Adventures in running, Uncategorized

I’m done with sleeping.

tec

I said I want to run a 5K and this weird switch happened in my head. Despite all the things I fear and all my insecurities, I don’t give a shit about any of that right now. I just want to run this 5K.

Hell, I don’t even care about running the 5K. I want to train for a 5K. I want to live this process and embrace it so fully, I feel consumed by it. My intention is for there to be nothing I’ve ever committed to more than this, apart from my family.

Last night I said I want this. It would have been so easy today to waylay it. To wait because I didn’t have the perfect training plan yet. Or the perfect running shoes. Or because R was going to run with me, but had to work on chem instead. All I needed was one tiny excuse to not get my ass out there.

But I’m a runner damnit and I will show up for myself. So I went out to the field wearing jeans and Chucks and I embraced that shit. I ignored the story in my head that the neighbors thought I looked stupid. I told myself instead the story of future Jill. Whose neighbors revere her for kicking ass every. damn. day.

My loose plan was to train for 30 minutes–15 second run/45 second walk. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. I ran around and played ball with S all last week! I could do this easy peasy, right?

Ha. That was unreasonably optimistic… 4 minutes in and I was dying and calling it quits in my head.

I thought about Dave Hollis though. And Rachel. I thought about my privilege and my commitment. Maybe I didn’t train for the 30 minutes I expected to. But I trained for 15. And that 15 is fucking huge! It is everything. It is ten more than my body thought it could give.

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*I started the stopwatch late.

And I felt like I was fucking glowing after! I had fought for every second of that run and every cell in my body knew it. It was electric.

I will hold onto this as my first training experience and it will always be the story of how I started running after a lifetime of wishing.

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It may be quite simple.

tec

What a strange and hard and beautiful weekend.

Friday was a long day after a long week. Saturday was me trying to learn to navigate in the face of all the everything….while also doing a 12 week goal challenge, maintaining my home, decluttering, mom’ing 24/7, attending virtual Al-Anon meetings, showing up for myself, backpedaling and flailing around in my progress, etc etc etc.

Saturday Chris and I successfully and safely walked through a conversation about overwhelm and needing help and support. Neither of us seemed to jump or get defensive and while I was reacting to the overwhelm, he wasn’t reacting to me and that brought us to a really great place.

I also talked to my sponsor on the phone for the first time. It’s something I wanted, but not something I felt “enough” to initiate. That’s an interesting thing for myself–not feeling my enoughness. I’m also navigating people and old friendships and new ones and common denominators and trying to feel a bit more whole. And I got to talk about that with someone who knows the right things to say back. Someone who is a good active listener and who can role model active listening. I need that. We talked for an hour on Sunday too. I could cry for how fulfilling it is.

Then Saturday night amidst all the pandemic and quarantine, we had a tornado touch down less than an hour from here. Downstairs we went at 10pm.

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Don’t let this happy face fool you. Just moments before, my sweet 75 pound pup had to be carried down the stairs because she was petrified.

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My favoritest girl. (And a trash run that needs to be made. Ha.)

The tornado (and R) helped me to realize that we need a better tornado plan. And I am ready to get back to work on the basement. I don’t know that it will happen soon, but I can at least put all that stuff in the car and make a trash run. Or I can start putting some of it out for trash little by little. But yes. No more basement stagnation, even with a bunch of other things going on. A five minute timer each day.

Overwhelm turned action.

Sunday brought us one last day of Spring Break downtime.

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The boys made a gingerbread cake and, later in the night–when it felt late and like the night should be wrapping up–S asked me to roast Brussels sprouts. I retorted, “help me then.” And he did! And we chopped together and took quality time and listened to Martin Sexton play on facebook and it was goodness and turned a hard weekend into pure beauty.

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Make the world brand new.

tec

Also!!–I don’t want to leave out this part. I participated in a Jen Pastiloff virtual event. Oh how I’ve wanted to do a retreat with her for years. The hour was life-changing and soul-blossoming and I just can’t say enough remarkable things about her. She is goodness and beauty and fearlessness-ish personified. She creates a world where my tiniest most afraid self feels safe and loved and accepted.

There are more things I will share as I navigate the experience.

