NYT Modern Love Rejection #2: An Amateur Runner's Guide to Self-Therapy (or Running in the Dark)

My second attempt at the popular column about my adorable unraveling twice a week

Actual photo from my route. Running up and down real and proverbial hills every Tuesday and Thursday for my body, mind, and potential kidnappers.

For some background on this piece, including a mortifying edit, along with my works-in-progress, listen to my audio clip:

To read rejection #1, click here.

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"How safe is that? I feel like you're saying 'Hey, kidnappers, I'm right over here!'"

I chuckled at my teenage son's assessment as I toggled through the three clickable settings on my runner's strobe light.

"Well, I need something, and the safety vests look like parachutes... and they're ugly."

He rolled his eyes while he scarfed down a bowl of generic sugared flakes into a bowl sans milk.

"Okay, heading out. I'm probably dead if I'm not back in about thirty minutes," I said with a smile, earbuds in.

"Sounds good," my cross-country runner replied with his school-issued laptop open, doing homework or not.

Don’t worry. This is not a story about the joys of running. It’s a story about hating myself so much as I rehash my unfortunate life events while reaping the health benefits. Sure, I put up a nice front as a healthy forty-year-old with my workout sessions, posture exercises, and Mediterranean meals from Pinterest, but my walk-jogs are ugly pre-dawn self-therapy sessions while I’m on waitlists for counseling with my state health insurance. With zero intentions of breaking my twenty-five-minute, one-point-eight-mile personal record anytime soon, I don’t run to find myself. I run to lose myself via a trip filled with mind-vomiting, too many song skips, and distressed mouth-breathing.

Every Tuesday and Thursday morning at five-fifteen-ish (hear that, kidnappers?), I push my body to jog and power-walk through my neighborhood. At least, that's how it appears to the few strangers roaming the streets in a Michael Jackson “Thriller” daze (i.e., potential kidnappers) or to “real” runners who dare me to pick up my pace.

I started jogging around the same time my son joined cross-country two years ago. With a positive mindset, I downloaded apps that would help me progress as a runner and sustain longer sprints, but my arthritic knees weren’t having that. Instead of quitting, I decided I would simply alternate my walking and running during these sessions. My route, morning start time, and distance have changed. I've learned to prepare for snowy conditions and sweltering heat. The treks and weather forecasts never mattered because my mind was desperate to regurgitate and sort my chaotic life in solitude. This was the true purpose of my exercise.

In the middle of the pandemic, my husband left the pastorate. It was no secret that we were moving away from our congregation as we questioned purity culture, complementarianism, Christian nationalism, and our denomination's pitiful attempts of reform in the aftermath of a national sexual abuse scandal. As division grew inside and outside the church, we knew our time as Southern Baptists was over.

With our Sundays free, my husband and I began talking about what we previously swept under the rug. Nearing our twentieth anniversary, we–-surprise!–-had changed as individuals. This wouldn’t have been a big deal if we hadn’t become opposites in so many areas. After giving much of himself to ministry, my husband longed for simplicity and a quieter life. I, on the other hand, finally felt free from the stifling role of a pastor’s wife and wanted more of a social life outside the walls of the church. (Have you ever analyzed the difference between lip balm and lip gloss or what truly defines a short dress? As a full-grown, legal adult, I hope not.) For the ultimate coup de grâce, my husband admitted he was gray ace, or graysexual, while I finally felt safe enough to admit that I was bisexual (and later pansexual), known to only a handful of close confidants in our small town.

Releasing inhibitions offered freedom, but it was a lonely path to discovery. In southeastern Washington State, I wasn’t exactly living within a progressive enclave of body- and sex-positivity. No longer having a faith community and now indulging in the threads of other later-in-life bisexual wives on Reddit, I craved authentic connection. In the chaos we see today, community feels less tangible, and because of that, I've been careful to keep the taboo pieces of myself hidden because I know I will scare people away with my sexuality and delight in sensuality, wrapped in the tight bow of fierce enneagram eight-ness. Yes, I’ve been on a few dates and then some as my husband and I opened up our relationship, but that season expired in finicky connections with pretty, submissive twenty-somethings, needy men in dead-bedroom situations, and my disdain for dating apps, a must-have past-time to adorn a level of hell in a modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno.

