I'm a stick.

I like to think that running clears my head.  That it's my therapy, my way of making sense of things, the time of day when I remember what life and the world are really made of.  When it doesn't work out that way, I get hit hard.  Harder, even, because I don't know what's there to catch me.

Yesterday I decided that right now, I feel like a stick.  A medium-ish stick the size that my son would pick up and use like a sword.  (When we were on vacation last summer, he had a special stick at each stop along the way.)  I used to be growing on a tree, but a couple of months ago, I was torn off in a storm.  Suddenly, unexpectedly.  For a while, I thought I was going to be fine.  I was still green, and if I could just keep moving forward, it would be ok.  But that's the way it is with sticks---they get more and more brittle, and yesterday I decided that I was dried now, and about to break.  I wanted to break, even.  Wished to.  I thought about how if I could finally just melt, somehow everything would be easier.

Today is better.  I don't want to melt--I want to be strong, and....together?  It's difficult, though, in so many ways.  Strength can be mistaken for callousness, for haughtiness, for plain old ok-ness.  I'm not any of those.  I spend so much time in life seeing all the other sides and being so unsure.  I usually think that unsure is my friend because when you're sure, you can miss things, ideas, ways of glimpsing the truth.  I don't want to do that.  I don't want to be the person that is really sure.  Words have been crowding my mind for so long now, though, that I don't know which ones should be allowed out and which ones should be encouraged to fade.  I don't know which ones are a glimpse of the truth and which ones aren't.

Running has been the part of my life for over two years now that has made me feel strong, that made my eyes fill with tears sometimes with gratitude for being able to do it.  I was so impatient to get to the part of marathon training that would bring new distances that would really impress me.  Because when my runs post to facebook, sure, yeah, I love seeing the compliments.  I do, and I appreciate with my heart every person that says anything.  I appreciate even more the possibility that anyone might really care to see and celebrate with me.  But it really is about impressing myself.  When I finished 15 miles the week before last, I was thrilled.

Sunday I did 16 and I was not.  I finished it, but I stopped to rest more times than ever before. I did not feel strong or powerful.  I felt defeated.  And it could be the heat or the sun, and I know it's an accomplishment, I do.  But I think that it hurt me to not feel like I had escaped through that run.

I've been stopping and starting my whole life; who doesn't, really?  For the last couple of weeks I've been listening to The Help.  I started out just listening on runs, but then I started listening every chance I could get.  And I've cried.  I've cried at hearing about the women whose talents weren't recognized and celebrated, but I've cried more at the instinct that made me assume that you would think that Minnie would appreciate Celia's offer of friendship, or Skeeter's, that that friendship would somehow make anything better.  It shows me in myself what the much-hated (at least locally) equity training workshop wanted everyone to see: there is stuff in us that doesn't belong there and to get it out, we have to want it out and we have to dig for it.  How do you make yourself or anyone want to dig out the parts that don't belong?

I ran 8 miles this morning before heading in to day two of a training workshop.  I felt stronger and more positive and I really needed that.  But my runs aren't pounding anything out of me right now.  I cannot connect all this together.  Not what's going on in my life right now and not what I'm getting out of this book, regardless of whether they are connected or not.  I know I need to resist the urge to sob and beg someone, anyone, to make things easier.  And I can run, literally, in the mornings, getting the miles in, but I can't run metaphorically like I want to.  There's pain here, and it's not the good kind that you embrace and sift through.  It's the destructive kind, the kind you have to face.