The Voice

Do you hear “that voice?”  Not the usual somewhat negative voice that mildly questions just about everything you do.  That one is annoying and can wear you down.  It’s the one that suggests that “Sure, it’s fine if you stick around for one more episode of Duck Dynasty, you can run tomorrow.”  Or “Well, you’re already having a burger and fries, why not have the milkshake too.”  It is the voice of the grasshopper that wants to enjoy the sun while the ant stores up food for winter.  It is self-involved Goofus to the always perfect Gallant.  Let’s call this the Goofus voice.

(Every freaking month when Highlights arrived in the mail I’d hope for Goofus that he had learned his lesson from the previous month.  It was like my own third grade soap opera.  HE NEVER LEARNED!  I did read somewhere that today Goofus would be considered as having “an alternative learning style.”  I love that!)

But I’m not talking about that voice, I’m talking about the voice that goes for the jugular, the one that says “You’re a complete and total failure, why even bother exercising at all?”  Or “Your crappy body deserves crappy food.”  The destructive voice that you don’t hear often, but when you do nothing good comes of it.  I’m not sure where this voice comes from, but one person I know truly believes that this is the voice of a demon that should be called out in the name of Jesus.  I don’t fully agree with this view, but I do appreciate the seriousness with which this person takes that voice.  (And I do like looking at the voice as something apart from me.  It isn’t my voice, it isn’t me.)

I heard that voice last week.  My friend Kelly called to give me a pep talk about running.  She’d read in the blog about my disappointment with how little time I was dropping on my mile pace and wanted to let me know that she ran a slower pace in the summer than she did when the temperature was cooler and with lower humidity.  This call was like a life ring, or a water station in a race.  (Look at me embracing running imagery!)  Kelly has run several half marathons and obviously knows what she’s talking about, and it made perfect sense to me once she said it. 

But no sooner had I grabbed on to that life ring that the voice started up.  “Why on Earth would Kelly call you about running?  Why would she waste what she knows on you?  It isn’t heat or humidity, it’s YOU!  You’re SLOW because you’re FAT!”   That voice also rears its ugly head when people have said such nice things about my writing and this half marathon goal.  “They can’t possibly mean it,” it snarls, “they have to say SOMETHING because what you’re doing is so ridiculous.”  This voice sounds a lot like Nellie Oleson at her worst, so we’re going to call this the Nellie voice.

Here’s the interesting thing though.  This Nellie voice makes no sense.  Kelly has just moved to a new town and is pretty busy establishing a new life for her family.  It would be so much easier for her not to make that call than to make it.  And the people who have said positive things are actually very nice people who are not known for saying things they don’t mean.  When I push that voice out in the open, it is exposed for the sad, angry thing that it is.

When I go for a run I hear from Goofus first. “ It would be so much easier to stay in the air conditioning, chafing is becoming a problem in the heat and humidity, my thigh is a little achy.”  After a couple of minutes Nellie takes over and starts her tirade of “This is a waste of time, are you sure this thigh thing isn’t actually hip dysplasia?”  Interestingly though, about ten minutes in I start to hear from another voice.  It is quiet but very confident.  It is reassuring  and tells me that I’ve got this.  This voice is all me.

Welcome to the world, Brave Elizabeth

Thinking about this running journey led me to read some mom running blogs.  I wanted to see if it was a realistic goal.  A lot of them were very inspirational, some were rather aspirational.  One blog really struck a chord with me and in a pretty uncomfortable way.  The post I read from this mom talked about how thankful she was to take up running and lose 40 pounds, and that she hated that body and the person she used to be.  Ouch!  I composed a response to this person in my head, but didn’t have nerve to post it since this woman was a total stranger.  But here’s what I wanted to say:

I’m so sorry that you “hate” the way your body used to be, but in my opinion, that body is pretty badass.  That body made the decision to start running even though it was hard and it hurt.  That body ran even though there were no cute running clothes in its size.  You should embrace that body and say thank you to it every day because that body is the one that took the first step.

I had such an emotional reaction to what this woman wrote because at the time I was working my way through Marianne Williamson’s “A Course on Weight Loss” which is supposed to guide you through 21 spiritual lessons for “surrendering your weight forever.”  This is my “brass ring” - what I want for myself more than anything is to be at peace with food and my body.    Williamson (and others) support a philosophy in the weight loss/self-help world that believes that if you are at peace with yourself you will be drawn to foods that are nourishing and satisfying and that you will naturally settle at the weight you are supposed to be.  This approach is very appealing to me because the discussions in my head about food and weight are exhausting.  I’m so tired of classifying foods as “good” and “bad” and having my self worth tied to what I ate on a particular day.

But here’s the funny thing.  Marianne Williamson has 21 steps to surrendering your weight and I got hung up on lesson two.  So much so that I abandoned the whole process.  What did the second spiritual lesson ask of me that I was unable to do?  She asks readers to reconcile “thin you” to “not thin you.”  In her example, “thin you” and “not thin you” write some brutally honest letters to each other, and I just don’t have it in me to be that mean to myself, even if the result is to realize that “thin me” and “not thin me” are the same person.

