The Inner Prosecutor and the Stage: What Bodybuilding Taught Me About Self-Sabotage and Becoming
On bodybuilding, the Inner Prosecutor, and the identity I almost talked myself out of.
I haven’t shared personal stories on this blog because I am much more comfortable being the one holding the mirror than standing in front of it. Yet this year gave me something I can't keep to myself, and if you've read my last post on the Inner Prosecutor, you'll understand immediately why I think it belongs here. (If you're new to this space, I'd encourage you to start there — it will make everything that follows land with a lot more depth and clarity.)
This year, I made a decision that genuinely surprised me: I decided to prep for a regional body building show, and then…Masters Nationals, one of the most prestigious and competitive NPC bodybuilding shows in the country. I'm also writing a book about what this experience has done to me — to my sense of self, my healing, my understanding of what becoming actually costs. But before the book, I wanted to give you a sneak peek, because what unfolded in this prep was one of the most vivid, up-close demonstrations of the Inner Prosecutor I have ever lived through personally. At times, I thought it was going to win.
A Quick Recap — Then the Story
If you haven't read my post on the Inner Prosecutor, here is the condensed version: it is the part of you that builds a case against you — cataloguing every past failure, every moment of falling short, every reason you are not ready or not qualified — all in the sincere belief that it is keeping you safe. It is a protector with the wrong job description, and it is remarkably skilled at what it does. (I wrote about this pattern in detail in my last post, so I'll let that piece carry the full explanation.) What I want to do here is show you what it looked like in my actual life, in real time, during one of the most demanding things I have ever chosen to do.
Mine showed up early in this prep, week two, if I'm being precise and it came in speaking the language of reason. You know how this ends. You've started things before. Who exactly do you think you are, standing up there??
For a long time, I would have called what came next laziness. There was a slow drift, a quiet loosening of my grip on the thing I had said I wanted. I know better now. It wasn't laziness at all — it was shame and fear wearing laziness as a costume, which is one of the more convincing disguises they have found. Underneath both of them was a pattern I have watched play out in my own life more times than I care to count: whenever I expand, I tend to self-abandon.
What Sabotage Actually Looks Like
The expansion I was stepping into was enormous. Masters Nationals is not a local show or a beginner's competition — it is women who are really dedicated to the sport of body building, who have competed many times before, who know exactly what they are doing under those lights, who have earned their place on that stage in ways I could see and measure and compare myself against. Deciding to enter that arena was a genuine act of becoming, and my Inner Prosecutor could not let that stand unchallenged.
Most people imagine sabotage as something dramatic — a week of chaotic eating, disappearing on your coach, withdrawing from the show entirely. And sometimes it is. But the sabotage I know personally is quieter than that, and far more sophisticated. It showed up as skipping posing practice because some part of me had already decided I would freeze anyway, so why invest the effort? It showed up as scrolling through other competitors' pages late at night and letting the slow drip of comparison hollow out the confidence I had built during the day. It showed up as catching my own reflection in the gym mirror and deciding, in a split second, that I didn't belong in the same room as the women who actually knew how to do this.
The Inner Prosecutor is brilliant at making all of this feel like clarity rather than sabotage. It calls itself realism. It says things like, I'm not being negative — I'm being honest. I'm just preparing you for disappointment. I'm protecting you. I would absorb that framing because the voice was so measured, so seemingly sensible, and because it had been with me long enough that it had started to sound indistinguishable from my own thoughts.
The self-abandonment was never loud. It was a slow leak, and I used to call it laziness, which only made things worse, because then I was prosecuting myself for the sabotage on top of the sabotage itself. That is the trap. That is how the Inner Prosecutor wins a fight you didn't even realize you were in.
The Turn
The turn did not come from a motivational quote or a breakthrough workout or finally seeing the number I wanted on the scale. It came from a question I started asking myself with real seriousness: When did I learn to do this?
