Evening Docket: Recent Episodes
Rebecca
Susan Sontag wrote that “[i]llness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” Between Two Kingdoms, a new memoir by leukemia survivor Suleika Jaouad, takes up Sontag’s formulation to describe her experience of emerging from the kingdom of the sick and trying to live once again in the kingdom of the well.
This Between zone is where I find myself, too. To anyone whose daily business in the land of the well might intersect with mine, I’m sure I appear to belong. I work full time, care for my family and my home, and am regularly out running in my neighborhood. I look normal and healthy. You can’t see that part of my scalp is gone forever, removed to prevent a cancerous lesion from metastasizing, replaced with other skin that doesn’t grow hair or nerves. You can’t see where I was injected over and over again with an experimental vaccine, in another attempt to thwart cancer, poked so many times in the same spot that the fibrous tissue underneath is still indurated and discolored almost a year later. You can’t see the tumors that took hold inside my body, despite everything. You can’t see how modern medication has reprogrammed and amped up my immune cells to exterminate the invaders. You can’t see that battle’s collateral damage, the friendly fire by overzealous immune cells that won’t seem to leave my perfectly healthy eyes alone, making my world look fluid, distorted, and tenuous — just like my efforts to blend in with the healthy.
Things used to seem so much clearer, before I left the land of the well and discovered the other place.
And yet, at least for now, I’m not really in the land of the sick, either. I spent just enough time there to understand what it is, how existence there is different than what I’d always known. The first thing to learn is that many of the currencies of the land of the well are worthless in the land of the sick. There are no top students, award winners, or record holders. There are no certificates or degrees. Even your cold hard cash will only go so far. In the land of the sick, the only thing that really matters about you is this: how hard can you fight to love the life you have left?
When I first learned I had cancer, I was overcome by fear. I saw immediately that fear could make my life miserable even if I was in fact far from death and physically feeling fine. With the doctors already helping me fight off my illness, I concluded that my main job was to fight off fear, to prevent it from stealing my life early. I conceived of fear as my mortal enemy, always lurking, waiting for a chance to ruin my day when I least expected it. This perspective made sense back when I thought I’d merely been kidnapped into the land of the sick briefly but had safely returned “home,” to my familiar healthy existence where medical appointments were rare and I commonly planned out my life several years into the future. It also made sense after I found myself suddenly back in the land of the sick, maybe forever. Who knew how much time I had left, and how could I possibly allow my precious life to be dominated by feelings of terror? I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.
Here in the Between, though, fear turns out to be more complex. Of course I’m still afraid of dying before my work is done — afraid that maybe the very good news I’ve gotten will turn bad before long, as happens all too frequently for cancer patients. I’m still afraid that, even if a good chunk of time is left on my clock, I’ll never really belong to the land of the well again. I remember the version of myself that was nurtured there, thrived there, and I’m afraid that the “me” I knew for so long might be fading away as I become someone too different, too fast. But looking back toward the land of the sick, now I’m afraid of a new thing. Even though much is lost to shadow in that difficult place, important things also come into focus if you can manage to retain your sense of self. Who and what you love, and who loves you, for example. The insignificant preciousness of your one very own unique life. What it really means to be human.
In the land of the well, these notions struggle to transcend the cliche. In the land of the sick, though, they become so real that you can almost reach out and touch them. Here in the Between, I remember being able to perceive these terrible and beautiful truths, but my apprehension of them is fading like a dream in the light of day. I’m afraid that I’ll forget what I understood when I was sicker. I’m afraid that if I have a chance to set up a new residence in the land of the well, I’ll just end up rebuilding one of those walls that healthy people erect in a vain effort to separate themselves from the other place.
Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, recently fielded a question about when we might hope to return to our “normal,” the way things used to be before the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives. He said: “I don’t want to go back there. It wasn’t a safe place — for our planet, or for social justice or for extremism or for human health.” That’s similar to how I feel now about the land of the well. It looks beautiful, but it’s built on a false and unsustainable foundation. If I try to live there again, won’t I just be setting myself up to be blind-sided again and again whenever I’m forced to remember that we can’t stay healthy forever?
There’s nowhere that I can hide from fear. But maybe that’s just as it should be.
