With just one glance at me, some words may come to mind. Weak? Maybe. Frail? Sure. Pitiful? Perhaps. But unmotivated? Absolutely not. I came to LA Fitness with one mission: I was finally going to start my fitness journey and be able to say “I go to the gym.”

Stage 1: Denial

It is 8 p.m. on a Thursday and I have overestimated my abilities. I am on the treadmill,  struggling to reach mile 0.7 at the brisk speed-walking pace of 4.5 mph, my legs and lungs about to give up on me.

I may lack endurance, I may get fatigued after jogging for 10 seconds, and sometimes, my steps per day may barely graze four digits. But I’ve sipped Gatorade. I’ve microdosed creatine. I’ve consumed copious amounts of unseasoned boiled chicken. I’ve experienced the delusion of thinking I could develop abs in under two weeks from watching 10-minute YouTube videos (Chloe Ting, my greatest adversary). I am determined to run a mile in under 14 minutes.

There is a choir of grunts in the background, metal weights clanging to machinery harmonize, supplemented by the soft, entrancing beat of a Zumba class below. It was the music that reinvigorated me.

Stage 2: Anger

There is a magic, a kind of folklore, perhaps a mythology, to gyms. While there, I am in a different realm, a different state of being. The air is thick (quite literally denser). There is sweat, lots of it, on the machines, on the fake turf, on the walls, permeating every surface. There are Gym Bros all around me, flexing in the mirror, hitting the classic emotes: the elbow breaker, the wrist-turn-bicep-flex, and the humble, swaddling-a-baby pose.

Most of the gym is a circus, a congregation of those finally knocking out what has been at the top of their New Year’s resolution list for years. In that circus, I play the clown.

I’m sure there’s motivated bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts out there. It’s just that the real Gym Bros typically go 12 hours earlier than the rest of us do — at 6 a.m., wide awake, hydrated, with a designated fitness plan. People unlike myself, who spend several minutes too long, standing in front of machines resembling medieval torture devices, confused, as I try to figure out exactly what muscle requires me to flip upside down to sufficiently work out.

Stage 3: Bargaining

In the end, even I succumbed to the urges; my friends and I took our first gym mirror selfie. And as I stared at my reflection I thought, wow my biceps do look bigger.

I am in immense pain, my senses are overwhelmed by the mayhem around me. There is a dizzying cycling class happening beside me, a Zumba class the room over, and a lone man launching, for reasons I fail to understand, a basketball at the wall.

I like to think that every dystopia-genre author takes inspiration from the gym, these machines making us perform the exercise we should be doing naturally, intuitively in our hunter-gatherer days, our society normalizing the act of going to a designated place, one that we pay for, to keep ourselves in shape.

I am hit by this almost violent sense of self awareness. What are we doing? Is this who we are now?

Stage 4: Depression

Time becomes relative. Somehow my body is insisting I run one more mile, bench 10 more pounds; I am doing this out of social pressure, I’m sure, but I fear this is the only way. My greatest motivator had become shame. Could the problem have been that I had no intrinsic drive? Sure, I joined because I wanted washboard abs for the summer, and sure, it was also to get cute, color-coordinated gym outfits, and maybe even just to be able to say “I go to the gym.” But there has to be something more to this, something more consequential to come from this.

Stage 5: Acceptance:

The truth is, no one is looking at how much I’m benching. No one is judging me for my bad form (most of the time). Spatial awareness is absolutely abandoned. The collective embarrassment we as Gym Bros must participate in has, in turn, bred a sense of shamelessness — this is my armor; I am invincible.

That is the beauty of the gym — it is the true place where people nearly, almost always do, mind their own damn business.

I, too, have become a bench-pressing, protein-powder sniffing, creatine warrior. My camera roll overflows with mirror selfies at the gym, videos of me dead lifting anything over 10 pounds, my legs constantly sore from doing the leg press, my veins coursing with determination, drive, and fish oil. What is the gym, if not a concentration of the indomitable human spirit? I see people from every walk of life, dressed in every possible outfit, listening to every kind of music, trying to become their best selves, reminding me that even if the man two treadmills over has more than 40 decades on me, I am among my peers.

Truthfully, the gym changed my life. Or at the very least, built my sense of self, working out my core to strengthen the core as I like to see it. Through dry-heave-inducing treadmill runs, awkward requests to strangers, asking to use the machine after them, to swapping out dumbbells I was sure would be lightwork work for me — the gym is well worth it. I can’t wait to see what my third visit brings.