So. Still on a high from last nights physical breakthrough. Still marveling about the fact that I could do that when I had NO idea I could. I guess alot of the barriers I had to breaking through and just finding that groove were of the mental variety, and for whatever reason, last night, those walls tumbled away.
I started thinking about my past "exercise" self. I mean WAY past. I have been thinking why I can do at 40 what I couldn't do at 14. I am serious, I couldn't run. Or at least, I was convinced I couldn't, by myself and by others. Here's the thing, and forgive me if it rambles a bit from here, but I am just now processing some stuff that I think I have been carrying with me since I was old enough to be self conscious. I am blind in one eye, legally blind that is. As a result I have no peripheral vision on my right side and I also have no natural depth perception. As a result I sucked, and continue to suck, at traditional team sports of the sort we were raised and graded on in gym class. I was horrible at soccer, basketball, badminton, softball etc. Anything that required hand eye coordination was lost to me. I felt it was because I wasn't good enough, was not able to do what the other kids could do because of some kind of ineptitude and that was reinforced each and every time teams were picked and I was always the last one picked. It got to the point in grade 12 that instead of participating in gym class, I instead did drawings of people in sports events and gave them to my gym teacher so I was doing SOMETHING in gym class.
Now though, now I am thinking that I was made to think I was a non athlete because of a disability I had but no one acknowledged, either through ignorance or lack of caring. Never once was an alternative offered. I was not encouraged to say, lift weights, or jog or run or do some other form of activity other than the ones that were offered. I was being set up for failure, I graduated from high school with the mentality that I would NEVER be able to run or be fit or take part in sports because hey, I was too fat, too slow, to uncoordinated and always, the last one picked.
Maybe that's harsh and not near the truth, but it feels right to me.
I can run, I can lift weight, I can be an athlete..... I just can't catch a ball or avoid a body check..... and for my adult life I have paid the price of thinking that in order to be an athlete, I had to do the things I never could do.
Again, setting myself up for defeat....
Well, that was then and while the lessons we learn when we are growing up are often the lessons we carry to the grave, I have to purge this lesson from my mind, I have to convince myself that the people who picked me last were wrong all along and I do have it in me to be as good as anyone else with the will and drive to move forward. I just wish that it hadn't taken this long to figure it out.
I just now as I read this had another little realization. I think this deep seeded belief that I couldn't be athletic or that I would always be the fat boy who got picked last is what caused the weight to go back on each and every time I lost it. I always felt like a faker, that a Cory Babstock at 180lbs was not a "REAL" Cory Babstock, that I was pretending to be something I'm not.
Maybe some of you have read the comic The Dark Knight Returns? In the opening story Harvey Dent, Two Face, is cured of his disfigurement and his face is made whole. As the story proceeds Harvey returns to crime and the Batman soon tracks him down. When confronted Harvey reveals that in his mind, his face is indeed whole, but its all scarred now, that no matter how he looked on the outside, he was damaged on the inside and that he would always revert back to what HE felt he was. That's kind of how I felt as a skinny fella, that on the inside I was still the insecure fat man and that no matter what the world saw, I would always be that man.
That's not how I see myself this time.
This time its not about being fat or skinny, its about being the athlete I was never allowed to think I could be. Its about running a 5k, its about the rush of doing something I never imagined I could, its about discovering that I can be a runner and I can be something other than the last kid leaning against the wall. I pick ME to be on MY team first and I am thrilled to have me there!
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