I’ve always loved the Pixar movie Inside Out. The main characters are five emotions that live inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl: Joy, Disgust, Anger, Fear, and Sadness. Although Joy seems to be the ringleader, and perhaps truly is the girl’s raison d’etre, the story is about the purpose of those other, uncomfortable emotions — how they all protect us in their own ways and, just like Joy, help us live our best lives.
Being in the Between has given me space to realize that Fear is not my mortal enemy. She’s me — or, at least, she’s part of me. She loves me more than anything, and all she wants is to protect me from being hurt. When the protector emotions and their priorities take control, though, things can go off the rails.
I’ve already had some experience with this earlier in life, with another emotion, Pride, taking too long a turn with my steering wheel. She not-so-secretly believed she represented my best self, and she got very good at deflecting any other part of me. She always intended to be upbeat, empowering, for my own good of course:
I can achieve anything I want. Why not? Just try and stop me. Throw all the obstacles you want in my path; they don’t matter.
It doesn’t matter if I’m a girl. It doesn’t matter if I’m short or quiet or awkward. It doesn’t matter if I’m different, if I don’t look the part. It doesn’t matter if the odds are not in my favor. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired, or sick, or scared. It doesn’t matter if this is all new and unfamiliar. It doesn’t matter if I already tried and failed. It doesn’t matter if I’m not from around here, if I don’t know a single person in the room. It doesn’t matter if it turns out they don’t like me, if they’re not impressed. It doesn’t matter if they don’t believe in me. It doesn’t matter what they say, what they think. It doesn’t matter if I have to do it alone. It doesn’t matter if it’s uncomfortable, if it’s painful. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t enough time, if I don’t have enough information. It doesn’t matter if I messed up and can’t take it back. It doesn’t matter if I’d have chosen something different than what I got, if this isn’t what I was hoping for, if I’m disappointed. It doesn’t matter how I really feel.
A lot of things don’t matter. Maybe nothing matters.
You see the problem. One emotion declaring herself queen, for our protection, can send us spiraling out of control.
Fear, who has protected me so well for so long, doesn’t want to be queen, would truly rather stay in the background of my consciousness, hasn’t a clue how or where to steer me. But she knows she has one job to do, and she will damn well grab the wheel and start screaming for help if she sees I’m in danger. And with so many very real threats lately, who can blame her for wanting to make sure someone sees them, someone does something, to make sure I’ll be ok?
In the land of the well, Pride would normally dismiss Fear, tell her that whatever she was screaming about didn’t matter, and send her back into the dark. In the land of the sick, Pride totally lost her sense of direction, leaving Fear to set my course as best she could. But here in the Between, Pride — and Joy, too — have a little time to regroup. They recognize Fear as their sister, their ally. They have time to sit with her, put their arms around her, calm her down, and tell her: Thank you, darling, we know. We see the gauntlet of dangers everywhere, too, mixed in with our ambitions and our inspirations and our loves and everything we find beautiful and meaningful. It all matters. We don’t really have a plan to navigate it yet, but we’re going to figure it out, little by little — together.
Current recommendations:
The stories of other Betweeners. When I allow myself to look with eyes open, I see just how many people who spend time in the land of the well, and may even pass for “normal,” are nevertheless unable to be at home there. Perhaps no one knows that better than families caring for children with disabilities. Jamie Davis Smith, raising a daughter with complex special needs, wrote for KCET about how, even with two white-collar salaries, her family was unable to pay for the care necessary for her maturing child to live a life of dignity.
“‘Oh, We’re Still In This.’ The Pandemic Wall is Here.” By Maura Judkis in The Washington Post. I felt like I reached some sort of limit in January, despite enjoying significant protections against the various hardships of COVID-19. I didn’t realize everyone else was feeling the same way.
Sarah Blondin on the Insight Timer meditation app. I’ve been practicing meditation to calm my fears and also the restlessness caused by hitting the above-mentioned pandemic wall. I find myself unable to engage with most guided meditation, but Sarah has my number.
Climate journalism. Although few of us need more to be afraid of right now, as a non-scientist I’m always grateful to be educated about the nature of the climate emergency. Like the land of the well, the climate we know is more transient than we’d like to believe, and we haven’t grappled with what other environmental conditions are possible for our descendants. In The Atlantic, Peter Brannen reminds us that “[w]e live on a wild planet, a wobbly, erupting, ocean-sloshed orb that careens around a giant thermonuclear explosion in the void. Big rocks whiz by overhead, and here on the Earth’s surface, whole continents crash together, rip apart, and occasionally turn inside out, killing nearly everything. Our planet is fickle.” Climate-alarm fatigue is real, and we should be careful about over-exposure to this genre. But I like how this piece challenges us to try to think in geologic time.
