As I sit writing this, thinking about confidence, missing teeth – more on that shortly – and the body aesthetic in relation to fitness and confidence, it is one day after a terrible suicide bomber attack on Manchester, following a pop concert. At last count, twenty-two people were known to have died and fifty-nine had been injured.
Because it was a pop concert featuring the extremely popular Ariana Grande, a twenty-three-year-old songstress of some talent, the event was attended by many young people, young girls. Twenty-two people will never get the chance to sing along to their favourite artist ever again. A lot more, beyond those injured in the attack, will have been traumatised by the incident.
Further news reveals that the bomber was twenty-two and Manchester-born. A young man, so lost and barely into adulthood, destroying the lives of so many strangers and, no doubt, the lives of those once close to him, for some misguided cause in peace time.
Though the attack is a terrible tragedy, acts of terrorism are not a new thing and will keep happening as long as some fanatical group or warped individual believes that it is the best – or worse – way to make their point. What is really sad is the relentless pointlessness of such attacks. Such an attack, against defenceless and unconnected persons, never created an understanding or coerced a nation or community into compliance. It is even more difficult to comprehend when no one is sure what they are trying to achieve.
All of these thoughts have converged in my head as I think about my bi-daily fitness blog. Back to my dental issues. I’ve been walking around looking like a Mexican bandit from a spaghetti western for the last month or so, ever since one of my caps fell out. As the base of the broken tooth that held it in, has pretty much disintegrated, it was unable to be reattached. So I left it.
Working in fitness, as I do, I deal with the general public on a daily basis. There is nothing quite like a tooth missing in the front of your mouth to drain your confidence. Now I’ll admit I can be as vain as the next person, but I was not going to stop working because of a tooth! I have not been particularly sociable though. The thought of being out and about, laughing like a toothless wino is too much for my ego. So it has been work and home for me for the past month.
I know this is a bit pathetic, it’s not like I’ve suddenly become John Merrick! But confidence is a strange and mercurial thing. Along with tooth loss, there has been negative thoughts and some personal upheaval. Self-talk is a powerful thing, one believes whatever one tells one’s self.
Then something like the Manchester atrocity happens and life is thrown into very stark perspective. There are things that happen that are outside of your control, like the weather. You cannot control the weather, but you can prepare for it, as long as it is not too extreme. Same with the headspace to an extent. Most can control their thoughts. Some definitely find it more difficult than others to control their thoughts, but there is still the option.
Then there are the things you cannot anticipate; freak accidents; an undiagnosed illness discovered too late; other people’s irrational, misguided, actions. Twenty-two young people, many of whom were probably experiencing a concert for the first time, had their lives ended by an event outside of their control. Fifty-nine others were injured because they went out on the wrong night. Hundreds of lives; mothers, fathers, siblings, cousins, friends and acquaintances, lives that will have been negatively affected by one person’s belief that their moment of madness was necessary, that it proved some point. It didn’t.
So many young people will never now know the anxiety of growing up: going to a festival, falling for that boy or girl, looking back on a fashion faux pas, freaking out about spots, having their hearts broken and thinking it is the worse day of their lives, never knowing that the worse day of their young lives, for the family members left behind, was the day they, nor their parents, saw coming.
The confidence, the ego, the self-talk, the pain of lost loves or anxiety of shame, none of it matters when something like this happens and reminds you, in the most brutal way possible, that life can be and is short.
Makeqfit 