Millennial Probz – Part 1

As I was writing this entry, it became so stereotypically millennial (self-centered, first world problems, all about me, etc) that I’m not even going to try to justify it. So, let’s get right to the sweeping generalizations about Life that I am so qualified to offer after 23 tuned-in years on earth. Hopefully it resonates with someone going through a similar situation, or opens your eyes to another viewpoint.

Millenial Problem #1: pressure to be great / comparison
The biggest problem facing Millennials right now is not unemployment or college debt or our crippling sense of narcissism… although they are related.

The problem is the paralyzing pressure to do something great with our lives, which we gain from our elders’ and peers’ influence and from comparing ourselves to others.

– Teddy Roosevelt

Since childhood, at school and at church, we get this message from adults that we’re destined to be anything we want to be when we grow up, and that we should “reach for the stars” or measure up to heroes like amputees who run marathons, missionaries who move to foreign countries to share the gospel or even our close friends who land big shot jobs in distant cities.

Why is that a problem?
These aspirations can go too far – we let them confuse us. We are not grateful for what we have and what we can readily  accomplish. Why is there this pressure to venture off and do something crazy like backpack across Europe or adopt a kid? Obviously these things are fantastic, and God uses normal people to do incredible things. But I think Millennials get easily dissatisfied with life, because we compare our present selves to these aspirational heroes. And on a level below hero role models, there are our friends and acquaintances posting gorgeous photos of life highlights on social media. Got to vacation in Hawaii? Got married to the love of your life? Go you! I mean that without sarcasm. Sharing your joy with the internet is good practice. Sometimes I get jealous – but that’s on me!

The problem is not people who do awesome stuff with their lives; the problem is people fail to realize that each life is full of awesome stuff that can be celebrated and appreciate.

(… well, and that people very easily forget that awesome stuff posted online is a snapshot or highlight of someones’s life, without the struggles or pain. For example, don’t I look happy in that picture from February of this year? I had just raced my first Baylor Cycling road race. Someone might deduce from my smile and the fact that I shared it on Twitter and Facebook that I was sittin’ pretty, but in reality this was a bleak time.)

Anyway, life’s joy, the accomplishments and anticipations, come from the pursuit of excellence, wherever you’re at. Ad agency job or lawnmowing; Hawaii or stuck at home; it shouldn’t matter, strive to be your best.

So where did I commit this Millennial sin of comparison and allowing myself to feel pressured to do something superhuman?

After four rosy years of sailing through undergrad at Baylor, year 5 (this past year) challenged me in new ways. Between starting graduate school, getting hurt and not running for 6 months, having a job during the school year for the first time ever, and of course random personal experiences that made me actually have to to think for myself, I was experiencing, shall we say, growing pains. On top of all that, I had to plan my moves for the next year (check out my post from December called Scheming) which could have been basically

• finishing my graduate degree at Baylor ($$$ pricy without that athletic aid!)
• knocking off early and looking for a full-time job
• something to do with exclusively running?

If I was getting a job, where? I’m pretty sure I want to work in the running industry but even in that niche there are a lot of options. And how was running going to factor into this decision? What if I meet some dude and get engaged? Where am I going to meet someone? Why am I still single? And oh God, am I ever going to get over this injury and run again? Down the spiral I went…

Life was going against me, or so I felt, and I allowed the pressure to do something incredible with my life to overwhelm me. Talk about a first world problem… there were so many ideas and options for my next year (school vs. work vs. running) cramming my head that I began to feel out of control. I felt inept to achieve anything great; the odds were stacked against me. And even if I could perform a Great Endeavor, where the heck would I start? Instead of excited for the future, I felt powerless and stuck. Since I felt unable to achieve something great, I felt unable to achieve even something small. A couple times, I was doing a mindless  activity like grocery shopping or pool running, and I started thinking about the future too much. The mental overpowered the physical and my heart literally started racing with nervousness. Whoa buddy!

Columbus Ave. in Waco: the specific pool where I had one of my little freakouts

These times exhibited extremely counter-productive thinking.  They were preventing me from striving to be my best. They were allowing a comparison to govern me, blocking me from moving forward and being grateful for the opportunities I did have.

But I beat it, this millennial problem. How? Part 2 of this post is in the works.

Never alone

Even though I’m connected to tons of runners on the internet, and I have lots of people in real life who may not care about running but care about me as a person – last spring, I felt alone. I felt like I was the only person who ever had these specific frustrations of an injury with a seemingly unlimited recovery time, and not knowing the next steps for life (finish school or not).

I felt like nobody understood how upset I was. Even at the time, I knew this was dumb. But that’s how it felt.