Starting seeds. In this dead of a pandemic winter, wondering what my future holds, I’ve needed so badly to just see something grow. I haven’t had great success with starting seeds indoors before, but this year I’m trying again with flower, herb, and tomato seeds from Botanical Interests. As they start to sprout, I’m reminded every day how life finds a way.
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Run through the jungle
Flashback: I’m a 28-year-old full-time mom and PhD drop-out, and I’m ready to race my first official mile. Actually, “ready” is probably overstating it.
I live in a new state, again. This evening’s summer track meet is the fifth in a weekly community series, each with a featured event and points for placing. I came in second in the 100-meter and 200-meter features, and then I won the 400 meters and 800 meters. I don’t really know how to run a mile strategically, and one of my competitors definitely seems like she does. But if I win this race tonight, I’ll be the series champion.
How am I back at the starting line of a race? In the years after leaving collegiate sports, I’ve contorted myself into a distance runner. Improbably, I’ve learned to run 5Ks for speed, not just to finish. I have no natural endurance, so every 15-second improvement on my mile pace is hard-won. And it all disappears whenever I fall behind on training. During the first year of my doctoral program, for example. When I was pregnant, for another. When I broke my ankle, running, two months postpartum and determined to recover my fitness sooner with the second kid. Back to square one, every damn time.
But I win the mile. My husband watches from the infield with our kids, who are parked in the double jogger sharing an iPad. It’s a flash in the pan, though. In a matter of weeks, I’ll start law school, traumatize my babies by abandoning them in day care, and discover that one of them is on the autism spectrum. I will spend the next two years figuring out on my own how to help her learn the basics of social life, since no one else seems to know how. Did I mention we’re still potty training?
Distance running turned out to be a perfect metaphor for my 20s. In those years, I learned that I could get where I wanted only if I tried harder than I ever knew I could — and sometimes not even then. There would always be unforeseen obstacles.
I’d trained hard as a sprinter, but ultimately I was just throwing all my energy into a short race on a flat course and hoping for the best. No matter what, it would be over soon. But distance running takes a different kind of mental toughness. You’ve been running hard for minutes on end, often over rough or unpredictable terrain, and all you want to do is stop. And of course, you can stop. You’re an independent person; you don’t have to keep running. Unless you want to get anywhere. And if you also want to get better, you have to not only keep going but go faster. Somehow, you have to find a way.
Often, that involves talking yourself into something, in running and in life:
“I don’t know if I can stay in this relationship.” Hang on, it might get better.
“They’re going to kick me out of this graduate program.” Just try to make it through this patch and then see what happens.
“I didn’t realize this baby would never sleep.” The hill flattens out up ahead.
“I definitely cannot take care of another baby already; the one I have is not even a year old.” Dig deep.
“I had to take a cough-syrup nap in my car this morning after Civil Procedure. These day care plagues are going on six weeks.” What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
“My kid has the wrong day care, the wrong doctor, the wrong therapist. Why don’t any of these professionals know how to help us?” Dig deeper.
“That lawyer said I can’t be in the top ten percent of my class because I have kids. I don’t believe her.” Steady breath; steady pace.
“This judge thinks I might be less dedicated as a clerk because I have a kid with special needs. What if I can’t get a job after I graduate?” The finish line is in sight.
“How am I the only woman attorney in this law firm? I’m not sure I belong here.” If you want to move forward, you have to keep going.
Carl Jung said that we can’t live the afternoon of life according to the rules of life’s morning. My morning has passed, and it doesn’t seem important anymore whether I can still chase the next personal best. I’m trying to catch other things now: Opportunities for my children to find happiness. A fulfilling career. A life I’ll be proud of. As far as I can tell, none of that is available to me without the perseverance I learned from evolving as an athlete. Running turned out to be a means to other ends.
But as my runs get longer, I start to lose track of whether I’m chasing something, or something is chasing me. Family members, old and young, pass away. So do other people I know: A good friend’s husband cursed with a rare cancer. A girl on my high school track and field team who had a baby about the same time I did before the flu took her. A professor at my law school, also with kids about the ages of my own, shot to death in his driveway on a sunny weekday morning.