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The whole world is moving.

tec

It’s so funny to me. I write a post like my last one, which, as soon as I honored that feeling, the feeling was gone. But then I don’t post for a few days and suddenly it appears that I memorialized that one fleeting moment for days. It amuses me.

Welcome to Thursday. Spring Break is slowly coming to its end. We are in week three of isolation. Here is a recap because I haven’t talked much about it.

The first week was because of influenza A. I got sick first and then R. We were diagnosed on Friday, when Chris started with similar symptoms. The second week was an e-learning trial run (which had some super high highs and some super low lows), along with Chris getting hit hard by the flu and L being hit by a super high fever and no other symptoms. S managed to stay sickness free the entire two weeks, then went to Joe’s for the weekend. Week three found everyone feeling better, except L had some dehydration and digestive stuff going on, but he seems better ish with fluids and a probiotic. S stayed the week at his dad’s which gave R some much needed S-free time. She also drove every day this week, which helped her feel seen and loved and trusted. Being out of work has been rough on Chris, but he’s actually handling it really well. He’s been doing self-reflection and showing up for himself, which is what I’m always hoping for for him. We also got to spend some good time together this week, going for a walk, watching Heroes a few nights, and cuddling on the couch.

I’ve been showing up for me as well. Taking a pause when I need to and shifting mindset in the face of challenging times. I’ve connected with my podcasts and my army of positive voices. I’ve committed time to my goals, especially getting my site launched, which I am constantly backburner’ing. I feel stable, which really says a lot.

The kids go back to e-learning next week and it’s going to be challenging. S gets sidetracked and R isolates. It will take a lot of mental effort on my part to stay on top of helping them stay on top of their education. One moment at a time.

None of this is easy. But I certainly don’t have to make it harder. I get to choose my mindset. That means everything. I choose goodness. That means even more.

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Tell me I’m fine.

tec

This morning is rough.

I’m consciously staying in mindset mode, but it’s challenging.

I woke up so sore today. My arm and shoulder hurt so much. And I knew that constant ache had subsided, but with all the flu going on and all the e-learning and pandemic and self-isolation, it was just nice. And not necessarily a fore-front kind of awareness.

But today I woke up and couldn’t raise my blanket over myself with my left arm again and it all came flooding back to me. I remembered all those months–almost a year of them–of not having the use of my arm. Of being careful and guarded and in constant soreness. Always being reminded my body isn’t where it is supposed to be.

And then after ten months of physical therapy, they finally found a spot that trigger point release worked! And then I got the flu and my whole family got the flu and I couldn’t go to my therapy sessions and didn’t do my stretches. And that was all okay because suddenly I didn’t have the constant ache and I could function!

But I woke up this morning and I couldn’t pull my blanket over me. And I was overwhelmed by all the ways illness slowly steered me from all of my routines. I know I don’t have to stay overwhelmed. I know I can put overwhelm into action and turn the whole thing around.

Knowing it doesn’t make it easy.

I commit to my regular morning routine. I commit to my regular routine life. I’m going to put a podcast on and make sure that my ego-driven doubt and shame get drowned out. It’s not real. I’m going to make coffee and brush teeth and do the dishes. I’m going to take my daily medicines. I’m going to do a pass through of decluttering and disinfecting. I’m going to do my stretches.

Action bores suffocation.

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Every picture you paint, I will paint myself out.

tec

There is this thing that happens in my brain? I don’t get any say in it? I am aware of it. Sometimes. But a lot of the time I am unaware of it. I’m usually only aware of it when I mention it and someone else finds it absurd. Or someone mentions something that triggers it and then their mention feels absurd to me.

I’m getting ahead of myself tho because I feel like I’ve lost you. Lemme start again.

I am unaware of my affect on others. Like, on a deep level. I heard last week that this is a pretty significant enneagram 2 thing. I cried. I feel like maybe I should write about that soon. But for now I’ll say that for me, for the most part, I assume I am pretty disposable to people and I don’t really matter much one way or the other. People feel fine to have me around, but also, outta sight outta mind–I’m dispensable and forgotten. And I say this relatively ambivalently. It feels like fact more than feeling. It is what it is and it’s been a reoccurring theme since childhood and I’m used to it. (Or…I should be.) I don’t think to think about it too often and I don’t feel the need to feel about it even less.

