On Starting Over

It's been four years--FOUR YEARS--since I've written seriously, and almost exactly that since I posted anything at all here. So much has changed: two kids, a new state, two new jobs, several new hobbies. Let's start with a constant: running.

I started running about the time of my last post. The previous February, I was promoted. It was my first post-college full-time job, and I hated it. The complete truth is that I loved what I did, but I really disliked who I did it with. My bosses had made it quite clear that I wasn't their first choice, and each time they came in, they spent a couple of hours telling me and my coworker of the week (it was the worst revolving door position I've ever seen) what a terrible job we were doing of running the place. And I, I who had never cared all that much for anyone else's opinion of me, had started believing the story of my own worthlessness. I didn't have friends near to buoy me up because I worked long hours, so I mostly spent my time away from work sitting on the couch eating ice cream and escaping into fiction. Soon I gained twenty new friends on my hips. And each pound made me believe what I was being told just a little bit more.

I remember one night I was lying in bed crying and thinking, "Why am I so sad? I've never felt so sad in my life." Jason didn't know what to do, and I can only imagine how helpless he felt with a wife who was paralyzed by her own sadness. I couldn't tell him how to help me because I didn't know what was wrong. But that night, I realized that the problem went beyond my unhappiness at work: it wasn't that I hated my job, but that I'd started hating myself. I'd bought into the rhetoric I was hearing at work that I was boring, stupid, and completely unproductive. And I wasn't doing anything to get a second opinion: I was completely neglecting not only my relationships with people who loved me, but also my relationship with God. And that was the killer. As long as I'd been secure in His love, it didn't matter what other opinions were expressed.

So the next morning, I ran a quarter mile and began to love myself again. It started as a way to lose those 20 pounds (and let's be honest, get hopped up on endorphins) but I found that what I really needed was the sense of accomplishment I felt when I ran. Endurance is something humans are built for (have you read Born to Run? You really, really should) but that doesn't make running easy, especially when your adult life has been primarily composed of sitting and reading. So every run was an accomplishment for me, and it still is. Running helped me climb out of the hole I'd willingly climbed into when I started believing what other people thought of me. I've only stopped running for pregnancy and injury.

That first quarter-mile run was one of the best decisions I've made as an adult. The verdict is out on other decisions I've made (letting the two year old play in a bucket of flour, for instance), but I'm hoping a return to writing will be one of the better ones.