Steady breath; steady pace. Not too fast. The finish line is in sight.
Lesson four: Your 20s feel like a wilderness, and not everyone makes it out. If you emerge having learned the difference between the means and the ends in life, call it a success and keep going.
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Running down a dream
Flashback: I’m 19 years old, and I run track for a small university known for its engineering and pre-med programs. I’m on an academic scholarship, not an athletic one. But by now, there is no “me” without running. I spend three hours a day stretching, training, icing. I regularly throw up at practice from the adrenaline and exertion. I do 100 situps every night. I have a boyfriend I met on the team last year. (I’ll marry him later.) I have never felt stronger.
Today, I’m in Atlanta for the league championships at the end of my sophomore year. It’s the second day of competition, and I’m about to run in the 200-meter final. It’s hot as hell, and I’m hiding from the sun wherever there’s shade or air conditioning. The first race of any meet can feel a little stiff, but I’ve already run the 100-meter final and the 4x100-meter relay today. Going into the 200 meters, I feel loose and relaxed.
In the short sprints, every hundredth of a second matters. In my 100-meter final this morning, I tied for fifth place. One hundredth faster would have put me in fourth, one place shy of a medal. For sprinters like me who are as familiar with their top speed as with the sound of their own voice, those hundredths of a second are mostly gained and lost at the starting line, in the efficiency with which you explode out of the blocks (without a false start) and then how quickly you can establish your optimal pace. You can’t pop immediately into your upright posture. For the first few strides, you’ll get farther, faster, if you give in to that initial horizontal momentum that keeps your head low. It gets more complicated in the 200 meters because you can’t run straight; you need to find the curved inside lane line ASAP and hug it tight.
In this 200-meter final, the heat sheet shows my name in lane seven, based on my qualifying time. Most people think the outer lanes are worse because you can’t see who’s actually ahead of you until you get to the straightaway. But I don’t mind: Fear makes me run faster. (So does anger. Don’t ask me how I know.) And as it happens, my nemesis, Valerie, is in lane eight today; she must have held back in the semis. When it’s time to get in our lanes, I start the work of visualizing how I’ll get past her.
But the adrenaline coursing through my body is distracting, and my stomach is turning over and over. The minutes before a race have always tortured me. I was the fastest girl in my high school; now I’m the fastest woman at my college. But I still can’t shake that suspicion that people think I’m not supposed to be here, that there’s something wrong with the picture when I step up to the starting line. Leaving that aside, I’m now running in the last meet of the season, the last chance until next year to make my hard work count for something. I see my teammates in the stands along the straightaway. I close my eyes. I never pray, except at starting lines. I form a plea to just let it be ok when the race is over. I don’t really know what I mean by those words; they’re just what my soul has chosen, in that moment, to whisper into the universe, which feels like it’s closing in on me.
“Set!” Head down. Strong arms. Hug the line. Get Valerie.
Gun.
My start is perfect. I fly around the curve, barely feeling the effort, barely feeling the ground beneath my feet. I catch Valerie before the straightaway and forget about her; the only thing in my brain now is the closing distance between me and the finish line. The distance disappears.
My time is a personal best. I’m not even tired. That’s good news to my 4x400-meter relay teammates, who are getting ready for the very last race of the meet. When the time comes, I run my personal best 400-meter leg, handing our anchor runner the baton in first place. We set a school record.
As the season ends, I revel in how well prepared I’ll be to run even faster next year. If I could run that 200-meter time without getting tired, can’t I go even faster? My best 100 meters was in high school; that record is due to be broken. Our relay anchor was running on an injury; next year she’ll be healthy and we’ll go to nationals.
But I will never run that fast again.
Racing warps your perspective. You don’t see where you’ve been or who you’ve left in your dust. You see only the course ahead, and who’s still in front of you.
I spent my junior year watching the parts of my life that I loved most from a brutal distance. My boyfriend moved away for graduate school; most days, our long-distance relationship left me feeling like my life had a hole in it. On a freezing March Saturday with snow in the forecast, I pulled my hamstring in the first outdoor 100-meter dash of the year. My season was over as soon as it started. At the championship meet that year, I was in the stands when Valerie won the 200 meter dash, cutting a full second off the time she’d run when she lost to me the year before. My 4x400-meter team trained my replacement, set a new school record, and trained for nationals without me.