So I wrote some blog posts about it.
Part 1: How I used to run track at Baylor (but missed my last season). SAD.
Part 2: The part when it got bad (MAD)
Part 3: Moving forward from there (Maybe I’ll be ok)

     

When I got out my megaphone and wrote those posts, people just knocked my socks off with positive responses. So many people texted me, sent me facebook messages, and talked to me in person, sharing their own stories and encouragement. Old friends, new friends, people I hadn’t talked to in months, parents, people who were like, “We had no idea you felt this way” and people who said “I had that same feeling.” It was incredible and I owe all of you thanks for showing me love in your own ways.

This experience came with some mighty empowering lessons:

1. The internet is awesome. It gives people tools to connect in new ways. My blog gave me a medium to start this conversation with friends who were distant and close.
2. That said, the internet is not magic. You do have to reach out (both online and in person). If you don’t talk about how you’re feeling, people won’t know what’s going on or how to help you.
3. Whatever emotional duress you face, you are never ultimately alone. I believe that thinking that you are alone is a flat out lie. There are a ton of people who have been through similar situations who are ready and able to listen and offer advice.
4. Finally, God never leaves you. I knew this and believed it, even at the mopiest moments, but I didn’t feel it. I think that might just be how life and faith is – you are not going to feel God’s presence all the time. That’s where faith comes in, as in, Hebrews 11:1
   
   Maybe feeling alone and coming out the other side OK was part of learning to actually believe that God was there. What I can say is that even when I was miserable, and I didn’t want to talk to God because in my eyes he was being sucky and not giving me what I wanted – he didn’t stop pursuing me or showing me where he wanted my life to go.

Never alone! I mean it. Oh, and take this chance to reach out to other people sharing encouragement whenever you can. Talk. Network. Nourish. This is the human experience, to reach out and care for each other.

Done with NCAA track career; what’s next?

What does all this depressing stuff about not running for Baylor and how I got to a bad place mean for the future? What the heck is this chick going to do with her life?

Right now I am lining everything up to finish my graduate degree in PR & New Media at Baylor by December of this year. No more resting on my track laurels to pay for school; I won’t be on athletic scholarship next year (no more eligibility, woohoo). However, my department at the Baylor Graduate School is very generous with scholarships and will probably enable me to finish without going into debt. I have faith that if it’s where God wants me to be, finances can work themselves out. If not I can just quit school; I already got one degree.

Not ready to leave this place quite yet. Baylor is phenomenal.

After December, I want to pursue professional running as well as my non-running professional career (a real-world job in PR/ marketing in the running industry) in some capacity. I’m not sure what this is going to look like.

Dream world would be that I’d get back into running this summer, train in Waco this fall, and set up my future so I could pursue 75% running and 25% non-running. I would like to do 100% running, except 1. pro runners don’t make that much money and I’m not even close to that level yet and 2. The running component in this situation would be me being on some post-collegiate team/club, and doing part-time PR for whatever club I join. If I was injured, I could amp up the time spent working for them and they wouldn’t jettison me for not producing results because I would be valuable in non-running ways. That’s my outside assessment, ha, but I still have a lot to learn about the post-collegiate world.

So, if I didn’t get an opportunity to be on post-collegiate team, like if I was mysteriously injured for the next year (which is how it feels right now), the balance of running/work would probably be flipped. I’d get a job like a person who has come to terms with the limits of their physical potential, and pursue running on my own. Run for fun. Maybe compete if I could get it together, train for a marathon, triathlon, ultras, crossfit, whatever.

Sure cross fitters seem crazed…

… But can’t you picture a runner saying this?

No matter the pursuit, I think I just want a niche again. This part is hard to plan because it is unpredictable. I haven’t run for FIVE MONTHS, people, who knows what life is capable of throwing at me!

My little brother keeps telling me it’s ok to hang up the spikes for good, but there are just too many success stories in this sport for me to want to quit. Whatever, he doesn’t know what it’s like. And it’s not like I’m putting myself through torture or missing out on the rest of life to keep trying to pursue running. Well, I mean, heel pain for three months straight/being in a boot for two months was unpleasant, but it wasn’t forever. Grad school at Baylor is a great place to be. Next year, if I don’t go “pro,” worst case I’ll be working a job.

I have not begun to formally contact coaches or apply for jobs. There’s a lot going on here just keeping my head above water with schoolwork and my job at the running store. I can work on this in the summer and fall. I’m at the point in my job search right now where I have these unspecific fantasies about living somewhere uber-outdoorsy like Colorado or California, but we’ll see how I actually feel about leaving home in Texas when it comes decision-time.

