Starting Over Again Again

I ran two consecutive days last week, after taking a year and a half off. Many people ask me if I am running and I end up looking at my feet and wishing I could say yes. With my depression, my husband asked what I thought I needed and my instant response was I need to run. It feels great and hard and freeing.

Once I have run a few days, I instantly think ahead to two weeks out when it will feel simple, a month out when I can play with speed and hills and distance to become faster. Then my mind gets lost in what feels unattainable, too difficult, and I lose my grip on the experience itself. The cycle of starting my engine after years off, of my propensity to quit over and over, make me wonder if my body will seize up on me this time, the way our van did when it ran out of oil, rendering it totaled.

I relay this to wanting to play the guitar, which I also wish I could do. I have taken lessons a few times but the idea of having to start again, knowing it will be slow and hard and I may never sound good, leaves me feeling tired, distracted, disillusioned and then drives me to quit before I even get my guitar out.

Maybe Spring is about renewed hope in growing and changing me. I expect that the acts of making, doing, working creatively might cure me of the holes that apathy bring. I knowing I will start, dream big, stop a thousand more times, but I may get a bit closer to what matters. I enjoy believing in myself, but I hate the idea that I will fail one more time. In my head I know that a part of me has to choose being in the struggle; letting go of any other hope beyond creating from where I am now. I should redefine success to be the act of creating in this moment as the end goal. Rather than wish I were confident, brilliant, accomplished, belting James Taylor from my porch while my kids rid around the circle, I want to enjoy doing basic music ladders and making up my own lyrics about the orchestra of frogs in the retention pond.

The truth is that running or writing or playing my five chords wake up my brain. They allow me to observe beauty and see the world with fresh eyes. In one 35 minute run, I can write five blogs, processed all the voices in my head that are vying for my attention and dreaming about possibilities.