My senior year was only a lukewarm improvement. My boyfriend and I briefly broke up, then spent months piecing our relationship back together. As the indoor track season got underway, I was focused on figuring out what I’d do after college. I didn’t get another season-ending injury, but my quadricep felt strained and vulnerable all year, always keeping me at about 90 percent of my top speed. My times were decent, but stagnant. At the league championship, the last meet of my career, I thought our 4x100-meter relay might have a chance to medal. But the handoff between our second and third runners went awry, leaving me to barrel gamely down the home stretch in last place.
When I stepped to the line for the last time to anchor our 4x400-meter relay, I felt broken. As had become my habit at the start of most races, I whispered to God, or the goddesses, or the universe, or whatever: “Please just let it be ok.” Years later, when I realized that I had been running mainly against myself this whole time, I finally understood the meaning of my vague prayer: Please let me feel the satisfaction, the fulfillment, the joy of this adventure when it’s over, no matter what happens. I took the baton. We finished in the middle of the pack. Back in my apartment that night, I had nothing but grief.
I’d spent more than eight years trying to run down that next hundredth of a second. But the chase was over.
Lesson three: All things end. The hardest goodbyes overwhelm whatever dignity and grace you possess; you die a little. Let yourself mourn, even if you never really stop.
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Run like a girl
Flashback: I’m 13 years old, and I’ve been abruptly plopped down in a new home in a new state, right in the middle of eighth grade. I’m more comfortable with myself than I used to be, having adopted grunge as my personal style in everything from clothes to hair to music. I’ve learned to protect myself with sarcasm and scorn. But at my new school, grunge is unexpectedly situated in a vast and lonely plain between Gothville and Little Stepford. And everyone already knows who their friends are; they don’t need another one. I know where I am, but I feel lost just the same.
Another gym class, another round of 50-meter dashes. Good. Some of these boys are actually cute, and I’m looking forward to getting their attention by outrunning them. I don’t need them to like me. I just want to interest someone. Anyone.
Except, for the first time ever, I can’t beat them. Up until now, the really athletic boys were the only ones who were ever faster than me. But suddenly, fully half of these awkward goons are posting significantly better times than mine. It’s not a fluke.
I finally realize that these aren’t really boys, and we’re not kids racing on the playground. I’ve been in a woman’s body for a couple of years already, as tall as I’m ever going to be at five-foot-two and change. And I’m competing against young men, growing toward their full hulking heights on just a slight delay. A few of them are more than a foot taller than I am. Getting noticed has become, in addition to everything else, a vertical challenge.
Looking back now, I see how much it mattered that I became a runner before I became a woman. Because of that timing, my understanding of femininity was always forced to co-exist with my reality as an athlete. Young women constantly confront gendered expectations that conflict with athletics: You’re not tough; you shouldn’t be tough. Your main value is in looking pretty, being pretty. You can’t attract boys if you’re competing with them. Your accomplishments and tenacity are fundamentally less interesting than whatever the boys are doing.
But my identity as a runner never felt any less absolute than my sex, my gender, or my sexuality. I was a cisgendered, heterosexual female athlete, all non-negotiable facts intertwined within my person in perfect harmony with each other. They formed an undeniable truth that dispensed, in short order, with any contrary expectations that were thrown into my path.
The harmonies got more complex as gender started to matter more in my life. When I ran on my first track team in seventh grade, no one explained why boys and girls had to race separately even though we practiced together. Maybe it seemed obvious why. Or maybe no one wanted to spell out for the girls that, because of our anatomy, we soon wouldn’t be able to keep up with our peers who happened to be male. Still, even when the teams officially bifurcated, I never stopped running with boys and men. Informally, track-and-field is almost a co-ed sport; event specialists often do the same workouts at the same time and place, regardless of gender. It wasn’t uncommon for us to literally run our sprint repeats together. In those years, I learned to think of perseverance in the face of adversity — sometimes hopeless adversity — as a defining attribute of femininity.
But perseverance against long odds wasn’t only about running with boys. More often than not, I got set in my starting blocks next to girls who were taller, stronger, and older than me. I sometimes lined up against fierce competitors whose muscle fibers would always twitch faster than mine, no matter how hard I trained. I gave everything I had racing girls I already knew would beat me, since I followed their times every week in the newspaper. For the vast majority of girls I raced, I was the unbeatable one. They ran with me anyway.