See, I’ve hated “not thin me” for so long, I’ve cursed the size of my upper arms, my stomach, my butt.  I’ve felt hopeless when I’ve gone shopping for dresses or swimsuits.  I’ve skirted around doctor’s appointments so that I don’t have to be weighed, and suck in my stomach when I do have to be weighed, as if that will make a difference in the number on the scale.  I’ve scrolled through cameras and phones, quickly deleting pictures that aren’t very flattering (and there are an awful lot of those) and attempted to position myself behind something or someone when I don’t have control of the camera to delete the unattractive shots.  And I wince when a picture of me shows up on Facebook that I didn’t know was being taken .

But I’ve also come to sort of love “not thin me.”  She’s incredibly brave.  She just paid $160 to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon even though she hasn’t run farther than three miles after five months of training.  She wore plus-size maternity clothes for two pregnancies, and was pretty darn stylish given that strike one was plus size and strike two was maternity.  She’s given a couple of professional presentations at conferences, and plays in the pool with her kids.  She’s read scripture in a televised church service and teaches 4 & 5 year old kids in choir. 

Here’s another funny thing.  “Not Thin Me” deserves to run the Disney Princess Half Marathon, but I don’t think she can physically or “physics”-ly do it in the required amount of time.  So I’m going to have to do what I originally didn’t want to do, which is to reconcile “not thin me” with “thin me.”  And while the usual course of action is that your head knows something that your heart doesn’t, in this case I think my heart knows that they are one and the same, henceforth known as “Brave Elizabeth,” I just have to convince my head.

Guide My Feet While I Run This Race

Recently I heard a choir sing an old spiritual I hadn’t heard before:  “Guide my feet, while I run this race, ‘cause I don’t want to run this race in vain.”  It sums up how I feel about this whole process.  I’m at a bit of a crossroads with my goal to run 13.1 miles on February 23, 2014.  The Disney Princess Half Marathon requires you to maintain a 16 minute per mile pace and I’m not there yet.  I’ve actually been disappointed by how little time I’ve dropped from my mile runs over my four months of running.  I can run for longer periods of time, I’m just not covering as much ground as I hoped to.  But I press on, because there’s a voice somewhere deep that keeps telling me I can do it.   (And I can take solace in the fact that I haven’t quit, which is a pretty big deal for me.  Also, last week I swallowed a bug while on a run, and I figure that makes me just about as much of a “real” runner as finishing a race would.)

So many people have said such kind things to me about my writing, and it has meant so much.  As big a goal as running 13.1 miles is, the other goal for this journey was to live more authentically and to allow myself to be vulnerable.  This authentic-vulnerable place is not an easy one for me. There's a part of me that wants to go through life with my head down, not ever calling attention to myself.  But that part cannot coexist peacefully with the other part that puts so much stock in other's opinions of me.  It is a weird balance that I haven’t mastered yet.  But really, have any of us mastered this yet?  (If so, please share with the world.)

And it doesn’t get any easier when I dig deeper.  Am I “head-down-non-attention-seeking” because of the introverted part of my personality?  Or am I avoiding opportunities to experience new things?  And is my approval seeking cowardly because I’m unable to decide if something is worthwhile on my own?  Or could it be an unsophisticated attempt to be vulnerable?  (And just what would a “sophisticated” attempt to be vulnerable look like?)  Why do I ask so many questions?

Maybe that’s why I keep running, even though I’m not much faster than when I started in January.  Because every other day for an hour or so, the pounding of my feet drowns out the voices in my head that question just about everything I do.  And the running makes me so tired that the questions don’t stand a chance at night as I’m drifting off to sleep.  Running is helping me think less and live more. 

I’m trying to pass this along to my kids as well.  They are very careful about trying new things, which can be good (drugs, “Jackass” style stunts) and not so good (swimming, vegetables).  And while I want them to be cautious, I don’t want them to miss out on something fun because they are too scared to fail, or worse, look foolish trying something new.   In fact I often forget just how alive I’ve felt when I’ve let go of the head-down-no-attention as well as the what-will-others-think parts of my personality and jumped into uncomfortable situations with both feet.  That feeling of “Oh my gosh, I’m really doing this!” is wonderful.

The one disappointment I had on our original Disney trip (where I learned about the Princess Half Marathon) is that the boys were too afraid to try any ride that was the slightest bit scary, even Splash Mountain.  Pirates of the Caribbean was about as intense as we got, and even then there was a little more “fingernails digging into mom’s arm” than I would have liked.  If I’m running 13.1 miles on our next trip, the least they can do is take a chance on Space Mountain.

This reminds me a quote from one of my favorite movies, “Parenthood.”  Gil’s grandmother recalls a roller coaster ride: 

You know, when I was nineteen, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster.  Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride!

I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn't like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.

Here’s to frightened, scared, sick, excited, thrilled, all of it.  ‘Cause I don’t want to run this race in vain.

If you haven't heard it, click for an awesome version of this song:  Guide My Feet