Incompatible with Life

I love to run. Or I used to. In the past five years, body has gone from expressing mild resistance to running to flat out refusal. Injury, pain, and general malaise would be the three top descriptors of my post-cancer running career. I’d built my identity around my status as a runner and, even as my relationship with the sport soured, I held onto the hope that with enough time/training/nutrition/motivation my post-cancer body would return to pre-cancer performance. I had never been a run-every-day-to-keep-a-streak-going kind of runner, but I loved the endorphin high of a good run. I had never been fast, but I did track my distance, pace, and race times religiously, comparing current race pace to prior runs and rejoicing with each new personal record. I celebrated every incremental increase in mileage, owned more than my share of training magazines and manuals, and had at least one race-like event scheduled for almost every month of the year. I ran solo for stress relie...

My mother is a firm believer in rummage sales. Throughout my childhood I was encouraged to go on an annual purge of my toy collection, to cull the items that I’d held onto mostly out of the comfort of familiarity and send them off to a new home. I was an anxious child and this task always pushed me to my limits. I was never quite ready to let go and even the promise of jingling coins adding up in my piggy bank was not enough to loosen my grip on the long-forgotten and ignored items in my toy box. As I got older, though, I began to see the wisdom and beauty in it. When you release something that no longer works for you, you free yourself from the burden of unnecessary clutter, and bless someone else with your bounty. The older I got, the more easily I handed off unworn clothing, uncomfortable shoes, and outgrown home décor. This release did not extend to my relationships, however. I held on long past revelations of irreconcilable flaws of character, kept a firm grasp even i...