Running for Myself

Below, I’ve written about an aspect of my story that involves physical health, mental health, and psychological defense mechanisms (~5-minutes of reading time).

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Between my years in junior high and January 2021, I engaged in a lifestyle that involved regularly exercising. My favorite ways of exercising primarily included sports, such as soccer, tennis, ultimate frisbee, and cycling. Subsequently, I’ve come to take a lot of pride with regards to my body, especially with regards to my core, legs, and cardiovascular system.

Over the past two years, between February 2021 and February 2023, I feel like I’ve been on hiatus from this lifestyle that has brought me a substantive amount of success. In experiencing noticeable differences in my physical ableness…

…in feeling like my legs and core are weaker than they once were…

…in feeling like I get tired, out-of-breath, more easily than before…

…I was compelled to find new things to root my ego in.

Putting aside my core, legs, and cardio, I was apt to wonder, “What other things about myself can I take pride in?” As someone who’s worked nearly four years in a full-time job that involves providing others with career advising services, I’m well-suited to consider a plethora of things that a person can take pride in. From my capacity for ‘stepping into the shoes’ of another person, to my singing, laundry-folding, and breathing skills, I had lots of options when considering this question, so I gave it some thought. However, this question was not the best question I could have asked myself.

Thinking now, on Sunday, March 26th, 2023, the question “What other things about myself can I take pride in?” was a form of ‘percepticide’ (Diana Taylor, 1997), or a means of self-blinding myself towards sights of violence. In the end, the question masked an emotion: I didn’t want to acknowledge how scared I was of being someone who has nothing to take pride in.

With the sights of violence being all internal and equivalent to self-harm, I’d argue that circumstances, new and old, have conditioned me to engage in a form of self-harm. This form of self-harm is nothing too serious, and yet something I should take more seriously than I have; that is, tendencies to engage in self-evaluation through a lens of ableness.

Slowly, but surely, within me, this emotion produced a new feeling of being physically disabled or having a physical disability. As I am someone who has historically identified as able-bodied and who has been complimented for ableness, this feeling paralyzed me and inhibited me in putting my best foot forward in various realms of life. I couldn’t help but criticize myself for not having made different choices. I thought that I could have taken steps to prevent this new feeling from coming about.

In the meanwhile, I also saw this feeling as something that is worthwhile for me to embrace. “There are perspective-related benefits with experiencing life in any new way,” I thought to myself. As I was drawn towards social work and public policy-oriented career path potentials, I believed that embracing this feeling would empower me to bring about increased societal justice for physical disability-identifying persons. I understood, at least a little more, what it feels like to have a body that is hard for oneself to take pride in.

Now, I believe the best question I could have asked myself back then is, “How do I feel about being less able-bodied than before?”

The answer to this new question, if I can remember correctly, would have been: “helpless, vulnerable, and insecure.”

I appreciate that this would have been the answer to this question, and am grateful for the fact that I have been able to realize all things related mentioned here.

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Now that I’m signed up to participate in the Chicago Marathon as a runner on behalf of Bottom Line Chicago, I feel compelled to recollect my experiences with not-exercising over the past two years as part of my marathon-training plan. Not-exercising was an experiment to see if I could implement new wheels for my bike, learn how to effectively use new tools to achieve success, and/or discover strengths that I didn’t know were part of who I am.

The experiment is now done. It seems that opportunities to confront hard questions, difficult-to-understand emotions, and feelings that may tickle or tug at heartstrings in more than one way, will only increase over time. I believe that my hiatus will empower me to engage in such opportunities throughout the coming days.

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Snapshots of my journey: