For the last 10 years or so, I have been calling myself an athlete. It’s a very grand title for a middle-aged woman who has never run a complete mile on pavement, who has been fighting with her body since she tried her first “miracle diet” at 11 years old, who regularly goes mountain-biking with her family and vapor-locks at the top of small hills, afraid to put her feet on the pedals, let go of the brakes and coast with momentum. The word athlete connotes skill, physical fitness and daring. I don’t have those things. What I do have, and am slowly building, is persistence. More days than not I put on an athlete’s clothes and shoes and do the things that athletes do — I work my muscles, cultivate new skills, create pain to create growth.
I am often sad, and I find it hilarious. The world is very sad right now. It’s a tragicomedy. It’s horrifying. And I am alright, which makes me feel guilty, and the guilt makes me feel sad, and I am off caroming into the hilarity of it again, the way you do when you take a large spill and find out you’re intact and there’s nothing to do but laugh with relief. It’s a real small problem, having to qualify your sadness with the words, “But I’m doing okay. I’m employed and my family is healthy and I might be a little lonely but it’s so rural where I live that i can go running every other day without wearing a mask. Other people have it a lot worse. I should just stop complaining about being sad.” Yeah, I do that daily. And the other people I talk to, okay, not to be reductive but —truthfully— the women I talk to, they say more or less the same thing. “I feel awful because the world is screwed up and we have no idea what’s going to happen next but there are people who have it much much worse than me.”
Girl, I’ve got nothing for you.
If you feel cowardly and unproductive saying you’re sad and scared, well, I feel the same way. Being sad and scared isn’t the way we’re supposed to approach the world if we want to change it, or so I’ve been told. A person with more confidence than me would pep you up by saying that resilient people find ways to cultivate joy despite all odds, and that scared is an anagram for sacred and that there’s some holy lesson in feeling this shitty. But I don’t think that’s true.
We’re living a human condition. You’re going to be sad, and you’re going to feel sorry for yourself. And you’re going to do things that are productive but feel pointless, like putting on your shoes and brushing your teeth and sitting down to work. And you’re going to do things that feel like throwing a glass of water on a housefire, like donating money or calling friends or buying lunch to go at the restaurant you love and want to keep open. And it won’t feel like enough on most days, because in the face of the Unknown there is no Enough. And at some point your condition will slide from feeling sad and guilty to something else. Maybe even joy. Because that, too, is the human condition. Nothing — good or bad — lasts forever.
There was a belief I used to have about self-improvement. I don’t think I — or any of the self improvement “experts” I read — really ever said it out loud, but it was baked into our approach. The belief was that discipline and internal order could align a chaotic world. It’s why we count calories, declutter, find people or politicians who reinforce our worldview, embrace guilt as productivity.
Running should feel like that, but it doesn’t. I don’t run because I’m in search of some way to make the world make sense, I run because I’m an athlete. An imperfect athlete with a fat dog who hasn’t quite mastered a bunny hop on their mountain bike, but an athlete none the less. The best advice I ever got about running came from a friend who told me it’s not about physical prowess. It is, in fact, a mental game, one where your body wants to give up but your brain keeps you going, saying things like, “I can run on tired legs” or “My lungs are, in fact, meant to feel this way.” Athletes, as it turns out, are supposed to feel like they’re dying some of the time.
You can survive this without feeling gratitude. You can change the world without cultivating joy. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in both gratitude and joy, but i also believe in feeling sad. Because sadness is a human condition. Go ahead and feel sad until you feel something else. You’re a human, doing what humans do, and this thing we’re all in is a marathon, not a sprint.