My phone’s alarm goes off. It’s 4:44am, another quiet, lonely morning at the farm. I miss Esprit. She’s in Seattle. I’m across the mountains in the middle of nowhere Eastern Washington.
I question what I’m doing out here. I recently quit my job and moved to Seattle with my girlfriend. This feels like a detour, just a way to delay real life, to forestall moving forward.
Maybe it is.
***
My spirit is lazy as I linger in bed. I just want to sleep some more. My alarm goes off again. It’s closer to five now. This time I look at the screen and see the reminder I attached to this alarm: “Sleep returns; today does not.”
Ugh. Fine.
I grudgingly roll from bed, slip on some shorts and a sweatshirt, put my hair in a ponytail, and grab a book and some water before venturing downstairs.
I mix a drink of sports nutrition and, after I finish it, I sit down to read a little while it settles. The book I’m reading is apparently adapted from an article of the same name: The Crossroads of Should and Must. It speaks to me, sparks some self-reflection, an open-minded look into myself. This is a good state of mind in which to run.
***
I set out on the primitive road, leaving my sweatshirt behind. My steps crunch along across the gravel towards the highway, about a half a mile down, where I turn left, heading further into the expansive emptiness of rural America. I’m listening to Four Tet. I have a little Chrome Sparks in the cue for later.
The plan for this run, to shake up the monotony of unchanging scablands, is to go out for about twenty minutes at an easy clip and then hammer a tempo run for another twenty or so, finishing at an easy to moderate pace.
It’s cold. Surprisingly cold. The temperature in my hands is low, a sign of poor circulation. My bare torso is on the border of uncomfortable, but not quite over the edge. I’ll be just fine. It’s only going to get warmer, anyway.
The morning sun is young, only a few minutes above the horizon. Golden hour bathes the sprawling landscape, casting long shadows, livening the world with contrast. No one said the middle of nowhere couldn’t be beautiful.
***
I’m cruising effortlessly at a decent clip. I feel like I’m finally adjusting to the higher altitude of the eastern side of the state. I’m somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 feet above sea level over here, which is significantly higher than a couple hundred feet in Seattle, even though the hills here are child’s play by comparison. But damn if the oxygen isn’t thinner.
I feel strong as I come up on the twenty-minute mark, doing something in the vicinity of 7:30/mile splits. I tighten my core, straighten my back, focus on the cadence of my feet, and increase my lean just enough to notice. I bring my pace down, closer to 6:00/mile splits.
The pace feels good. It’s hard, but not unmanageable, which is exactly how it is suppose to be for my purposes here this morning. The miles tick by markedly faster than the warmup.
And then I hear something. I cock my head to the side and turn the volume down on Four Tet. There it is again: canine yipping and barking. The rocky outcroppings distort the distance and direction of the sound’s origin. I can’t tell if they’re coyotes or domesticated dogs. It doesn’t matter, though. I enjoy seeing neither of these on the loose while I’m running alone in the middle of nowhere.
I turn the music off, alert and ready to react in the event I need to confront a wild animal. The barking yelps persist longer than I would like. It feels like they’re following me. My pace slows as I subconsciously conserve energy for a fight or flight eventuality.
Slowly, the animal noises die down until I can no longer hear them. I put the music back on at a lower volume, still alert, but no longer feeling the need to be completely on guard.
I reach the turn around at mile five and my tempo returns to its preferable speed. I’m more than halfway through now.
***
I crest a small hill. There’s a figure in a white tank top walking about a half to a quarter mile up ahead of me.
That’s curious.
As I draw nearer the man in the white shirt, he crosses the road and climbs over a guardrail.
“Loki!” he yells. “Teacup!”
Oooooh. They’re his dogs.
We exchange morning salutations as I speed by and carry on.
