I hope to have my own gym, where I can coach sponsored athletes as well as paying clients on a sliding scale to make the sport safer and more accessible for everyone.