Is Everybody A Badass Now?

I am badass                               Brooke Lark, Unsplash

A couple or so years ago I signed up to an online fitness program that overcame a lifetime of excuses that I am not a gym person. I was tennis and a beach person and at various phases a hockey, windsurfing, dragon boating, cricket, squash and cycling person. The gym program was tough but brilliant. The word badass came up in the videos a lot. I had never used the word.

Badass doctors and lawyers

The fitness program has closed but still going is the private online group where members exchange gym selfies, compliments and encouragement. The word badass came up a lot there but rarely about me. I did not self-identify as badass. Yet the doctors, dentists, lawyers, executives, designers, and pilots in the program did. The feeling was forged by achieving seemingly impossible goals that changed their body shapes. While I made my own  modest transformation, I started to feel badass. The gym I attended then had a weights room in the basement, and when I went there and lifted my (admittedly small) weights among serious mostly male lifters, I felt badass being seen as just another person lifting.  It’s time I did again.

Is being badass really you?

The word badass appears on a lot of sites of copywriters and other creatives. There are some I really dig too. Pia Silva! But it can seem like everyone is so badass. I can’t pull off the badass image in branding. It fails first at the photo shoot (especially if the aim is to attract business) and then in my semantics. I am old school-ish. Other words entice me.

But I can be badass any time I want. All it takes is lifting weights and a vocabulary transplant.

What kind of badass are you? Do tell!

Marian Edmunds