Point is, I don’t have to put all my eggs in one basket of running, because I picked a career that allows time for outside hobbies (unlike someone who wants to go to med school and can’t do that + run at the same time). Besides, every professional athlete needs an outlet besides sports to keep them from going crazy by focusing only on the sport.

Recap: I still want to run. Scheming and dreaming as to how exactly to do that. Not sure why I bother planning; stuff always turns out differently. And from what I hear, this feeling of uncertainty, possibility and so much opportunity it’s crushing you are all part of being in your 20s! Growing up, y’all.

One great thing I have learned (more to come for sure) is that even without running, I still wake up and find out that the world is still spinning, people still love me, and I can still make a difference.

from my last summer job at Team Prep USA. One foot in front of the other…

The part when it got bad

Since I was 7 years old, I have been a runner. I was a 5k fun runner with my mom, I was a basketball player who ran on the side, I was a costumed Cap 10k runner, I was a high school trackster traveling to meets with my parents, and I was a member of a collegiate track program. Even with injuries or high school summer vacations, I never took more than a couple months off. But now I’ve been off for five months, an amusing yet staggering figure to me.

Naturally, I’ve had a lot of time for reflection about my sport and what it means to me. I miss running. The last five months have, mentally, been the worst of my life. Running was a consistent thread in my life, and without it I’ve found it very difficult to focus on managing my time, feeling motivated about anything, and feeling like I’m accomplishing anything useful in school, work or relationships. When I stopped running in November, I felt a lack of motivation for the rest of life, and that quickly manifested itself in a lack of accomplishment. Everything, at least in my small-minded view, started to fall out of order.

With school, I stopped doing reading for classes. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just didn’t make it happen and did other stuff like spend an entire morning making marshmallows from scratch instead. I sat through classes bored and uninvolved. At night, I’d surf the internet until 3 or 4 am. Several times when I had a big assignment due the next day, I’d procrastinate literally all night on my computer until 7 a.m. because I couldn’t make myself start the assignment. I NEVER did this in undergrad; if you had a tempo to run at 6:30 a.m. somehow you could find a way to get school done. I wasn’t perfect then, but I was not disordered to that level. It was scary.

With working out and overall health, cycling was a decent outlet for a while, but it just didn’t provide the same validation or compulsion that running did. I did alright in the first couple months with near-daily cross training, getting more involved in the Baylor Cycling Club (mountain biking! *fist pump*), but in December I started to slip. My doctor directed me to sit out the bike as a new tactic for speeding up healing on my stress fracture, and swimming just didn’t have the same draw for me to work out. Not to mention, all my night owl antics didn’t leave me feeling fresh and ready to work out very often. There were a couple three-week spans where I didn’t work out AT ALL. Not having to eat to perform (no track practice this afternoon = chocolate chips for breakfast no prob), plus late-night binges and the lack of working out caused me to gain weight, which was another stressor. My self-damning logic here was even if I did get my foot healthy, I’d be too heavy to run fast.

My relationship with God was up and down. I know God is the only true constant in my life on earth, and sometimes that motivated me, but other times I got down about religion or how bad of a Christian I was being. I knew I still had it pretty good compared to the rest of the world, but that made me feel worse for being ungrateful. A cynical part of me says, “you are just experiencing moods,” or “you are overspiritualizing,this” but I know that God is real because I’ve felt his work in my life in the past, and I’ve seen it in the lives of others. Now, I could say a lot of cheesy things about journey/destination or spout out some “Peaceful Warrior” quote, but you’ve heard it all before (because it’s true).

I used to wonder how runners would get so discouraged during injuries. Why would so many wimp out and quit? Well, it’s pretty tough not knowing, facing disappointment and disappointing yourself. You guys … now I know.

This is the rock bottom truth, and I didn’t want to hide it or say I was always positive or did the right things during my injury. I let negative cycles and downward spirals embed themselves into my psyche. So, life felt messed up; I was messed up without running.

I wrote this whole entry in past tense because I wanted to indicate, “that was then, this is now,” and it’s just too freaking scary to think I’m still in this hole. But it’s not really over. I still can’t run, and I’m still learning to deal with finding motivation and validation from other places.
All I can say is that some days I wake up with an epic kind of realization, like the feeling you get when you listen to Explosions in the Sky. I haven’t been thinking of anything, drawing out some reasoned path for why I know what I know; I’ve been asleep. But I wake up knowing absolutely, innately that this is a beautiful adventure God’s laid out for me.

Wallowing

This video shows what I can’t put into words – what an incredible sport. I wish I was out there. For those of you who are, get after it and enjoy it!