It never occurred to me to think of any of these arrangements as unfair. I never wondered if one of my bigger, stronger opponents was “really” a girl, never thought I wanted to race people only if their testosterone levels, height, age, and muscle structure were comparable to mine. Those constraints would be alien to a male athlete focused purely on reaching his peak performance. I like to think they were alien to me, too, just like they were later in life when I studied and worked in male-dominated environments.
And yet. Sex-based differences, whether natural or nurtured, sometimes do merit separate considerations. “Girls’ track” always felt like a necessary contrivance to me, the best feasible way to organize things for all the people wanting to be involved. I appreciate that system for nurturing my competition experience and motivation. It made people celebrate my (relative) talent when they woudn’t have cared otherwise. It made me push myself toward goals that seemed within reach. In fact, the people in my community accepted the legitimacy of “girls track” so readily that I could almost forget that the boys’ sprinters would smoke me in a head-to-head race. Almost.
On the other hand, unless you’re Usain Bolt, there’s always somebody faster. At the end of the day, competing on the track for me was always this simple:
“Wanna race me from here to there?” Hell yeah.
Lesson two: There’s no wrong way to be female. However you choose to do it, just try to find people who inspire you to bring your best game.
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Get set. Go.
Flashback: I’m 9 years old, and I’m starting to notice how much is wrong with me.
I have thick, unruly dark hair, and I’ve somehow allowed it to be cut boyish-short. My fashion sense includes stirrup pants and prints that are garrish even for 1990. I haven’t heard much current pop music; I’m not allowed to watch TV. I don’t know how to play any team sports. I seem to come down with one cold after another, always looking for the tissues. I speak so quietly that people give up trying to listen. I’m the youngest kid in my class, and I spend recesses playing tag instead of chatting with other girls. My talents — piano, schoolwork, tree-climbing — turn out to be worth very little in elementary school social capital.
But at age ten, I discover that I have speed.
Our school gym teacher was called Art. In fifth grade, Art tells us we’re going to learn to race. You have to run a certain way to reach your top speed, Art says. You lift your knees high and use your arms to push forward. It’s called sprinting. He demonstrates, running in place in an Adidas track suit. There’s a swell of laughter. “That’s how Rebecca runs!” say some kids who know me from tag.
For several minutes, we all practice “sprinting” with our knees up and our arms swinging, prancing around the gym and enjoying a bit of freedom to act ridiculous. I’m mostly relieved we don’t have to throw any balls today. Eventually, Art takes us outside and has us form a line. One by one, he times us over what he calls a 25-meter “dash.” Standing around waiting, our 10-year-old personalities get a little silly — chatting, teasing, laughing. When everyone has run, all we really care about is who was the fastest.
I don’t know if I’m surprised it was me. I just know that everyone else is. In fifth grade, we believe in simple, predictable narratives and stock characters. I am not supposed to shine in this context. As we line up again for a 50-meter dash, there’s less laughing, especially from the boys. In the back of my mind, I understand that they believe they’re supposed to be faster than girls. Especially this girl. I know that beating them won’t make me more popular. But I also have nothing to lose. I run. I win, again.
“I knew it,” says Art, winking at me.
At first, my speed does not compute. Those dashes weren’t real races, after all. We’d each run alone, against only the clock. People seem to need the storyline to be corrected. Kids stop wanting to play tag with me and instead challenge me to race outright, head to head. I keep accepting, keep winning. I get to know my top speed and how to find it. Boys soon stop asking me to race. For them, the results are the facts.
But among the girls, a consensus nevertheless forms that a different one of us should be the fastest. Mandy is a popular and reliable all-around athlete, unlike my scared-of-baseballs self. A race is arranged: a course set, competitors recruited, and spectators corralled. We run. I win, unacceptably. “Go again!” kids yell. Back to the starting line, and Mandy and I take off a second time. As we speed by, someone implores: “Let her win, Rebecca!”
For one second, the open call for a fake loss throws me off. It’s so blatant, and I don’t understand it. But Mandy hisses “No!” through labored breath, snapping me out of my confusion. I find my fastest gear and pull ahead of her, to the disappointment of most of our audience.
But at our makeshift finish line, she smiles genuinely at me and says, “good run.” For the first time, I realize that my speed is not one of the things wrong with me. Mandy heads back to her friends. The narrative shifts.
Lesson one: Defy expectations, and write your own script.
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