In the past few years, I’ve been understanding just how important physical activity can be in developing confidence.

Now, confidence is a big word. And it is certainly dimensional. One could be adept at public speaking but be demure while negotiating prices. Each is it’s own challenge. One could pen a novella in a week but freeze up while trying to reply with nuance and depth on the internet.

In my experience, in my fortunate experience of possessing four roving functional limbs and a head that didn’t take one too many knocks, I’ve found that I started to care less about what others perceive of me when I exercised in front of them.

As a child playing with your friends, this comes quite naturally. Brimming with glee as you run from ‘it’, you make eye contact with a towering adult. You flash him a smile, because you’re in a thrill, running and having fun. The adult might smile back or just avert your gaze and move on. As a kid, you might feel a little strange, thinking to yourself, why was he looking so desolate, was everything okay?

Now, you’re it. Fast forward to your adulthood, you’re sick of being/feeling trapped in your room and you decide to go to the park, if only to breath in the cool invigorating morning air, and hear the fauna stirring. You reach the park and realize that you forgot your water bottle. Your perfect workout is already done with. It’s okay. Nothing is perfect. Nothing ever was.

As you do some random wavy movements which excuses as a warmup, you feel out-of-place and you can hear some people in a group sniggering behind you . Are they laughing at you? Have they noticed the hole in your trousers in the left shin?

They’ll be gone after this and you’ll never see them again. Even if you do, it won’t matter. You decide to start small. There are a few metal bar supports, foam platforms and benches in the park, using which you perform some knee-pushups, some bench dips, some horizontal rows, maybe three chin-ups and some squats.

As you begin your set, you hear your bones creak and groan. As you push and pull, you feel a searing pain coming from within your muscle, but you want to know how far you can go and you try to push for just one more. The pain overwhelms you and you take a pause. Following this pain, there come immediately waves of relaxation. You breathe deeply and you look around. People are happy with or without you. And for some time, so are you.

In recent times, exercising in a public gym, exercising in parks and running on the roadside has forged some steel in me. People might look at me quizzically or with disdain, and I stare right back, indicating with my eyes: “This is me and this is what I do. Now fuck off”. Maybe there’s something about moving your body in front of others without a care in the world that imbibes conviction.

If you are fortunate to possess and maintain a functioning body, I urge you to start moving. Gently at first, in fact gently for a very long while and then … all at once.