So I brain-dumped all the things I wanted to forget on my early morning jogs, the ways I struggled with connection and identity through my life, while pushing my body as a very amateur runner:

I shuffled past the bakery and brow lounge on College Avenue and wondered what the Cuban versions would look like in Miami, where I grew up but never fully learned Spanish, causing me to question my latinidad.

As the sprinklers soaked the lawns of the local Seventh-Day Adventist university, I recalled my promiscuity with men as a way to hide any opportunity to express my attraction to women as a college student in the Bible Belt of south Georgia, which ramped up aggressively after my sexual assault my freshman year.

Pushing myself to race past two adjacent nursing homes, I mulled over the time I ghosted a beautiful young model solely based on my discomfort with our age gap despite substantial and humorous conversations and video chats.

My chest burned as I glanced down the street towards my daughter’s elementary school, where I previously worked as a special education paraprofessional during the COVID outbreaks, exhaling memories of heated discourses on vaccines and mandates.

Not knowing how to support me in my bisexuality, some of my most progressive Christian friends abandoned me. Their faces glowed and then faded as I climbed uphill stretches of dark sidewalk accompanied by muscle strain.

Watching very early summer sunrises over the Blue Mountains, I wondered why I continued to connect with the wrong people, evident in a toxic, back-and-forth situationship with a former college football player in Boise.

As frigid mornings made their way through our valley, I spit out loogies that smacked me back in the face as I considered if I was truly a good wife and mother while stuck on a confusing path of self-discovery.

I had to leave all of this on the pavement because back home my three remarkable kids, my only successful connections, lovingly bombarded me, as I waded through a difficult post-grad school job hunt. I reserved these thoughts for the heaving and aching in the morning darkness because venting to my husband, my soulmate, would just emphasize our differences. I needed him and creating a deeper pit between us wasn’t my desire. Honestly, I became upset that I couldn’t just fall in line and be a normal housewife. “I love who you are and who you’re becoming,” he reminded me. “You hid for a long time.”

I abhor showing vulnerability and weakness, so these momentary escapes allowed me to reflect on but hack off insecurities, missed opportunities, and frustrations. A chance to empty myself before needing to be “on” for the day’s responsibilities. Two days a week of bodily exhaustion, plus uprooting an average of four flashbacks per run highlighting my loneliness and need to belong for twenty-plus years, gave me the stamina to stay alert for the extracurricular activities of three kids. I admit, it’s twisted psychosomatic math.

It’s not all gloom and doom. Jogging can be fun. I’m known for my attempts in keeping up with public transit buses. I’ve pranced and mused with Dua Lipa and Radiohead blaring into my ears. During times of juvenile spark and a need for a healthy dose of humility, I leaped over icy patches that thankfully did not lead to E.R. visits.

On most mornings when I return home, my splotchy face, damp skin, and accelerated breathing might signal that I pushed myself too hard. No, not for the display of over-exerted fitness. This is the condition of a woman who has just exhumed her ongoing desperation for human connection over her four decades of life. Clever facade, I know.

On a recent morning after my run, I plopped on the couch and stared up to God, odd stains on the ceiling, or into the abyss of impatient longing, wishing I was better hemmed, tightly stitched to people who are like me.

So I could be the best for the people who rely on me.

My oldest came over with a waffle in hand. “No kidnappers today. Good, but Mom, you really need to do a cooldown. You look like you’re gonna die.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, expelling my last winded breaths and smiling. “I only allow myself to die twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

I extended my arms out, and he helped me up. Moving into our dimly sunned kitchen, he said, “Don’t forget to turn off your light.”

I looked down at the beam still attached to me, surprised I just noticed its harsh glow, and clicked it off.

That’s right. I don’t need it here.