I think every girl should be given one grand and useless task before she becomes a woman. Not for discipline exactly, though that is the excuse people like to use, and not for health, which is always such a dreary little word for what is really being displaced. I mean a task with no natural endpoint in the soul, something external and measurable and faintly absurd, so that she may fasten all her beautiful inward ruin to it like ribbons on a gate. A long distance. A number of hours. Something she can point to when people ask what, exactly, is wrong with her.

There are some girls who cannot simply live, they must convert living into project. They are embarrassed by their own formlessness, by appetite that has nowhere decent to go. Give such a girl an ordinary life and she will begin to haunt it. She will pace its rooms like a widow. She will feel, with increasing indignation, that her body has been wasted on errands, lectures, tutorials, the tedious administrative work of personhood. No—she wants ordeal. She wants discipline. She wants a structure severe enough to lean all her wanting against. She wants to suffer in a way that can be scheduled in a calendar.

Training, then, becomes a very elegant disguise for the familiar insanities. Wake before light. Measure the day by exertion. Learn new dialects of exhaustion. Become intimate with deprivation, but honourably this time, publicly, in moisture-wicking fabrics and expensive shoes. It is marvellous what the world will permit a girl to do to herself so long as she calls it commitment. Starvation sounds ugly; endurance sounds impressive. Obsession is frowned upon until it acquires split times. And the body, poor beast, poor instrument, receives all this with a kind of mute loyalty. It will go where she drags it. Into water black as a pupil. Onto roads that do not care for it. Through kilometres and kilometres of private bargaining. It is touching, really, how obedient the body remains in the hands of someone who does not entirely love it, only needs it. She begins by trying to master it and ends, if she is lucky, somewhere stranger: in awe of the thing for continuing. How indecently willing it is to be asked again.

But the real pleasure is metaphysical, not athletic. It is the lovely reduction of the self. During long effort, all the decorative anguish is burnt off. No ugliness, no vanity, no little humiliations with their gilt edges, no future bright with threat, only this primitive arithmetic: breath, footfall, distance, weather. At last, the mind is dragged down from its rococo habits and made to count like a servant. One, two. One, two. It is almost religious, if religion were less interested in salvation than in repetition. Such girls are always accused of control, but I think this is inaccurate—control is merely the alibi. What they want is purification. To be rendered simple by force. To become, for a few sanctioned hours, a creature without irony. This is why effort feels so clean. You cannot be clever in the middle of real pain. Wit evaporates. Persona fails. Social costumes slide off in sweat. There remains only the ancient and unembarrassing desire to continue.

There is vanity in this too, naturally. There is vanity in becoming hard. In being the girl who gets up, who does more, who goes further, who can make a fetish of forecasts and lactic acid and the private glamour of denial. She will pretend she is beyond appearance now, beyond the petty economies of being looked at, but she is still looking, only differently. She wants to witness herself becoming formidable. She wants to catch herself in the act of substitution: see, where there was once longing, there is now mileage. Where there was all that soft and humiliating need, now there is a body learning the old, ecstatic language of command. But still, something more tender hides beneath it. Because no one submits to this kind of repetition without hoping, secretly, to emerge altered in essence. Not fitter, exactly. Not healthier. Transfigured. Cleansed of the previous self as a snake is cleansed by leaving its skin in the grass. She tells herself she is building capacity, but what she really wants is evidence that a person can be remade by will. That if she keeps going far enough, steadily enough, she may outrun the version of herself who was porous, distracted, easily wounded, too impressed by love and language and the various bright disasters of being alive.

It never works like that, of course! The old self does not die. She simply learns to carry it further. This is the first true disappointment and the first true wisdom. You may become stronger without becoming new. You may cross every distance and still arrive as yourself, only stranger, only more acquainted with your own continuance. The wound keeps pace. The vanity keeps pace. The old ache jogs dutifully beside you, improved perhaps, but recognisable. And yet this is not failure. There is something almost noble in discovering that transformation is not annihilation. That the self is not burned away by labour, only clarified, like broth.

So let the girl have her distances. Let her rise in the blue dark and perform her little brutalities. Let her become intimate with effort and call it training, which is kinder than calling it prayer. Watch how she grows quieter under the weight of her own repetition, how the frenzy in her is given rails. After all, there are worse fates than to spend your youth in pursuit of a task large enough to dwarf your sadness. Worse fates than learning, again and again, that the body can be persuaded into carrying what the heart cannot set down. Worse fates than becoming someone who mistakes stamina for meaning and is, in rare and private moments, almost correct.

Because that is the secret, I think. Not that the distance makes her better, but that it makes her legible to herself. At the far edge of effort, stripped of ornament, reduced to pulse and refusal, she meets the simplest version of her nature: not beautiful, not cool, not interesting, not even particularly good—merely unwilling to stop. And in a world forever asking women to be softer, prettier, kinder, easier to interrupt, there is something perversely magnificent in discovering that at the centre of oneself lies not a heart, but a small, hard, splendid engine.