I dip down into a valley as my tempo session reaches its end. Sweat dribbles down my face, looking like tears in the reflection of my foggy sunglasses. My heart rate is high and my breathing shallow. I’m ready to regain my composure by slowing the pace. As I do, Chrome Sparks inherits the spotlight from Four Tet. I begin the final segment of this morning’s workout: recovery.
***
As the physical strain lessens, my mind returns inward to that intrinsic self-reflection from earlier, prior to my departure. I ask myself the potentially rhetorical question, why am I here? Not existentially, but literally. Why am I out here in Lincoln County rather than in Seattle?
My body is as tired as my soul. And now I have a hill to ascend. My pace begins to stall. I feel my breath, suboptimal. I’m fixating on my fatigue and perceived limitations.
Seeing this, I flip the script, introducing a contrary mantra, which I repeat aloud over and over for the next few minutes.
“Trust yourself. You are more capable than you know.”
Once I’ve repeated this enough for the words to lose their individual meanings, I play with the inflection and emphasis. It becomes something of an aspirational Meisner exercise performed solo.
I reach the top of the hill and slowly cease my rote recitation. I feel good, better than I expected. And more confident, too. The mantra seems to have helped.
With the terrain returning to a slight decline, I reflect on my past and my present, recalling to mind how depression has beleaguered me in profoundly toxic ways for so long. And yet, here I am. Still here. Still cruising along. I feel like a survivor.
But then I reflect on the future, and I realize something else. I cannot simply define myself as “survivor.” That’s too passive.
It was true for a time. Before I knew I was depressed, and especially before I knew how severe things were, the most I could ask for was survival. Thriving is not really in the cards when you’re in the throes of something monstrously destructive and potentially life threatening. But even if one is ignorant to that threat, the effect it has is obvious. This is remarkably confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes all you can do is hold on for dear life.
And you survive. And if you do, that feels like enough.
But staving off defeat is not the same as victory. And once you see the threat, once the problem has been revealed for what it is, the confusion begins to clear. The formerly disparate pieces fall into place: your life, your context, it now makes some kind of sense. Or at least it begins to.
You no longer want to merely survive. You want to eliminate that which does not serve you.
And in light of this understanding, I adopt a new mantra.
“I do not survive; I conquer.”
And, like before, I repeat this on a loop. I don’t believe it at first. I feel strong of body, but weak of spirit. The mantra feels kitschy and self-aggrandizing. My mind tries to reject the premise, as it always does when I attempt self-empowerment.
I recall times when I felt betrayed and lied to, both by others and myself. Indignation lights a tiny flame in my soul. I can see it now. I am just as worthy of happiness as anyone else. And I realize how long I’ve been robbed of that happiness for no goddamn reason.
I am filled by the desire to rise above and show the world and myself just how much better than mere survival I can do.
“I do not survive; I conquer.”
My conviction surges as I repeat the phrase over and over, believing it more each time. And then I combine both mantras into a singular, unified invocation to the goodness of myself.
“Trust yourself. You are more capable than you know. You do not survive; you conquer.”
I talk to myself as one who is on my side, as an ally, a true believer. And not a believer in fairy tales or myths, but a believer in myself.
I reach the gravel road once again. I’m on the home stretch now. I know why I’m out here rather than in Seattle. I know why I’m alone in the middle of nowhere when I would prefer being with Esprit in a bustling metropolis.
I’m repairing myself.
Day by day, I feel inner healing taking place. The first two and a half decades of my life were robbed by the vicious lie that I am a wretched, vile sinner, in whom no good can be found, who deserves no joy or love. So many years were stolen by the lie that decency is external to me, but villainy is embedded into the very fabric of my own disgusting DNA.
As I return to the farmhouse, I reach a definitive resolution: it’s time for a different story. A true story. My story. The story of a kid who grew up hating his own existence, despising his own nature, but who learned he has never been the bad guy, that he can be happy. He is not the villain of his story like he thought he was. He is the conquering hero.
And now, after an arduous and harrowing exile, he returns home, stronger than ever before.