The online comments that tried to break me — and how I didn't let them

The spiral I almost fell into after I made my ~fitness modeling debut~

It’s your girl!

There are quite a few things about the life I lead today that I think if you told 12-year-old me about, she’d be utterly shocked. As we’ve discussed, I was a very unathletic kid. Very self-conscious about my body. Pretty shy. Awkward. Exercise was not part of my life at all. Performing publicly in front of others was, but as a violinist — nothing that required big muscles or any kind of lung capacity.

It’s sometimes very strange to zoom out and think about the fact that I’m now a certified personal trainer, and not only do I train individual clients, but I teach group fitness classes and even post videos of myself exercising on the internet. It’s really freaking weird, and not at all where I thought life might take me. I’m still not athletic, to be clear, but exercise is a central theme of everything I do.

One particularly trippy career moment happened a few weeks ago, when I got an email from my editor at The New York Times asking if I knew anyone who might be into serving as a fit tech on NYT video shoots — overseeing the form and making sure the visuals were depicting the exercises accurately and safely. As it happens, this kind of work is exactly why I’m a CPT in the first place: More than a decade ago, I was working as a fitness editor for two small magazines, and we had to hire a trainer for each photoshoot to do this kind of work. I thought, I’m already on set! They might as well use that money to pay for me to become a trainer. (This line of argument worked but it was all a lot easier said than done. Turns out, studying to become a trainer is no joke!) Anyway, I love this kind of work and don’t get to do it much these days, so I went ahead and volunteered myself as tribute.

I soon got an email from a video journalist at the NYT asking if I could come serve as a fit tech for a few workout stories he’d be shooting the following week — and, by the way, would I like to model for the story I’d written about how to do a burpee? Friends, my fingers immediately started typing, “Sorry, but I can’t do that.” For several reasons!