The trick to deadlifting is keeping the bar close to you: “Close enough to shave the hair on your shins,” according to one of my favorite instructors. “But not close enough to scrape the skin.” The closer you keep dead weight to your body, the more control you have over it and the lighter it feels. But the farther you hold the same dead weight from you, the heavier it becomes and the more likely you’ll compensate in dangerous ways. Think of the spine rounding, of putting pressure in undue places, of lumbago encircling your lower back as if scribbled in a teacher’s red ink.

When I’m lifting, I sometimes think of a chapter of “The Second Sex,” in which Simone de Beauvoir remembers the exuberance of a friend who once considered herself to be as strong as a man. The friend was so self-assured about her physical strength that she often picked fights with anyone harassing women on the street. But after what Beauvoir elides over as “bad experiences,” the friend is transformed. Violence has taught her a permanent lesson about her body. The strength and protection she once sought from within she begins to seek from men. “To lose confidence in one’s body,” Beauvoir writes, “is to lose confidence in one’s self.”

I did not realize exactly what I had lost after the three years of my abuse came to an end. It felt counterintuitive — at last I had my body back to myself, I had agency — but like Beauvoir’s friend, I felt I had been dimmed, somehow, from the inside out. At women’s health care clinics, I couldn’t slide my feet into stirrups without jerking my knees together, nearly kicking some innocent doctor engaged in the dismal pap-smear process. I cannot pinpoint when it happened, but at some point I lost the ability to be physically intimate with anyone and spasmed shut at a partner’s touch. I had not anticipated that, even after I was free from my abuser, my body still would not feel like mine.

The physicality of my trauma unnerved me most, and instead of talk therapy, I turned to physical therapy in an effort to rebuild myself from the outside in. But even those P.T. sessions were frustrating; the exercises I did in them reminded me that there was no way I could use my body without thinking about how it had been used. But in that garage gym in New Jersey, and in others since, I’ve found reprieve in the deadlift, in its simple, singular focus on what the body can do.