Detour

the ground beneath her feet

I’m sitting in a large conference room at the Four Seasons breathing in the smell of expensive coffee.  There are a lot of suits in the room.  White faces.  Mostly male.

I feel a thin sheath of alienation slide over my body.  As usual.  I wonder for a moment what the room would look like if I were wearing true color glasses. Magic spectacles that would make people’s appearance match their true character and secret life.  Who would be the wife beater, a looming, oversized ogre? Who would be the binge eater, a 500 pound woman sitting in the corner, furtively stuffing twinkies and hohos into her mouth?  Who would be the alcoholic sitting on the ground against the wall clutching his paper bag, slack jawed and toothless?  What twisted fetishes and shameful secrets would be revealed?

Every woman in the room is wearing expensive clothes and is well put together.  So am I.  I imagine myself through the true color lenses.  I imagine that my polished, professional, persona would be fractured: my features off, like a Picasso portrait.  Or I would be held together with duct tape and baling wire, missing a piece of my ear, an eye, some teeth.  Every misstep, wrong turn, bad decision, shameful secret, detour, would show up as crack, a fissure, a break.  You would be able to see it on the outside instead of just in my eyes. My past.

I am afraid of heights.  I am afraid of standing on ledges, bridges, roofs.  I am afraid that gravity will stop working just long enough for me to float several feet up in the air and out over the abyss. Then I will plunge to my death because it is working after all.  It only stopped because I looked away, stopped concentrating

Professional success feels the same to me.  I am afraid that I will look away and it will stop working, stop holding me fast to the ground. 

I know so many women who talk of their inner bag lady.  How they feel like imposters.  Do the male boardrooms and glass ceilings do that to us?  Is it because it was only yesterday that we burned our bras?

Maybe men feel this way, too? 

Or is it something else.  Is it that a dope fiend looks back at me from the mirror? An alcoholic?  A fuck-up?  I can't shake them, they are part of me forever.

Trauma victims are always waiting for the next traumatic event, sitting with their backs against the wall, watching the door.  Hyper-vigilance.

I am acutely aware of my lack of backup in the world.  A single parent with no siblings. Parents who would prefer I never needed them at all.  I am one slip away from ruin.   No room for accidents.  No room for mental illness. 

I can’t look away.

angels

There are single moments I can point to in my past that changed the entire course of my life.

I was 25 and at a party. I was uncomfortable in my outfit; my "dress" World Gym sweatshirt, the pink one that was still new looking.  I was acutely aware of my gym rat status in a roomful of larger lives. Somehow my single biggest accomplishment, becoming an athlete after a lifetime of sloth and crappy eating habits, seemed threadbare in a roomful of genius grad students.

I admired my friend Terry very much. He was a medical student and he took good care of himself. He was thinking about doing a triathlon. He ran along the crest of he Berkeley hills in the mornings and spent an hour on the bike in the afternoons.  That was our common ground. He was studying for his boards. I peppered him with questions about science and medicine.  I took in what he had to say like a sponge.  He was everything I thought I could never be.

I thought those decisions had already been made.

I glibly mentioned that “if I had it to do all over again” I would study molecular biology. As a high school dropout barely subsisting, I was pretty confident that ship had sailed.

Growing up in Berkeley, in the shadow of a world class University, I remember lounging at the UC pool in the summers of my late teens and early twenties. Overhearing the casual conversations of the college students around me made me unbearably sad. I could taste the envy. Did they know how lucky they were?

That first “C” in the seventh grade was the start of a slide down a slippery slope to  my own version of Loserhood. I dropped out of high school as a Junior with a gpa of 1.9…after repeating the ninth grade. 

I did not think of myself as college material.

There was never a college fund for me.  There were recriminations and punishment. No one reached for me. My high school counselors had me firmly slotted in the “juvenile delinquent” category.  No one talked to me about college.

I was an angry kid.

My phone rang early the next morning.  It was Terry. He reminded me of what I said. He told me he had been thinking about it all night. He said, “you know, it’s never too late.”

And just because he said that thing at that moment, I decided to go out and find out if he was right.

it's complicated

There's been a debate raging at Swistle's and at Kristin's fitness blog 
Aquafit that touches on what I think of as fat politics.  Here's a a comment I wrote on Kristin's blog (more about this journey of mine later):

"I've looked at fat from both sides now..."

