Easter Legs

Easter used to be an exciting holiday. It came with hoards of chocolate, pastel stuffed animals, and egg hunts.

The searching was always my favourite part. I’d wake up to tiny foiled eggs glinting around the room like tasty treasure.

As I aged, the eggs perched in more and more precarious places. The Bunny got crafty, and what used to be a joyful jaunt around the living room became an immersive search and rescue. The usual hiding places stopped yielding results, and I would still be finding eggs for weeks after the fact.

Eventually, the Easter Bunny stopped coming altogether.

This Easter I woke up to an alarm ahead of a 9:15 am spin class.

Instead of eggs, I searched for my favourite leggings, a second sock, and my water bottle before hopping out the door with Mark.

At the studio, we were ushered into a dark room blaring club bangers. We clipped into a semi-circle of bikes and spent fifty minutes engrossed in heavy beats and light shows. The man in the centre yelled directions from his stage or strutted past the wheeled pews to keep us going.

“You got this, Leslieville!” he yelled, and forty strangers swayed in trance-like unison. My mind slipped away to reverberating Madonna vocals. Around me, sweaty bodies throbbed in time. I let out a whoop. We all whooped.

This, I thought, must be what it’s like to speak in tongues.

Perhaps a more direct comparison is dingy nightclubs. My university days - particularly long weekends - were a blur of dark rooms with dripping dancers and loud music. We clumsily moved together on sticky floors and lost all sense of time. More often than not, we wound up at the sketchy 24-hour McDonald’s with makeup running down our faces.

Same same, but different.

In my early twenties, I spent my time hunting for bursts of dopamine. I searched bars, dating apps, and impromptu travel plans for the next hit. I never wanted to leave anything unexplored, lest it became a pivotal life experience or melt between the proverbial couch cushions.

I - like many Millennials - collected stories like tiny eggs to add to our social profiles. Have you ridden an elephant? Studied abroad? Played the field?

Recently I’ve been rewatching Girls, and I’m stunned at how my attitude has changed. I feel too old, too removed, and too secure to relate to the whiny characters. Hannah subjects herself to terrible sex “for the story,” A b-plot character starts a gourmet mustard company, Jessa ruins a relationship on the basis that her bohemian lifestyle is the only kind of real living, and I cringe.

I remember thinking the show was raw and honest. I thought Lena Dunham's scripts revealed kernels of truth about why, as young women, we were forging our own paths. Upon rewatching, everything I thought was drama turned out to be a comedy. What I’ve found hidden in-scene is something unexpected: the value of stability.

As the youngest Millennials push thirty, we still value those novel experiences. That said, very few of us are willing to leave our houses at 11:00 pm (ew) for a release. Instead, we’ve replaced the feeling with club-adjacent spin classes, float tanks, and other cults that make us feel like we’re doing something bigger than ourselves… in a contained environment.

Since the pandemic, I’ve been working out from home with Peloton. Over time I’ve noticed how the lessons and phrases have bled into my daily life. My negative self-talk is slowly being replaced with Cody Rigsby yelling “You didn’t survive a pandemic to fake an orgasm.”

My therapist would call that progress.

The Peloton Parables - as I’ve affectionately begun to call them - are an unintended benefit to an app I downloaded to prevent myself from gaining weight. Each instructor has their own catchphrases and class rituals that make it feel like you’ve chosen a congregation.

Adrian William’s “emotional laps” have gotten me through tread boot camps and stressful days at work. Jess Sims’ assertion that “you are what you repeatedly do” has given me the confidence to say that I am, in fact, a writer. Tunde Oyeneyin’s reminder that progress is the “culmination of your attempts” reminds me that even failing has a purpose.

In trying to do something physically demanding, I’ve unknowingly changed my own mental makeup. The insecurities that plagued me in my original Girls era have been replaced with a chorus of “I don’t have to. I get to,” “Being ready isn’t a feeling, it’s a decision,” and “You’re stronger than you think.”

Of all the inspirational words, there’s one quote from Robin Arzon that stands out: “There comes a point when holding on to the old you is more energy than creating the new you.”

As we walked out of the spin studio I thought about how different my long weekends have become. 10:30 am and there was no hangover or foil-covered chocolate in sight. And yet, I was still in a state of euphoria.

I pulled on my shoes as a woman commented on the diffuser smell on the front desk. “It’s SPINCO branded”, a staff member beamed, and I laughed.

The Easter Bunny taught me that the best hiding places change. You never know where you’ll find those tiny eggs of inspiration, dopamine, or release. Sometimes they’re obvious, sometimes they show up in places you thought you already checked, and other times they turn up in the most surprising spots.

Younger me would never have looked here.

Curtain Call