By this time last year, I was almost done culling all the committees from my calendar.
I had thought contributing to those groups would make me happy, or at least make me feel like a good person, but it didn’t. Instead, I felt drained and uninspired. I felt removed from the charities I was supporting and smothered by the childish infighting among people who were supposedly present to give back to the community. I learned – not quickly, but eventually – that volunteers aren’t always compassionate, board members aren’t always competent, and adults aren’t always as mature as the average 7th grader. I learned to dread my committee meetings with a stomach-turning, lung-strangling anxiety. I learned that doing something “good” can feel shockingly bad.
So I stopped. I gracefully left everything (after completing significant milestones and transitioning my role to replacements; I’m not a monster). When I was free, it took a little while to enjoy the space to breathe, the space to think about the difference between having a full life and having a fulfilling life.
With Jenn’s help, I tried to figure out what I want(ed) and what I am(was) passionate about. My success was limited. The only target I could settle on with certainty was running. I wanted to run a marathon. Had wanted to for years. Had put it off knowing if I was making excuses for why I shouldn’t do it, then I shouldn’t do it. But I wasn’t making excuses any longer. In fact, I had cleared my schedule, and I needed something to feel good about.
I could write pages and pages on my marathon training – already have, in fact – but for the purposes of this post, all you need to know is from November 2016 when I decided to run, to February 2017 when I started my for realz training, to May when I (re-)injured my knee and had to change my marathon plans, to June when I started over, to September 23 when I completed my first full marathon ever in effing Grand Forks, North Dakota of all places… I did feel good. I felt purposeful and strong and accomplished. Even during the abject shittiness of my injury, I was driven to meet my goal.
And then, about three days after it was over, I felt lost. Aimless.
And stupid.
Obviously, while I spent my year running in temperatures that ranged from -25 to +30 degrees (that’s -13 to +86 degrees for you nonsensical Americans. Seriously. Fahrenheit is bonkers), while I spent hours curating my running playlist and vetting audio books, while I got lost on lonely, marshy trails at the cabin and took too many left turns in the maze of identical houses in the new development down Henderson Highway, I should have also been asking myself the question, “what’s next?”
But I didn’t do that.
I didn’t ask myself “what’s next?” until about three days after the marathon was over, when I was already in “next.” And I didn’t have an answer.
Now, for all of you regular humans, Robert Galbraith is a pen name of the goddess J.K. Rowling, author of the much-lauded and world-shifting Harry Potter series. I, by consequence of being a bookworm, a fantasy nerd, a person with splendid taste, and someone who was born in 1988 and thus grew up with the characters as the series progressed, am a deeply committed Harry Potter fan. But I had never read any of J.K.’s adult fiction. There was no reason to believe that I wouldn’t like it, and there were many reasons to believe I would be highly diverted by her storytelling prowess, so I downloaded The Cuckoo’s Calling and introduced myself to Strike and Robin.
Listening to an audio book while running took some experimentation. I began by downloading books I thought would be inspiring (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall), energizing (Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing), diverting (Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling), and comforting (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen). Some of these were favourites and some of these were new, but with every attempt I came closer to finding the type of book I knew would be effective in keeping me going over the building mileage in my marathon training.
Meanwhile 