I was a pretty fat kid into my early twenties.  Getting fit saved my life.  It taught me things about how to live that my parents should have.  I learned discipline, how to achieve goals and to respect myself.  

But.

But, the ugly underbelly of my journey was the body image piece.  When I first got fit, the reward was in the improved body image.  I was no longer invisible to the world.  I got attention.  I got on stage in a bikini at 9% bodyfat for a bodybuilding competition.  It was powerful to be thin.  I thought about it all the time.

I discovered that I always saw flaws, even at 9% body fat.  I discovered that my moods were negatively affected by the strict dieting I had to do.  I discovered that I wasn't meant to be that lean.  It took such an effort.  I was very close to developing an eating disorder.  I was boring as hell.

That was 22 years ago, Since then?  I've run marathons, done triathlons, raced bikes (road and mountain) and competed in weightlifting competitions.  I eat and train for performance.  I look pretty good for a 48 year old mom when I have my clothes on.

I don't look like Linda or Kristen.  And the voice that tells me I should is still inside my head and it bugs the f&*@k out of me.  So when I hear Kristen and Linda talk about the effect of exercise on their bodies it does make me uncomfortable. I feel like it's dangerously close to becoming part of the "you should exercise to be hot" chorus that I wish would just go away...please don't flame me for saying that I know it's not what either of them intend, but there it is.

But when they talk about what it feels like to achieve goals, I get it.  I am always training for something.  I push myself very hard to be better, stronger, faster.  See, I've discovered that training hard makes me happy and balanced, and keeps my depression at bay.  I wish we talked about these elements of fitness more.  

I catch myself feeling superior all the time, for being the only one at the track at dawn doing intervals, for ordering meat and veggies at dinner and eschewing the bread, for running a 5k in under 24 minutes...And it is NOT ok.  I am not better than other people because I can always find the time and because I do it even though it's hard.  Fitness is a  closely held value of mine, I need it as part of my life and it makes me happy.  
I'm lucky.  I found that.  But I really believe that other people can feel happy and balanced without it.  And I've met people who really, truly, loathe exercise.  Far be it from me to tell them they should do it. Even if they want to lose weight. ( Recent studies show that NEAT, non exercise activity thermogenesis, the time you spend house cleaning, gardening, running after your kids can be much more important to weight loss than "exercise").

But Im sure there are a lot of people out there  suffering like I was, people who don't know yet that exercise can bring you joy just in the act of doing it.  It can help with depression, anxiety, insomnia.  Those are the people I wish we fitness mavens would spend time trying to reach.  I don't really care about the message that everyone can change their body for the better, what I do care about is the message that everyone can surprise themselves by finding the limits of what they are capable of.   Really.  I promise.

crooked dreams

Trying to remember the stuff of my childhood dreams always brings me up short. It usually starts with: how did I get here?

I remember lying in bed on the sun porch of our big Berkeley house. It was still light and I was seething with resentment because my mother sent me to bed. The party was still going full tilt in the backyard, strains of Janis Joplin reached me in my bedroom of windows. I wanted desperately to be out there with the drunken adults. My three uncles were up on the roof of our garage and the neighboring house. They were playing frisbee from their perches, lobbing the dented tin lids of our trash cans over the heads of the revelers in the back yard.

I must have been seven, since that's the summer we had a full house, two pregnant aunts, one uncle and my two year old cousin. That's why I slept on the porch. It was 1968. Berkeley was alive with riots and tear gas, brimming with the energy of youthful righteousness.

My parents, at 28, were the patriarchs of our family. They hosted the bridge games: big bottles of Hearty Burgundy passed around the table. There was cigarette smoke and swearing. I wanted all of that. Deep political discussions, wine, cigarettes, the houseful of people, demonstrations in the streets. I wanted to wear full length gloves like my mother wore to the Governor's ball with her off the shoulder gown.

It was the sixties, but it was also still the fifties in many ways. It was such a time of upheaval, everything was changing. What did the future look like for girls? College? Maybe, not for sure. Marriage? Maybe, no longer a requirement.

My biggest aspiration was to become a flower girl as soon as I was old enough.