The Anatomy of a Thirst Trap
This chapter isn’t about health. It’s about survival.
I didn’t have the typical story of a gym rat on a mission.
I was dying. My blood was a ghost town, but the mirror was the only place that didn’t lie.
I was 6 when I learned how to control food. My mom took me to a food therapist because I only ate five things. When she made me a PB&J and used the same knife for peanut butter and jelly? I refused to eat it.
Control is a strange language when your dad is abusive.
I guess it stuck with me—food became a lifeline.
It’s not about calories. It’s about this won’t hurt me.
So that year—the year my body was breaking down and I was posting gym selfies—it wasn’t about flexing or showing off.
It was about the one thing I could still control: what went in, what came out.
The only predictable variable when your body is failing.
People call it a “thirst trap.”
Let’s say it out loud: “thirst trap” is an insult.
And it’s a double standard that I’m not going to apologize for.
When girls post boudoir shoots and get showered with love, no one says a word.
But a guy posts a photo where you can see the shape of his abs, and suddenly he’s arrogant?
It’s funny because those gym selfies didn’t catch anyone. They weren’t bait.
They were proof I still existed.
No one reached out to say, “damn.”
More guys messaged me about my workouts than girls ever did.
Most of the time, the girls who did see it? They just rolled their eyes.
And in person? I felt invisible.
Not big. Not muscly. Not even sexy.
The abs didn’t feel like anything but a distraction from how much my insides hurt.
The 8 lbs of muscle I gained and the 8 lbs of fat I lost in that year?
That’s not supposed to happen.
I didn’t do it on purpose.
I just did the same thing every day.
Same food. Same lifts. Same world that didn’t see me.
It wasn’t about having abs.
It was about momentum. Consistency.
It was the only thing I could count on when everything else was slipping away.
And you know what’s even more insane?
I never got sore.
Never bruised.
I didn’t even have enough in my body to generate that soreness.
It’s a mystery how I gained that muscle at all—because when I walked into the ER, it disappeared overnight.
The selfies weren’t thirst traps.
They were an autopsy of my own body, in real time.
A quiet documentation of a man trying to stay here.
I didn’t know what healthy was supposed to feel like.
I knew I was dying, but the outside didn’t know.
I had abs, style, and a face that looked alive.
But that was just skin.
The inside? The inside was a slow funeral march.
I wasn’t trying to fool anyone.
I didn’t even want to be seen.
I just wanted to keep going.
In a world where I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight, food was the one thing I could.
That sandwich at five years old? It’s funny, but it’s the same thing I was doing at 38.
Control. Precision.
One meal at a time.
When I posted those gym photos, it was like leaving breadcrumbs for myself.
Proof that I was still here, even if I didn’t feel like it.
And that’s the part no one gets about a thirst trap:
It’s not always about wanting to be wanted.
Sometimes, it’s about wanting to remember that you’re still human.
I’d stare at the photos later and think:
That’s not me.
That’s someone else.
That’s a ghost who looks like they have it together.
Because in the gym, it’s easy to hide behind the numbers.
The weight goes up, the weight comes down.
Nothing else to think about.
But life isn’t a deadlift.
It’s a thousand tiny cuts.
It’s going to bed every night knowing that your blood can’t carry enough oxygen.
It’s feeling your heart flutter in your chest, knowing you’re not supposed to feel it.
It’s being strong enough to lift, but too weak to breathe right.
It’s your knee feeling like it might explode walking down the stairs.
It’s your hips locked up like iron gates, every step a negotiation.
I spent a week retraining myself how to walk, like a baby giraffe.
I would rotate my hips back, step by step, on walks with my dog.
Trying to outsmart a skeleton that was fighting against me.
It’s your spine feeling like it’s welded shut.
Your breath shallow because your ribs forgot how to move.
I wasn’t just trying to eat better.
I was trying to figure out how to exist.
I was 191 pounds.
I looked like I had it all figured out.
But I was the closest I’d ever been to leaving.
And that’s the thing:
It wasn’t about a photo.
It was about a body I didn’t trust.
It was about proving, even to myself,
That I was still here.
I didn’t post to be wanted.
I posted to be witnessed.
Because that’s what you do when you’re dying and no one notices:
You leave a record.
The gym was never about glory.
It was about staying in motion when everything else felt still.
It was about giving myself something to measure
when my thoughts were too broken to track.
Those gym photos weren’t about abs.
They were about breath.
About sweat and steel and the simple relief
of knowing that, for a moment, I could still feel something.
I was alive in the snapshots.
Even if I was dying in the hours in between.
Because in the end,
the only thing that mattered
was that I didn’t stop.
Not when my blood was too thin.
Not when my head was too foggy.
Not when I was closer to death than anyone knew.
So go ahead—call it a thirst trap.
I don’t care.
Because this chapter?
This is about what it took to stay alive
when everything else said I shouldn’t be.
It’s about the anatomy of survival.
One rep.
One breath.
One second at a time.
And if you can’t see that,
I wasn’t posting for you anyway.