I have been a bodybuilder four times. Not four separate attempts at the same thing, but four entirely different relationships with muscle, with mirrors, with myself — each one wearing the same activity like a costume over a completely different man. I have trained out of longing, out of fear, out of hunger, and finally, at forty-two, out of something I can only describe as recognition. The iron has been the one constant. Everything I brought to it changed.
I. The Awakening — Teenage Years
I was the quiet one. The geek. The boy who read books at lunch and drew things in the margins of his exercise books and existed, as boys like me existed in the nineties, in that narrow corridor between invisible and targetable. The sporty kids — the ones who moved through the school like they owned its physics — they noticed me only when they needed something to push against. And I let them, because I did not yet understand that the body was a thing you could choose.
But I noticed them. Not in the way they noticed me — not with cruelty, but with a fascination that I did not yet have the language for. I noticed the way their arms looked in PE. The way their shoulders moved under their shirts. The way confidence seemed to live inside physical space, as if taking up room in the world was a privilege that came with a certain kind of body, and I had simply been born without the ticket.
I know now that what I was feeling was at least two things tangled together so tightly they felt like one. The first was desire — not metaphorical, not abstract, but the specific and terrifying desire of a teenage boy realising that he is attracted to other boys, and that the bodies he is drawn to are the large ones, the strong ones, the ones that take up space. The second was something harder to name. A desire not only for those bodies but to be one. To inhabit that kind of mass. To walk through a room and have the room feel it.
I did not go to a gym. A gym was their territory — the sporty kids, the confident ones, the boys who belonged in spaces that smelled of rubber and effort. I worked out at home, in my bedroom, with whatever I could find. Press-ups on the carpet. Curls with bags full of books. I bought my first tub of protein powder with pocket money and mixed it with water because we did not always have milk, and it tasted like chalk and ambition, and I drank it because I had read in a magazine that this is what you did if you wanted to grow. I was fifteen years old. I wanted to grow more than I wanted almost anything. But I did not give myself permission to want it fully, because wanting it fully would have meant admitting what I was — not just a boy who wanted muscles, but a boy who wanted muscles for reasons that the world I lived in would not have understood.
So I kept it private. I grew a little. Not much. Enough to feel the faintest echo of the thing I was chasing. And then I buried it under books and shyness and the long, careful performance of not wanting too much.
II. The Disguise — Twenties, New Zealand
I moved to New Zealand at twenty-one, and the distance did what distance does — it loosened the grip of everything I had been. New country, new self, or at least the possibility of one. I joined a gym for the first time. I remember the act of buying gym clothes as a kind of costuming, as if I could dress my way past the feeling that I did not belong. Tracksuit bottoms and a loose t-shirt. Nothing that would draw attention. Nothing that would say I am here because I want this. The clothes said: I'm just keeping fit. This is casual. I could take it or leave it.
I could not leave it.
I took to it like a duck to water — like a thing returning to its element after years of pretending it could breathe on land. The movements felt correct in a way that surprised me. The barbell felt right in my hands. My body responded fast, the way some bodies do when they have been waiting for this specific demand, and within months I was changing shape in ways that were visible to other people, and this visibility was both thrilling and unbearable.
Because this was the decade of dysmorphia. I could not see what other people saw. I looked in the mirror and found only deficiency — arms that were not big enough, shoulders that were not wide enough, a chest that was not thick enough, a body that was perpetually, stubbornly, maddeningly small. I know now that I was not small. Photographs from this era show a man who was clearly training, clearly growing, clearly building something real. But the lens I looked through was warped by years of being the geek, the invisible one, the boy who did not take up space. My eyes were calibrated for inadequacy. They found it everywhere.
I trained naturally. No drugs, no shortcuts, just food and effort and the slow, honest mathematics of progressive overload. And I entered my first amateur bodybuilding competition, and I stood on a stage under lights, and I was terrified, and I was proud, and when it was over I felt that I had achieved something that had nothing to do with placing and everything to do with the simple fact that I had done it. That the geek, the quiet one, the boy who would never have imagined himself comfortable in a gym, had stood half-naked on a stage and presented his body as a thing he had built on purpose. It felt, for a moment, like permission. Permission I had been waiting twenty years to give myself.
III. The Performance — Thirties, Sydney
I moved to Sydney, and something shifted. The dysmorphia faded — not overnight, but steadily, like fog burning off under a strong sun. I could finally see myself. I could look in the mirror and recognise that the body standing there was big, genuinely big, and growing bigger. This should have been freedom. In some ways it was. But nature does not tolerate a vacuum, and what rushed in to fill the space left by dysmorphia was something almost as consuming: a need to be seen.
I started using steroids. I will not dress this up in euphemism — I made the choice with open eyes, knowing the risks, wanting the results badly enough to accept them. And the results came. My body responded to the drugs the way it had responded to everything else I asked of it: eagerly, generously, as if it had been waiting for permission to become the thing it was always capable of becoming. I grew fast. I grew enormous. I pushed past every number I had previously considered a ceiling and found more room above.
