My Thank You Letter to my Body

 After reading Lose Weight with Ang’s beautiful thank you note to her body, I felt compelled to write one of my own.  It has been a rough year, and my body has taken a back seat to my mind, a theme that needs to change as my 50^th birthday looms in the near future.  I hope you appreciate, and I hope you are inspired to write a thank you note to your body!

Enjoy!

PR Performance! October, 2018

Dear body,

Thank you for being so strong and healthy. 

It didn’t start that way.  The danger of the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck made my birth scary for a first-time mother and landed me in the high-risk nursery for the first week of my life.  That week was the last time I spent the night in the hospital, thanks to your strength and health.

I would need that strength and health of body, because my mind was often too broken to properly take care of you.  A mind that refused to eat at an age when food was needed to grow.  A mind driven to submit to hour after hour of training in order to excel in running and figure skating, despite having no natural talent or gifts.  A mind that insists on endless showers and hand washings.  A mind needing to be beaten into submission as the outside world triggered it into chaos.

You have been my rock, my pillar.  No matter what damage I inflicted upon you, you kept getting up, kept living, kept surviving.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year and a half since you put on a show, negative splitting the last five miles of the New York Marathon and finishing under five hours.  I was a lean, mean, running machine, and the future loomed bright.  There were so many things I could do for you to make you even stronger, even faster, even more beautiful.

But my mind was still healing from another breakdown, one that ended my job and my relationship that year.  Marathon training had to be put on hold as I struggled to stay ahead of the bills.

Again, you rose to the occasion, allowing me to take on several physically intensive jobs that required being in top shape.  As a global pandemic of an unknown virus shut down the world, your immune system kept me from succumbing to disease, allowing me to shuffle and adapt as furloughs loomed.

It was a glance in the mirror on a warm July afternoon that I noticed the damage I had inflicted upon you.  My face, always a source of pride, looked crooked.  My angled jaw was now rounded and chubby.  I looked at my body, the lithe sinew that traveled across the five boroughs of New York City, atrophied into a fluffy marshmallow.

My mind broke again, fearing everything from a possible stroke to a horrible disease.  It was in this fear that I realized how much I had taken your strength and health for granted, how many times I had skipped the basic checkups and maintenance, the things I had done to hurt you instead of care for you.  Inside of a world that could not return to normal and hours of isolation, my mind went into a tailspin, sliding down a spiral of self-pity and self-abuse instead of giving you the love and caring you deserved.

By the time I finally made it to the dentist and the doctor, I learned that once again, you had risen to the occasion.  No cavities, no major health issues, and no serious illnesses.  You gave me the gift of being able to heal my mental illnesses without having to battle physical ones as well.  I cannot thank you enough for that.

It is why I end this letter with a promise.  I promise to care for you, to treat you with love, to do everything in my power to nourish the strength and health you have given me all these years so that we can have many, many more years to come.

With Love,

Erin

 

The Face in the Jar by the Door

Before I quit skating back in 2011, I had decided my next freestyle program was going to be to Eleanor Rigby. 

Eleanor Rigby

Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been

Lives in a dream

Waits at the window

Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door

Who is it for?

I have lived my entire adult life wearing the face I keep in a jar by the door. 

It’s understandable, given my childhood.  I was not an easy child for any mother, between the OCD and the high IQ, but my mother came into parenting with the scars of her own difficult childhood.  Today, she probably would have known to heal herself before becoming a parent, but back then, she saw being a wife and mother as her salvation.

She had no idea what to do with a kid who just saw the world so differently than everyone else.  A kid who taught herself how to read and do multiplication, but would get insanely frustrated if things weren’t exactly ordered in her head.  (For example, I nearly had a meltdown on the first day of kindergarten….because the school bus didn’t have seatbelts.  In 1979, when you could drive around in your car without wearing a seatbelt.)

Overwhelmed by the meltdowns and scared of what the world would do to her outlier child, she did what she learned from growing up in an alcoholic family.  Pretend.  She would say things to me like, “you know, you’re not going to have any friends if you act this way.”  “Do you know how difficult you are to live with?”  In eighth grade, I’d have to come home from school, detail every social interaction, and problem solve to see how I could do better.  Every day.

She was determined to jam my square peg into that round hole, even if my self-esteem was destroyed in the process.  Her anxiety over me was so great that she would do whatever it took to gain total control of my life, even into adulthood.

Instead of creating a confident young woman who glided through social interactions, she created a woman who felt the need to pretend to be someone else to garner acceptance.  I created my face in the jar and learned how to navigate life wearing it.  My mother loved “Face in the Jar” Erin better than the person I really was.  At one point, after a sorority Mother’s Day tea, said to me, “why can’t you be like this all the time?”  Because, Mom, it’s an act.  It’s not me.

In the process of healing from the breakup of a four-year relationship, I’ve been reflecting on connection and my connection to the world.  That face in the jar has allowed me to navigate the adult world, but I don’t feel connected to it in any way, shape or form.  I have friends, but not a single best friend who gets me on that deeper level, because it’s hard to let anyone in.  Don’t even get me started about dating, which is all about putting your best foot forward while having a good time….until it’s time to take down the façade and be vulnerable with each other.  My ex once got angry at me because I didn’t trust him.  He was absolutely right, but it never occurred to both of us that perhaps we should have stepped back from our relationship and worked on building that trust.  Instead, he decided that because I didn’t trust him, he had carte blanche to treat me however he wanted.

