This is me. This is all of me. 🫶

Reflecting on setbacks that keep us from doing things we love. 🥺

This is the third time I’ve sat down to write this article. It started as a simple piece about setbacks, a topic I’ve become well-acquainted with the past nine months. I let the piece simmer overnight, as I usually do, and the next morning, I didn’t feel right sending it. Why? I didn’t want to be a Debbie Downer in your inbox. It wasn’t a feel-good piece. It was, in brief: reality check, setbacks suck.

But later that morning I went to drop off a copy of my book to a good friend. This is someone I don’t see often but with whom I can be instantly honest. You know those friends? Hold onto those ones. She asked how I was doing, and when someone like that asks how I’m doing, I don’t say, great, thanks, the way I do at the grocery store check-out. Instead, I teared up and said: It’s been rough.

I told her what had been happening, some of which I can’t include here. But the piece I can use today for the purposes of unpacking this topic is related to my fitness. To summarize, since January I’ve had two broken toes and suffered from long COVID symptoms. I’ve been frustrated by my inability to keep up the level of fitness that I both want and need. Seriously, I just want to pound it out on a run sometimes, get my heart rate up, and sweat out the stress. Sure, I have other ways of coping, but physical activity serves a multitude of purposes for me. And being in perpetual healing mode, physically, has felt like I have a shaky foundation underneath all the other stuff I’m building in my life.

“You make it look easy on social media,” my friend said. It wasn’t a jab. She’s just the kind of person who knows that there’s always more to the story.

The comment made me realize that I needed to revisit this article. I shouldn’t hold back from my community because I don’t want to be a downer. Because, if anything, my past experience of being vulnerable with you has taught me that these are the kinds of words people need to read.