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Owning It: When Life Hurts part 1

This post has been waiting for a long long time to make an appearance. This has nothing to do with recipes or CrossFit or running or Paleo or Whole30 or food photography. It has everything to do with me and how I lost my way.

A few months ago, I got lost. Hopelessly and completely lost. When I look back on my life, there are a few events that have shaken me to my core and knocked me off my path. For each one, time was the only remedy. The same is true for losing our baby. Looking back, I remember every small detail of that day when I knew something was wrong. And it’s as if my life turned down a path I’m not proud to admit. But the time has come to be brave and own it. Own that path I took and the lessons I learned from bad decisions, the apathy, the Cold as Ice cloak I clung to. Time to be brave and live again.

I struggled with everything. I struggled with running, with getting out of bed every morning, with cooking, with walking out of my house, with working, with anything. That huge wall I build around myself in my early years took a very long time to slowly crumble. Stephen has spent years working on it, with great success, but it was standing tall within a few weeks after the miscarriage. That area of personal space that only very close friends and family can enter, shut down. It was just me and my mind full of so many toxic thoughts.

I went on auto-pilot through the holidays and all the socializing and entertaining that goes along with that. I struggled with keeping focused on anything. It was like depression meets ADHD and all of that covered with a righteous haze of oppositional defiance. I remember thinking “just get to January and turn a new page”. I naively thought it would be that easy. I thought the clock and calendar had magic unicorn glitter to make everything okay.

As far as my blog, I limped along with it as best as I could. I censored every little thing and it exhausted me. I would want to write about what I was feeling, but it was Monday and Monday is for talking about food, not feelings. Tuesday is for cross-training topics, not how absolutely devastated a commercial for Mother’s Day left me. Wednesday is a running topic day, but I didn’t run, so I just crawled back under the covers with Frankie standing guard and Stephen letting me know with a look that I wasn’t fooling anybody.  I met my sponsored post deadlines and threw in the random workouts when I could. But I wasn’t being real to myself. I wasn’t being real to my readers. Putting on the fake resting happy face that was so far from happy is bordering on hypocritical and I couldn’t keep doing it.

To put it plainly, I stopped living and started just surviving. Running until breathless was no longer working. I couldn’t get that endorphin rush and mind-clearing effect. Pushing my body and using soreness and yes, even pain, to cope with the inner agony was no longer working. Quality sleep was non-existent. My passion with cooking and photography didn’t help. Work stress worked its evil magic and I blamed everything on work and the flu.

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Time, however, is working. Time doesn’t heal anything, I firmly believe. It just allows us to build coping mechanisms (or..MORE of them). Slowly, I began to notice the little things that make life so beautiful. Honeysuckle wind.  Stephen’s hand on my neck when he pulls me close. Chalk dust in my callouses after a hard workout. Sweat running down my legs. A friend’s kind words. A giggling student. A Colorado skyline that takes my breath away. I began to live again. And I’m ready to own that, too.

Thanks for reading. This is far beyond the set topics I have here and a lot more than the “daily review” posts that many readers seem to like. But, I needed to get that out and now I can deal with it.

Part 2 now posted.

Christen

Thursday 9th of July 2015

Just wanted to say that I'm so glad you're finding a way to focus on healing. I'm praying for you.