And that’s the thing about my face in the jar.  It’s a laid back, amenable person who has allowed herself to be stepped on, walked over, or in the case of my ex, steamrolled.  It’s someone who is easy to ignore or fade into the background.  It’s someone who never complains or creates drama for others.  It’s someone who is easily forgotten, someone who knows how to be invisible.  Someone completely different than the woman whose mind is always on overdrive with thoughts, ideas, and keeping ahead of her OCD.

One of the things that has been tumbling in my mind of late is whether it’s time to leave the face in the jar when I leave the house.  Then I look at the world right now and see all the the anger and vitriol and judgement and closemindedness and intolerance towards each other.  It saddens me that as a culture, we are so dogmatic about receiving conformation about our own beliefs that we have zero respect for someone who disagrees with them.  We are supposed to be a country where each of the 330 million people get to believe whatever they want, but instead, I see a country where if you don’t conform 100% to whatever, you are automatically horse manure…and I’m scared of how I’ll be treated if I didn’t wear my face in the jar.

Eleanor Rigby resonates because so many of us keep faces in jars by our doors, afraid of what would happen if people saw our true selves.  We’re supposed to be the champions of individuality, but instead we force people into silent conformity.  To fix our country, we need to start here, and it’s why I no longer want to hide. 

Welcoming in the Roaring 20s (and Mine Will Roar)

It’s been a year.  Well, it’s been a decade.  It’s hard to believe that when 2010 started, I was so looking forward to a precisely planned, perfect future.  That January, I attended a primary candidate forum….and everything changed.  It’s been a difficult journey, one that is hard to regret taking, but I’m still here, looking at 2020, and trying to figure out a new future.

Planning, planning, planning...for a fabulous future.

We’ve all had that moment when the rug was pulled out from under us.  For me, it was Labor Day, 2011, when the man I wanted to marry….told me our relationship was over.  It broke me, but looking back on it now, it led me to so much more.  The resulting depression led me to a therapist, which led me to understanding why my brain was wired the way it was, which led me to realize that how I was living my life wasn’t in synch with my brain wiring.

However, there was an even bigger revelation.  My mother, trying to maintain order in her own head, emotionally abused me.  It’s interesting, really, how a child sees their reality as “normal,” until they hit a point where they see there are other realities.  For me, it was working with a therapist who pointed out the times my mother, with her endless controlling behavior, crossed the line from being helpful to hurtful.  And hurtful she was.  Not only did I believe that her depiction of me was true, it had made me passive and controllable, which literally ate me up inside.  It’s her words, not mine, that I’ve said to myself in the mirror all these years. 

Due to both nature and nurture, my brain processes things differently than most people, but I’ve spent the last 45 years trying to fit my brain into a “normal” mold.  It hasn’t worked well, leaving me exhausted, frustrated, and feeling like a failure.  Now that I understand all of this, I can spend the 20s creating a life that fits me and my brain, then helping others do the same.  It seems so counter-intuitive that a country whose founding principles are all about accepting and tolerating differences…has so many people suffering from anxiety and depression because they feel too different.  Perhaps I can do something about that, but I can’t from where I am now.

I see where I want to be by 2029, but I am starting at the bottom of the mountain.  This year, my goal is to build a solid foundation from which I can tackle harder things.  It means creating financial security and stability.  It means retooling my house to be a place of relaxation and comfort.  It means cleaning out all the survival anxieties that cloud my decisions and sap my energy.  It means missing the run club’s annual run to Lake Michigan to instead hustle for income.  It means walking away from all the things I do to escape from the challenges and instead face them head-on.  It means working hard towards my goals, even when it’s not easy.

2020 is probably going to be my most challenging year, but I have all the support and resources I need to come out of it successful.  It’s time to make my 20s roar.

Gratitude for Thanksgiving Day

Inspired by a Facebook post of a friend who lost her husband of 38 years, here is what I am grateful for this Thanksgiving holiday: 

• The right diagnosis for why my brain works the way it does, so I can figure out how to make my life work for me, rather than struggle trying to make me work to have a normal life.
• Strength to walk away from toxic relationships in my life, even when it was safer to stay.
• Passion for marathon running and writing, healthy addictions to deal with the challenges life throws my way.
• Friends who have reached out, supported me, and became my family, even as life got crazier and crazier. 
• Life lessons that were earned from the difficult times, as well as the personal growth that came from them.
• Discovering a voice that has been silent way too long, and the confidence to make it heard.
• Peace in my soul that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, replacing the empty longing that comes from fantasies.
• Hope that fuels the pursuit of my dreams, and dreams that are worth pursuing.
• Looking in a mirror and loving the woman I see in it.

In the face of so much wrong and bad and difficult and challenging in our worlds, we still can find so many things that are good.  Stop and think about your life.  What is on your gratitude list this year?