Sorry for not replying sooner
Sometimes the most hurtful comments come from the people closest to you, but for me, it came from an acquaintance.
In Jess Ekstrom’s Chasing the Bright Side, she says we have a box in our brains labeled “Things that Will Never Happen to Me Move On!…they are events that have never touched our palette of experience, so we don’t even need to imagine what it would be like to experience it. So we stuff the story in our box and move on.”
In that box are all the things you think would never in a million years happen to you. Well, I can safely say that box gets lighter as I continue on my life journey.
I’m a person that follows her heart. Some people would call me reckless. I have been known to be spontaneous, quick to judge and to proceed without caution. I firmly believe in the Universe and trust that my challenges and issues will work themselves out. This doesn’t mean I sit around waiting for the next sign. I take action and I keep moving forward.
In July of 2018, I fell in love. So what, right? It’s a little more complicated than that.
When I announced I was getting my second divorce on Facebook, a “friend” commented, “Des, you’re really good at running.” He was a part of a past life, a friend of my then-husband when I attended college at Brigham Young University. His comment could have easily gotten lost in the shuffle because I was deep into ultrarunning.
But after I read his comment the second time, something ruptured inside of me. It made my blood boil. Why should I have to justify my actions to someone who barely knows me? I didn’t reply and eventually deleted my FB account and stopped running.
Clearly, there were things I couldn’t explain out loud to anyone. Running helped cover up other issues. It numbed the pain of what I still had yet to understand about myself. Writing changed that for me. When I stopped running, I started writing and the real issues with my mental health began to surface. Finally, the things I felt that were too difficult to explain came out in my writing and it became a healing balm.
I couldn’t explain to that acquaintance that I was not in love with that man or that I was suffering from years of depression.
I couldn’t explain to anyone when I wasn’t running, I was imagining what it would be like to crawl into a fetal position and go to sleep and never wake up again.
Nor did it help I met the second ex in the midst of leaving Mormonism and my first marriage. I couldn’t help him understand that my decision to leave Mormonism after 22 years was devastating and crippling on its own.
It goes without saying that I am a complex woman with a load of issues who is still learning and growing from them. I am throwing away that labeled box because I live in a world of nevers, where anything is possible. I married for the third time to the man I fell in love with in 2018. We have two girls together.
Yasser here’s my reply, “Thanks, I’m a good runner because I’m running towards something better.”
desireeharos.com 