Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

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The Fantasy of Discipline

Kelly Davio
Gay Mag
Published in
21 min readApr 17, 2018

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TThere was a period in my life when it seemed that everyone I knew was getting married. This period was followed shortly by the time when everyone was having a baby. After those two epochs came a long span of divorces. All of these periods were predictable enough. Today, I’m at a point that was harder to see coming: Everyone I know seems to have taken up running.

This was a somewhat unexpected development given the company I’ve kept for much of my life. I’m the person who, after a week of tryout matches for the junior varsity tennis team, was ranked only marginally higher than the young woman who had broken her arm the week prior and hadn’t bothered to either show up or remove her name from the roster. I didn’t achieve better results with any other sports, so I cultivated different hobbies — books, music, film — and hung around with folks who, like me, didn’t mind a largely seated approach to life.

I continued roughly in this vein, surrounding with (what I assumed were) like-minded individuals, until I woke up in my late thirties and found that every other unathletic person I knew was now training for a fun run, a triathlon, or…

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Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Kelly Davio
Kelly Davio

Written by Kelly Davio

Kelly is the author of the essay collection It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability. Find her at kellydavio.com.

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