But then someone will say something. Like yesterday. Chris and I were talking about the inbetween time of our relationship. Where we knew one another existed and we’d said hi, but hadn’t started dating yet. This was a four month period. We were just people that passed one another and we were both unaware that the connection was deeply and entirely mutual.

So we’re talking yesterday and he says that even if we never got together. Never became more. I would have always been the person in the back of his head he compared people to. Other people would have come in and out of his life and still, it would have been “they have beautiful eyes, but they’ll never be Jill’s eyes” or “I love when they smile, but it doesn’t quite light up the room like Jill’s smile” and he kept listing things “like Jill’s <fill in the blank>” and–this is the thing absolutely no one who knows me knows or could possibly comprehend.

Seven years of a relationship later, Chris can say this to me and my only thought is “…he knew my name?”

And I can only weep. Weep so inconsolably. Because how absurd and pathetic is that? Of course, logically, he knew my name. But logic doesn’t exist here. Only feeling brain exists here. And feeling brain tells me no one sees me and I’m not worth seeing.

It only serves to validate feeling brain more that so many people I love deeply have disappeared from my life. It feels impossible that I matter at all, if people like Kristi and Mandy can just abandon me without thought. That my dad could and my grandmother could and my mother could. Then how could I believe anyone would ever want me at all? And I know reasonably that anyone who leaves me left because of themself and not me. Left because something in them made it so they couldn’t stay. But reason does not exist in this part of my feeling brain. Only feeling exists. And feeling dictates that I am not enough to stick around for.

And I can’t stop sobbing and I can’t catch my breath and L is sitting here playing legos and I am falling apart.

. . . . . . .

I took a minute to pull myself together. And in doing so, my feeling brain has already switched itself off.

I am sickly good at the compartmenalizing.

When I sat down to write this, my intent was not this. My intent was only to give an amusing anecdote about my skewed perception. It was not so much to say I don’t have any ability to understand what I mean to people. It was not so much to say that no one has the ability to comprehend how acutely incapable I am of believing my worth to others.

And yet…here we are.

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Trace the moment.

tec

Chris and I have a perfect place. He found it first. He shared it with me. It’s this little tucked away place that doesn’t even feel like it’s part of our town. Or our state. It’s our sacred place. It’s hitsuzen. We have to have a certain kind of weather for it tho and winter is often not it.

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A couple weeks ago it was perfect outside tho. Still snow on the ground, but the bike path was almost entirely clear of snow and ice. The air was crisp, but the sun was so warm that it didn’t matter.

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Despite the fact that the car had been making this weird noise, we risked the 20 minute drive to go for the walk. It was worth it to get that kind of time in that kind of place. A place that brings us back to ourselves. For me, it doesn’t bring me back to an older, idealized version of me or an older, iidealized version of Chris. It just always brings us to a more grounded place of our present selves. I think that’s what I always love most about it. The everything else falls away and we’re stripped down to our purest, naked selves and we can just be.

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We walked for maybe an hour and munched clementines and kiwi. We showed L all the cool things we love and he ooh’d and ahh’d the 50 foot wall cliff and the train tracks and the river and the trees.

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We stopped and marveled the sewer/tunnel pipe and L made up stories about it coming out into the river. And then he sang songs as we walked on.

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The day before this walk, we walked too. The weather begged our presence. Our relationship begged connection. We showed up. It’s the greatest thing we can do.

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We always walk back to us. This season has been filled with ebb and flow and pain and growth. Distance and connection. Falling away and coming back. As the earth warms again, I feel a tingling of change. There’s a buzz my skin feels. A fire sparking. Despite the ebbs–and there will always be ebbs–I can feel the flow’s energy building up momentum.

Yesterday Chris and I had a…discordance. It wasn’t an argument. It was just….an overwhelm of feelings and thoughts and fears. It was vulnerability and anxiety and honesty. In years’ past, it would have broken us. It would have been a full on argument. It would have been irreconcilable for hours, the day, the weekend. It would have been the thing that, Chris especially, wouldn’t have been able to navigate through. (I say Chris especially because for the most part, I lean toward compartmentalizing as an involuntary coping mechanism. I’m not bragging here…)

But yesterday, because we’ve both had so much growth–because he is diligently searching to reclaim his self–it was only discordance and an exchange. The moment of ebb made the subsequent flow that much more energized. It was like reaching hitsuzen without the walk.