And I documented every ounce of it. Endless selfies. Progress shots. Flexing in bathroom mirrors, in gym mirrors, in any reflective surface that could contain the evidence of what I was becoming. I posted them online and watched the responses pour in — the likes, the comments, the messages, the desire. God, the desire. It came from everywhere. I had spent my teenage years invisible, my twenties unsure, and now, in my thirties, I was drowning in attention. I became a personality. A figure. A version of myself that was larger than life in every sense.
That is the thing nobody tells you about being wanted — it does not fill the hole you think it fills. The validation was constant and it was never enough, because it was answering a question I had stopped asking. I did not need the world to tell me I was big anymore. I could see that I was big. What I needed was something the world could not give me, because it was internal, architectural, a question about who I was building this body for. And the answer — the honest answer, the one I had been avoiding — was that I did not know.
I reached a hundred and twenty-two kilos. My arms measured twenty-two and a half inches under a pump. I was, by any reasonable standard, massive. But I could not push further. I was working as a baker, spending ten hours a day in heat that stripped the calories off me faster than I could eat them, and my body had found its ceiling — not a ceiling of potential but a ceiling of circumstance. The muscle could not outrun the furnace.
And then my heart spoke up.
Enlargement. Damage. The specific, non-negotiable language of a body that has been pushed beyond its tolerances. I sat in the cardiologist's office and listened to words that rearranged my priorities in the time it takes to draw a breath. And I stopped. Almost immediately. Not because I wanted to, but because I had a husband, and a life, and people who needed me to be alive more than they needed me to be enormous.
I stopped, and the iron went quiet.
Interlude — Six Years of Silence
I did not grieve it. That is what surprised me. I expected to mourn the loss of training the way you mourn a death — sharply, visibly, with a wound that demands attention. But it was not like that. It was more like a room in the house that I simply stopped entering. The door was there. I knew what was behind it. I just walked past it every day and did not turn the handle.
I baked. I gardened. I poured the part of myself that needed to build things into sourdough and raised beds and dinner parties and the quiet domestic architecture of a life well-lived. And it was good. It was genuinely, uncomplicatedly good. I was happy. I was loved. I had enough.
But there was a shape in the corner of every room I entered. An absence that was not painful but was present — the way a missing tooth is present, the way you run your tongue over the gap without deciding to. I did not think about it. I did not let myself think about it. Thinking about it would have meant admitting that the contentment had a hole in it, and the hole was shaped like me, and the me it was shaped like was bigger than the one I was living in.
IV. The Return — Forties
We got a home gym. It was practical — just a cable machine, some space in the garage, a place to keep fit. Maintenance. Health. Nothing ambitious. Nothing loaded with meaning. Just a forty-two-year-old man staying in shape. That is what I told myself.
I did one session.
One.
And the door that I had not opened in six years did not creak open slowly. It blew off its hinges. Every sensation, every instinct, every buried frequency of the thing I had been trying not to think about came flooding back in a single hour of cable curls and lat pulldowns and the feeling of a muscle contracting under load, and I stood in my garage with a pump in my arms for the first time in six years and I thought: you idiot. You absolute idiot. This is what has been missing. You knew it was this. You always knew it was this.
And here is what is different now. Here is the thing that makes this fourth age unlike the other three.
There is no dysmorphia. I look in the mirror and I see exactly what is there — ninety-five kilos of a body that has been away and is coming home, and I do not hate it for being smaller than it was. I see it clearly, honestly, without the warped lens, and I know what it can become because I have already been further than this and I came back alive.
There is no need for validation. I do not post. I do not perform. I do not need the world to confirm that I am doing this, because the doing is the confirmation. The weight moves or it does not. The muscle grows or it does not. The mirror changes or it does not. The audience for this is me, and for the first time in my life, I am enough of an audience.
What there is — the only thing there is — is a conversation. Between me and my body. Between the man holding the handle and the muscle doing the work. A quiet, private, daily exchange that goes something like: how much more can we do? Let's find out. How far can we go? Let's see. And the goals I have set — goals that are bigger than anything I reached in my thirties, bigger than the hundred and twenty-two kilos, bigger than the twenty-two-inch arms — they do not feel like ego. They feel like honesty. Like the first time in my life I am setting a target based not on what I think I deserve, or what I need other people to see, but on what I believe I am actually capable of if I give myself fully to the work.
I am forty-two. My heart has a history. My joints have a memoir. My body has been built and unbuilt and is being built again, and I cannot fully explain why this matters to me the way it does. I have tried. I have written essays about it, drawn analogies, reached for metaphors. And they all help, a little, but none of them quite capture the irreducible thing at the centre of it, which is this: bodybuilding is what I am for. Not all that I am for. But the part of me that is most purely, uncomplicatedly myself — the part that has survived the bullying and the dysmorphia and the validation-seeking and the cardiac scare and the six years of silence — that part lives in the gym. It always has. I just kept leaving the room.
I am not leaving anymore.
I am not comparing myself to the man I was at thirty-five. I am not apologising for wanting to be enormous at an age when the world expects men to start settling for less. I am not performing this for anyone. I am not hiding it from anyone either.
I am just doing the thing I was always meant to do, in the body I was always meant to build, for as long as this body lets me do it.
And I am enjoying it while I still can.