There was a time when my body was my armour—when muscle was my strategy, and discipline was my religion. This was my GI Jane era, where strength wasn’t just aesthetic, it was the point. Every rep, every controlled movement, every precise angle in this photo speaks to that version of me: the woman who saw her body as both battlefield and shield, sculpted to withstand, to endure.

Six hours a day. Six days a week. That was the cost of turning my body into a machine.

One and a half hours of cardio.

One and a half hours of strength training.

One and a half hours drilling a two-minute choreography routine.

Then the core work. The flexibility work. The posing practice.

Five carefully measured meals—lean protein, whole grains, no nonsense. Fuel, not indulgence. Except for cheat day, when I could eat an entire cheesecake (and then some) and wake up leaner, because my metabolism was a furnace burning everything in sight. I was a machine that ran on precision, efficiency, and sheer will. And it worked—I won my competition, just as I knew I would.

Now, there’s a little more softness, a little more wisdom. But the strength? The resolve? The stare that unnerves people with a bad conscience? Unshaken.

My mother taught me to weaponize intellect over aesthetics, but let’s be honest—both have their uses. The mind cuts deeper, but there’s a certain power in presence, in knowing how to own a space. And looking at this image now, I see it for what it was: a version of me, fully embodied, fully committed. I view her with a mix of admiration and amusement. Who was that girl? Me, of course. Just a different iteration. A different strategy. A different sense of what power meant.

I think about what drove me then. The relentless need for control, the constant testing of limits, the certainty that if I could master my body, I could master anything. But control is a trickster, an illusionist—just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, life hands you something that no amount of discipline can prepare you for.

These days, the weapon of choice is words. The battle is memory, narrative, truth. My memoir, Crash, Burn, Write, is coming together—piece by piece, layer by layer. It’s no longer about chiseling away at muscle or measuring success in strength alone. It’s about excavation, about unearthing the buried, the forgotten, the rewritten.

The reckoning is in progress. And this time, I’m not armoured up. I’m stepping into it as I am—stronger, but unshielded.

📸 Danielle Bédard

#GIJane #Memoir #CrashBurnWrite #TotallySurreal #TotallySurrealBlog