part of my story: running and self love

I began keeping a journal when I was in the 8th grade and I wrote in it nearly every day through my college years.  I still have these books and when I read them I am reminded of the young girl I used to be.  It is a fascinating thing to witness the emotions and thoughts of the me from over half my life ago.  While sometimes it can be sad and painful for me to read, it can also be hilarious and heartwarming.  I’m so glad that I kept these journals and that I saved them – that I was so honest and open with myself in them – because I know that it was helpful to me to work through things at the time and now it is my hope that as my children mature I will be able to remember at least a smidge of what it felt like to be a teenager.  I want to be there for them in any way that I can be.

As a 13 year old girl I was mostly focused on writing about what was happening at school – who was “going with” who and other kinds of pre-teen gossip – and sharing the latest and greatest news about my soccer team and how awesome we were.  I was confident, goofy and happy.

Once I started high school, though, so many of my insecurities and self-criticisms started developing.  Most of this criticism was with regards to my self image and my weight.  How I measured up to my peers purely from a superficial standpoint.  I wrote about all of it and poured my heart into these books.  If you saw me from the outside you probably would not have ever guessed that on the inside I was so cruel to myself, that I did not love myself.  I was an athletic, active, and happy teenager as far as anyone could tell: involved in sports year-round, a good student and very social.  I had amazing friends and got along with everyone at school and I had a boyfriend, Seth, who was also my best friend and who I dated very seriously.  From the outside, you would think I had it all and that I would be extremely self confident.

But I wasn’t.

I remember at 16 years old, during the winter of my Junior year of high school, I had this idea that I would “stop snacking” so I could lose a few pounds.  I did not have any intention of letting this get out of control.  But it got very out of control.  The next thing I knew, everyone was concerned about me.  My family, my friends, my boyfriend – everyone was making comments about how I didn’t eat enough, how skinny I was. My journal entries from this time are astonishing – I truly honestly did not understand why people were freaking out.  I thought I was fine.  I remember going away on vacation with my family that Spring Break, and my mother encouraging me, begging me, to eat some pretzels on the airplane.  I did not want to eat them.  She was scared and upset and told me that if I did not start eating she was going to have to take me to the hospital when we got home.  She needed me to see how I was hurting myself.  How serious this was.

smiling, but hurting. wasting away.

me with my beautiful sister, Alissa

I still couldn’t see it.  But when we returned from this trip she put me on a scale and stood me in front of a full length mirror.  My mother was crying and gripping my bony shoulders.  And that was when I saw it.  When I saw my mother’s face – filled with fear and sadness – and looked into my own tear-filled eyes, I understood.  It was one of the saddest moments of my life.  I could not believe how much pain I was causing my mother, and how much I must have been hurting everyone I loved by doing this to myself.  I ached to make it all better, to stop hurting the ones that I loved.  But even still, I did not recognize that I was punishing myself.  That I was not loving myself.

That took some time.  A lot of time.

I went to therapy, I went to a nutritionist.  I reached a healthy weight again but struggled every day to feel good about myself and about my body.  My college years were the darkest time in my life, for a lot of reasons.  I feel like I walked around with a big heavy weight in my heart.  I was incredibly depressed and developed some pretty awful, self-loathing habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking too much, sleeping all day, eating horribly.  My weight fluctuated a lot during those years.  I just had no idea how to take care of myself.

My journal entries from this time reveal how much I struggled to find inner peace and happiness.  I began to pray a lot and to write about how I wanted to break free from the trappings of my physical body.  I was finally aware that I needed to learn to love myself, and I wanted, SO MUCH, to figure that out.  It was not only about self acceptance, but about self love.  I had spent so much time criticizing my body and defining myself by how much I weighed or how I fit into my clothes.  It was time for me to shed that way of thinking and to begin to love myself for who I was on the inside.  It was time to begin to believe in myself.

And this is when I started training for my first marathon.  I was 23 years old.  I was one of those people who had no idea how many miles a marathon even was, yet I wanted to do it with every ounce of my being.  I researched and researched (and yes quickly learned that a marathon is 26.2 miles!) and I put a training plan together for myself.  It was not about losing weight or about wearing a certain size of clothing.  It was about doing something so incredibly hard because I needed to believe that I could.  It was about taking care of myself from the inside out.  Running took me to a place deep within myself and introduced me to parts of my spirit that I did not know were there.  I remember thinking to myself that every time I went out for a run by myself, I was getting to know the real me.  I began to respect, love, believe in and feel proud of the person that I am.

Running saved me from depression and it taught me how to truly love myself from the inside out.

I am forever grateful.