Whiskey Room
My thumbs flew over the screen.
“I’m having a hard time,” I typed. “I feel guilty for not being productive.”
The ellipses bubble twinkled.
“It’s OK, you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
Mark was right. I did feel better the next day, but not before an itchy restlessness threatened to consume me in the bright, upstairs room of an old house in the Berkshires.
I’d come here for so many reasons: writing, running, and decision-making. When my host had given me the tour of the upstairs apartment, she’d shown me the three bedrooms. I’d picked this one because the late afternoon sunlight flooded the space, bouncing off walls the color of goldenrod. The room shone like whiskey in a crystal class. I thought that maybe if I stayed in this room, its glow would mellow the rigidity pinging inside me; a warm strum when I, like a too-taught guitar string, was ready to snap.
The discomfort had come because I had decided to stop, stop trying to make Rise Run Retreat something it clearly did not want to be: big.
In the stopping, I have realized that I do not know who I am if I am not striving.
That feeling has followed me for a lifetime. As long as I can remember the purpose of my existence has been tied to some kind of productivity.
From my earliest memories up to age ten, I was striving for my salvation. I was scared the original sin I carried inside me could never be erased and doomed me to hell. I had to please God with my goodness. Perfection would save me.
When I had done all the good things a good girl does–like read her Bible every day and not have sex and not drink and not do drugs and definitely not listen to rock and roll and pray without ceasing–I shifted my focus and spent the next decade striving to be as thin as possible. I was very good at being thin. Too good at being thin.
And then, when I realize the prize for being the best at being thin was death (I was fast-tracking myself to the hell I was so afraid of), I changed course and tried to be the very best patient my treatment team at the eating disorder clinic had ever seen. This was also exhausting.
When motherhood shook me from my head back into my body, and I learned that changes in action precipitate changes in thought, I stopped trying to be perfectly good and perfectly thin. The striving had no place to go, so I applied it to running. I trained harder and got faster, and then I built a business around that journey.
And now I am forty and exhausted and wondering: who is Sarah when she is not striving for excellence?
The problem, at least as I’ve gathered from everything I’ve read and listened to about the neurochemistry of the brain, is that I am addicted to the cortisol brought about by all of this striving. That stress response has been coursing through my body since I was young, first as a response to abuse, then when the abuse was removed I started self-abusing in the form of an eating disorder. So that itchy discomfort I feel when I stop or slow down, that’s real. Those are neurotransmitters wondering where the heck the cortisol is. Why isn’t this girl stressed out? She should be stressed out. Let's make her stressed out.
My subconscious goes searching for something and can always find the perfect thing to heighten cortisol all over again:
YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
At anything.
At everything.
Ahh yes, that one always hits the mark and can ruin any perfectly good day.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
What’s really wrong is that there’s nothing wrong. Which feels wrong. Which means that I am not good enough.
Stopping reveals so much and boy is it uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because it brings up painful truths from our past (the source of the voice that whispers “not enough”), and forces us into conversations that we’d rather not have.
Perhaps this is why we avoid quitting even when we know we should. Perhaps it's not so much the failure of the endeavor, but the feeling that our own personality is the failure. And while our personality isn’t a failure, recognizing why we are the way we are requires a reckoning with the people who raised us, and the people who raised them. And this reckoning forces us to look at the whole web of pain in our family and the way things get passed from one generation to the next. And that is a much bigger conversation than: should I cancel three retreats?
It's so much easier to avoid the deep dive and just keep striving.
What I’ve realized though in this transition is that, while I have grown in confidence over the past decade, my self-worth has always been contingent. It hinges on everything I can achieve, produce, share, create, accomplish. In my own opinion, I am only worthy of existing if I am striving for excellence.
But I’ve wondered lately, is it possible that I am being an Excellent Sarah right now? As I am. And that is enough.
-Sarah