Choosing to Struggle

I have written on this blog about plenty of physical training stuff with a smattering of mental stuff. Today is mental stuff.

It being the beginning of a new calendar year, many people have thoughts about renewal, starting over, taking on new challenges and refocusing on the ones they were already pursuing. Many of my friends are embarking on their push towards an Ironman. Others are marrying off their children or having grandchildren. Some are getting married for the first or not first time.

I spent the first half of 2014 swimming in a morose stew of self-doubt, misguided self-analysis and general shiftlessness. I've gone into before some of the things that led up to that, and recently figured out (from analyzing data!) that I need to structure my intentional athletic struggles in a particular way.

Choosing to master something is making a choice to struggle. You don't get good at something accidentally, or without making countless mistakes and possibly making a fool of yourself. You may even be ridiculed along the way if your something is considered frivolous--such as making art or conquering long distance triathlons, or setting an official world record for miles cycled in a year (I know some people making that attempt).

I've had some things come to me without too much struggle--in grade school, I loved reading and math and foreign language study. I think I inherited a gene from my Dad that made it easy for me to excel in those areas quickly. However, being good at the level I was deemed to be at was never enough for me. Even in 3rd grade, I craved challenge, but was deemed too young to determine my own destiny. By 5th grade, though, it was too obvious to my teachers that they needed to do something extra with me or else I would be far too bored. And my parents did not have the money to send me away to a special school. I worked with my teachers to come up with a way for me to move ahead and be challenged without too much extra effort on their part. I would help the Spanish teacher teach the other kids. I would pick up advanced math books and study on my own. It worked well for a few years. 7th and 8th grade were challenging for me, though, because I acquired a new set of teachers that weren't interested in learning about my history--I was to go with the flow. But I supplemented the lackluster schooling by teaching myself to sew. It seemed like a fun, useful skill to have, especially since my Mom was back working again and had precious little time to be making clothes for me.

To make it mentally challenging for me, I went to summer school. I took a typing class (which I excelled at because I'd played the piano since age 4), and I took a history class (which I hated, but understood that my emotional struggle would contribute to my need to feel challenged). I did continue to be ahead of my peers in math and Spanish, so much so that when I entered high school, within the first week my teachers knew they needed to do something special with me. I was taking Spanish, but the teacher discerned I was about 3 years ahead of everyone else (by my own doing--all I did was retain what I'd learned during the prior 4 years), and decided I could tutor the other kids, and he gave me self-study for the level that I was at. On a dare, I signed up for Russian and German, because what the hell, it sounded like fun. My math teacher figured out the same and I was put into a class with kids 2 years older than me. As to the rest of the curriculum, I couldn't have cared less, as I was able to spread my wings in math and languages. Oh but there was English. One would assume that my proficiency in foreign languages had something to do with English, and it did. I absolutely loved learning about the structure of language, and ingraining all that in me is what enabled me to pick up the foreign languages so easily.

Unfortunately, being the weirdo smart girl who was paid special attention by many of the teachers put me in an odd position socially, and as well, within my own family unit. My 2 brothers and one sister older than me had gone to the same high school, had done fairly well and even had some of the same teachers as I did, but I was always compared to them as light years better. As much trouble as this gave me, I felt it was worth it for me to pursue my own struggle to exploit my natural talents and work ethic.

This desire to go beyond has stayed with me. I fast tracked in my career during my 20's after discovering the joy of computer programming and actuarial science. As you can imagine, regularly being singled out for special attention in school and at work put a damper on my social life. Well, to an extent. My first 2 years of college I was the Social Chairman in my sorority. I figured doing that would be a good way to "learn" more social skills--by doing a bang up job of making other people happy! But college was a struggle for me because I really felt the social toll all my years of excelling (and also having a 20-hour per week job to fund college) had taken. It seemed all I knew how to do was excel at stuff. And I was always rewarded for it in some fashion--either money or accolades. Somehow I think that I became set up for a lot of external validation.

I was 25 when I was raped. I was doing exceedingly well at my actuarial job, living in my own apartment and being self-sufficient. The rape threw me for a loop for awhile, but mainly in terms of my ability to feel safe and trust people. Although the people I worked with were absolutely wonderful in giving me time off, and my landlord easily agreed to let me break my lease so I could move to a safer neighborhood.

