personal best

When I lost my job, a friend encouraged me to take up running. Because I saw a real danger that I might spend all my time sitting around my apartment feeling anxious and sad, I decided to give it a shot. Of course, at first I hated it. If I forced myself to run a mile, I thought I was going to die.
Things have changed. Now running is one of the only things I look forward to. It’s an escape from all the things in my life that seem so scary and insurmountable. An escape from insecurities about my body into physical activity. An escape from crushing loneliness into pleasant solitude. It’s as if while I’m running my mind can rise above the smog layer it’s usually trapped under, into the clear sky, get some distance on my problems, make them seem smaller and more manageable. My brain starts working differently. I come up with more ideas while I’m running than I do when I’m not. It’s a coping mechanism, but I think it’s a healthy one. And it feels good to recognize that things I once would have thought myself incapable of have become totally doable. Like I’m a video game character who has put in the work and leveled up. Running five miles isn’t exactly easy for me now, but it’s not exactly hard, either, and there’s usually a while there where I’m just coasting along, my heart and my legs seeming to find a pace they feel like they could maintain forever. The only thing I don’t like now is coming back down.
I recently watched Robert Towne’s film Personal Best. In the film, Mariel Hemingway looks almost exactly like what I imagined the “real” me looked like when I was that age, the me in the correct universe, where I was assigned female at birth like I should have been. Meanwhile, here I was, trapped in a crummy alternate universe where nothing was ever quite right.
Like a lot of sports films, Personal Best touches on the idea of competing primarily with yourself.










This notion is also expressed in the trailer for the upcoming movie Creed…
in which Rocky tells his new protege Adonis, “This guy here, that’s the toughest opponent you’re ever gonna have to face. I believe that’s true in the ring, and I think that’s true in life.”

Later in the trailer, we hear Adonis say, “A great fighter once said it ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
Speaking of getting hit, the new film Results is also concerned with fitness–physical fitness but also fitness as a person, fitness for loving and being loved. Danny, played by Kevin Corrigan (who is so fucking good in this movie), walks into a gym with a strange request.








I like Danny. I’ve never been in a ring but I know a thing or two about taking a hit, getting up again, and trying to keep moving forward. I’m drawn to people who understand that, too, in their own way, and aren’t afraid to admit that it hurts like hell sometimes.
I also share Danny’s frustration with people who talk as if the love in their lives isn’t worth much, people who act as if, because love is readily available for them, it’s readily available for everyone, and doesn’t need to be worked for or fought for.






Danny struggles with bitterness…



…but, in championing love in the lives of his friends, even when it appears completely unavailable in his own, he seems to rise above the bitterness, and is probably more fit to love and be loved as a result, should love ever come along.






I probably am my own toughest opponent, and the struggle with my own capacity for bitterness is one of my toughest battles with myself. It’s a lot harder than running five miles, though I believe that running five miles (or 10K, or 10 miles, or whatever) can help me be better prepared to fight off the bitterness.
Anger and bitterness feel good, in a way. They are seductive. They mask the pain and bring a grimly satisfying logic to aspects of my life. “Of course I’ve never really known what it is to be seen and desired and loved as myself by someone I really saw and desired and loved. I’m a fucking misanthrope. It makes sense.” When I abandon the bitterness and let myself be my truer, better self, the far more compassionate and empathetic person I have the capacity to be, I feel a lot better about myself, and much more capable of getting past myself and thinking about other people. But recognizing that I deserve love and have love to give also means letting myself grieve about not being loved. I guess I think there is strength in that.
The other day my therapist said that thinking I can’t live a fulfilling life if I never have someone to share my life with is not as bad as someone thinking they can never be fulfilled unless they are rich, but it’s similar. I don’t believe this at all. (”Never for money, always for love.”) Of course my life is hardly devoid of all meaning or fulfillment or love just because I don’t have a partner, but I do believe that love is what makes life worth living. This is something I think you come to understand differently when you don’t have it than when you do. I understand that some people are content being single. I guess I think that’s fine, and for a long time, that was me, too, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me now. I know who I am on my own. I’ve been on my own forever. I want to know who I am, who we are, when my life is intertwined with someone else’s. I want to be a priority to someone who is a priority to me. I want to see and be seen.
My therapist also said that she thought I sounded like a bit of a defeatist when it came to love. She was right. Sometimes I’m very hopeful and sometimes I have no hope at all. I told her about how I still had a line from Mad Max: Fury Road rattling around in my head. “Hope is a mistake. If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.”

I told her that for me, hope felt like a kind of balancing act. Wanting to keep hope alive so that I stay open to the possibility of love, while also not expecting love, or feeling entitled to it, since love is rare and hard to find for so many, and since I meet so few people who I can even imagine sharing my life with in any kind of real way, and since, as a queer trans woman, I probably won’t meet many people who see me as a chance, either. So yes, sometimes I do want to give up.
Then my therapist said she found my defeatism strange, because, she said, I’d already gone through more challenges and brought about more changes than a lot of people ever do. “You are not someone who simply accepts what is,” she said.










Maybe that is what I am, someone who doesn’t simply accept what is. The difference, of course, is that I can change things about myself. Those are things I feel like I have some control over. I can’t make the universe materialize someone in my life who makes sense to me and who I want to be close to and who wants to be close to me. All I can do is try to be a little better today than I was yesterday.
And that means not giving up. Sometimes I feel like there’s this tiny woman in my heart who knows that I was complacent for too long. She knows there’s something wrong, something missing. She knows something has to change at some point. And now she won’t let me forget it. She’s my pain and my hope, and I probably need her. She’s my friend and she’s doing me a favor. She’s not the one breaking my heart, she’s just the one sounding the alarm. She’s shouting and kicking and swinging a sledgehammer in there. Sometimes I like to watch her swing the damn thing. She’s got these beautiful muscles in her arms.
The other day as I was running I ran into a woman I used to work with. She was laid off the same day I was. She hasn’t found a job yet either. She was out running with her kids and her dog and she said she was preparing to run a half-marathon in Oakland next month. She asked me how much I’d been running lately and when I told her, she encouraged me to sign up for it, too. Maybe I will. I could go for a new personal best.

Notes
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