The Inner Prosecutor did not arrive fully formed. It was constructed, piece by piece, out of experiences that taught a younger version of me that being seen was dangerous, that visibility invites judgment, and that wanting something for yourself is its own quiet form of arrogance. It absorbed the lesson, very early, that the safest thing to do was stay small, stay quiet, and keep a realistic ceiling on your expectations so that no one, including yourself — could be disappointed.
When I was finally able to look at the origin of that voice, when I could turn toward it with the same patient curiosity I bring to my work with clients, something genuinely shifted in me. I stopped arguing with it and began to get curious about it instead. I found myself saying, internally, “Of course you're scared. Of course you're trying to protect me. You have been doing this for a very long time”. And then, with equal firmness: “But I don't need you to protect me from this. This belongs to me”.
Identity Is Not What You Feel, It's What You Decide to Believe
There is something about bodybuilding prep and I suspect about any high-stakes act of becoming, that surfaces every unresolved question you carry about who you actually are. The stage does not allow for the usual hiding places. You cannot disappear behind busyness or usefulness or performance for other people. You stand there in the light, in your own body, and the question that lives underneath all the other questions finally rises up and asks itself plainly: Do I believe I belong here?
For most of my life, my answer to that question has been conditional. I belong here if I've earned it, if I'm good enough, if the judges agree, if the voice inside finally goes quiet long enough for me to feel certain. What I learned in this prep, slowly, and sometimes painfully, is that belonging is not a reward you receive after getting everything right. It is a decision you make before the evidence is in.
I had to decide, not feel and not know for certain, but simply decide, that I was already the woman who steps onto that stage. That she wasn't someone I was building toward. That she was already present, already real, and that everything the prep demanded of me was simply the work of clearing away what had been covering her.
Michelangelo believed the sculpture already existed inside the marble, and that his only task was to remove everything that wasn't the sculpture. That is what this year has been for me. Every early morning, every hard session, every moment of wanting to stop — and especially every moment of looking the Inner Prosecutor directly in the face and choosing to go anyway — that was the chiseling.
What I Know Now
I want to be clear about why I did this - because I think it matters. I did not step onto that stage to win a trophy. I chose Masters Nationals because I needed to rescue my real self, the one who keeps getting quietly left behind every time I get close to something that truly means something to me. She shows up at the beginning with so much vision and desire, and then watches herself drift away the moment expansion begins to feel real and risky. I was done abandoning her. This prep was a declaration that she gets to stay, that she gets to be the one who finishes, that she does not have to keep disappearing in order to keep the peace with fear.
The Inner Prosecutor did not disappear when I made that decision. I want to be honest about that, because healing stories that end with the inner critic finally silenced and the heroine living in uninterrupted peace are not real, and they are not useful to anyone reading them. The voice is still there. It showed up six days out, four days out, and on the morning of the show. It still makes its case with the same methodical persistence.
What changed is that I stopped prosecuting myself alongside it. I learned to acknowledge it without being governed by it. I learned to say, with genuine calm, I hear you, and you are not the one making this decision. The woman I was choosing to become — the one who walks out anyway, who steps into the light anyway, who means it when she says she is ready; she was never someone I had to manufacture. She was always who I was when I stopped letting a frightened, well-meaning protector speak for me.
That is the identity shift I am writing about in the book. Not a transformation into someone unrecognizable, and not the permanent defeat of self-doubt, but the quiet and daily and sometimes fierce decision to believe something different about yourself than what fear has been telling you. There is so much more to this story, and it is all going into the pages being written. But I wanted you to have this piece of it now, because I suspect some part of you knows exactly what I'm describing. Maybe you've called it laziness too. Maybe you've watched yourself drift away from the very thing you said you wanted most, and couldn't quite name what was happening.
The Inner Prosecutor wanted to keep me safe by keeping me small, and for a long time, I let it. This year, I chose big instead. And it is helping me choose my deepest and truest self every single day.
That is what I want for you.
About the Author - Darcy Plunkett is a Licensed Therapist who specializes in the Relationship Theory Method. Through her work she helps individuals and couples move past the patterns that are holding them back from the life they desire to live.