Fast forward to my 30's when I was married and puzzled at how to make a marriage work. So I did what I knew how to do--be good at stuff--taking care of the home, making lots of money and looking good. But it wasn't enough, and I realized there needed to be some pinnacle of moving ahead at work and acquiring stuff and having a perfect house that I needed to accept as "enough."

But it wasn't enough. But it was enough to contribute to the end of my marriage. Which was an extreme blow to my self-confidence. I fucked up and got drunk one day and went rollerskating, crashed and broke an arm and got a concussion, then a few weeks later, I was laid off at work (not due to my performance). I thought I'd never find a new job, and was deeply shaken for a few weeks. But I acted "as if" I was still the same confident person, and soon had 3 good job offers.

The job I accepted was intentionally going to be a struggle for me, as I would need to be on the phone with customers and visiting them in person frequently. Two things I was not a big fan of. I did not enjoy talking on a phone (I couldn't see the person and figure out what they were really thinking/feeling), and yet I didn't like the in-person meetings, either, because I had to be on my "best behavior" which to me was always an act. But I took the job anyway, and discovered there were other people like me with the same social challenges (maybe not as stunted as me, LOL!). I learned new things, new skills, and someone invited me (this was within just a few weeks of when I started the job) to attend a "cardio step class" at the gym located in the building where I worked.

I had never considered myself athletic or particularly coordinated, but the step class had structure to it, so I quickly adapted, to the point where I was teaching the class when the instructor got sick or had other personal business to attend to. So once again, I was flexing my mastery wings. But I loved the exercise--I'd rollerskated and lifted a ton in my 20's, and got away from all that while I was married, and the exercise seemed to feed my mind and get me back to that sharper place I'd been in my 20's.

I fell into a small group of runners, and along the way, captained softball, volleyball and stair-climbing teams. I've always enjoyed taking a leadership role, especially when nobody else wants to do it! One of the runners told me about 5k races, then "suggested" I do a marathon, and from there it all escalated to Ironman and beyond.

While I periodically have a conversation with myself (and sometimes close friends) about how this behavior of constant struggle and achievement might be self-destructive, I hope I have finally given up on looking at it as a bad thing. It's just how I'm wired. I never know when my ability to do all this might be taken away from me. I sit here this morning with sore arms and pecs from swimming with paddles yesterday followed by a stint on the assisted chin/dip machine, then a run where I could tell my legs were still sore from that obscene bike workout on Saturday, and knowing I need to go outside and shovel my driveway so I can leave if I need to, but I'm having someone come to my house tonight to begin some MAT sessions. I look at the workouts and events I've got planned for myself and think it's fucking crazy--why am I putting myself through this? But, the thing is, that it is this physical "excess" that feeds my mind. I know it does, and I can't object to it. Some days I am afraid of my own drive, as I feel like I'm overflowing with energy and happiness for just being who I am.

At the end of every day, I don't expect anyone else to be like me. I can't tolerate people who denigrate me for being the way I am anymore. My ex-husband did that, and some male friends have done that to me recently. It cuts deeply to my core when someone tells me I do something too much. What the fuck is too much? Am I living too much? Am I being happy too much? Am I being introspective too much? Am I trying to encourage others to be their very best too much? Am I being an example of what a person can do too much? Nobody can know what the rest of my existence is outside of what they see me doing without making an effort to get to know me better. Because while the too much is pretty evident, my inner struggle to be just enough so that someone will love me is very real. I know the doing is not what I will be loved for--it is the being. And there's a whole lot of being inside me. It is just my unfortunate luck that the way I get at it is by struggling and doing. Sometimes it's hard for me to explain this to others. I think it may be because they are so caught up in the excess of my external presentation that they don't have the energy to dig within. Their loss. I believe that I do this with my own friends--I know that whoever they are on the outside is just a skin they wear, and that they are far more to me than that. This is why I have very few close friends. It's those who also have the energy/desire to spend to probe deeper, and/or I've tried to show them how. Sometimes I just have to ask them to do that, but that's OK. All a person can do is say no. Some people do say no, and then I need to let go of them.

Wow--this was enlightening to me. I begin today wondering how the hell I am going to have the energy to shovel the snow off my driveway, do a fucking hard bike workout, get some strength training done, do my job and then be ready (and energetic enough for, if that's required) for some MAT. And probably wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. It's a daily struggle--even as I've at times said that training is easy. It is! The struggle is doing the training but doing all the other shit, too!