In eighth grade, I got back a math test. On the friendly green paper was a score I couldn’t believe — an eight out of 20. 40%. My heart sank, but the disappointment that lumped in my throat and pooled in my eyes was quickly replaced by shame. While I hadn’t understood the content and I had made mistakes that showed my fundamental lack of understanding, I believed that my poor score was not a reflection of my math knowledge, but of myself. “I’m so not a math person,” I thought to myself, hiding my face with my sleeves.
During elementary school, I was always smart. I read above my grade level, flew through long division worksheets, drew incredibly lifelike horses and could even spell eye-watering words like “narcissistic” and, sometimes, “bureaucracy.” But I internalized my strengths (academics and art) along with my weaknesses (perseverance, piano). To me, what I could — and couldn’t — do was a reflection of who I was. I was unconscious of this black-and-white worldview, yet it was deeply cemented in me. I remember thinking, after playing piano became too frustrating, that if I wasn’t a piano “person,” if piano wasn’t baked into my DNA the way science and history were, why would I work hard at it? To me, it always made more sense to quit what didn’t click the first time and retreat into the safety of familiarity and success without discomfort. Every success felt like a given, while every failure felt unavoidable.
Getting back that math test, I was confronted by my failure and reacted according to my black-and-white worldview, tearfully bemoaning my intrinsic shortcomings and my teacher’s failure to teach me. As the year progressed and math never clicked, I hated myself more and more for my supposed natural inclination away from the subject, looking for the nearest thing to blame besides myself.
And as ridiculous and lazy as it might seem, I couldn’t bring myself to do anything more than study to mild discomfort a few feeble times. I had never struggled through learning before, and I had no idea how to.
In freshman year, I was trudging back to the locker rooms after a particularly humbling P.E. class. It was the dreaded mile, and I had come dead last. Trying to recover my lost pride, I said to my friend, “Some people can just do push-ups, or run a mile or do the splits. I’m just not one of those people.”
Right as it left my mouth, the absurdity of the false dichotomy hit me. Couldn’t we all do the same monkey bars, heated games of tag and candle poses as young children? Right as a part of my mind wanted to shift the blame to my parents (for not making me continue gymnastics after I said I didn’t like it), another thought took over. Yes, some of those “push up people” were naturally stronger. But the vast majority had just wanted to learn and had stuck with it when it was hard.
While the core of my fallacy had started to crumble, it wasn’t until my sophomore year that a change started to happen. I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram storytimes and GRWMs when a video grabbed my attention: a two-minute video of a woman teaching herself, over the course of six months, how to do chin-ups.
Invigorated by the simplicity of it — her persistence, the linear growth of her abilities, the determination that made something once impossible easy — I wandered over to my rug and tried to do a push-up. For the first time, I considered the possibility that there were no “push-up people,” just those willing to be beginners despite the embarrassment of failure, and to sustain effort even when it felt hard.
Unsurprisingly, I flopped to the ground. But unlike when I saw the 40% on my math test, no shame rushed into my cheeks, and I didn’t lift any emotional defenses to shake the blame of my failure onto something else. I accepted that my inability to do a push-up lay in myself, and for the first time, it didn’t sting. I got back into the starting position and tried again.
For months, I attempted push-ups, and when I achieved them after a month or two, I moved onto pistol and dragon squats, headstands, L sits and more. But my white whale eventually became pull-ups — the upper body exercise that felt like both the hardest and most impressive thing in the world. Day in and day out, I watched videos and read articles on how to unlock my first pull-up. I followed female calisthenics influencers and watched with rapt attention as they shared their journeys. In between sets of squats in weight training class, I would gaze wistfully at the bars nearby, imagining myself floating upward, propelled by my own strength. Pull-ups dominated both my dreams and daydreams, and I spent every second I could at my garage pull-up bar, spamming banded pull-ups (an easier variation) until my arms were jelly.
The summer after my junior year, amidst college applications and crushing demotivation, my goal of a pull-up was often the only thing that got me out of bed. Every day, I could barely move myself upward before resorting to assisted pull-ups, but each failure felt necessary and good. I wasn’t a “person who couldn’t do pull-ups,” as I would have once seen myself, but a determined and hardworking girl not giving up on her goal. Whether I achieved them or not, as I climbed down from the bar every evening, pull-ups were turning me into a stronger person, emotionally and physically.
One day, like all days, I started my morning by attempting a pull-up. I hung from the bar, and after mentally reassuring myself in the event I didn’t get it, I began to pull, drawing my shoulder blades together and my elbows down. Hold on, I thought, I’m still going up. I lowered down and tried again. Again, my chin cleared the top of the bar. Then again. After ten months of yearning and working for a single pull-up, I had done three. When my brain caught up with my body, I was overwhelmed with emotion — first disbelief, then tingling excitement, then an unfamiliar pride.
I realized I hadn’t achieved anything on such a monumental (to me) scale before. Where my previous successes had felt like a given, this reward felt deserved, and like much more a reflection of myself than successes once had.
Over time, that experience helped reframe the way I approached other challenges, and the college applications I had been dreading started to feel a little easier. They, too, were a monumental task with no end in sight, but the pride from my success gave me the perseverance necessary to sustain effort at another task. When school started, I began to relish the process of learning when I would’ve once avoided it, finding the motivation to watch Organic Chemistry Tutor videos and then do practice problems on what I learned. Watching my grades go up after an initial dip gave me the same feeling of pride that achieving a pull-up did.
My calisthenics journey taught me how to learn — how to accept that being a beginner at something doesn’t mean I’m a failure, and that anyone can learn anything, no matter how out of reach it seems. While I once assumed my mind and body were inflexible and unable to grow, proving myself wrong about my body led me to realize I could become stronger mentally as well. Pull-ups changed my mindset and with it, my life.
