Box Checking

Box checking makes me feel safe.  It helps me feel like I’m in control, that things are calculated and organized, and it helps me orient myself forward when things don’t go as planned.  It keeps my finger on the pulse in all of my affairs: at work, with my health, and at home.

Box checking has helped shape me into a disciplined, structured and efficient woman.  It has enabled me to follow a system at work that has yielded very positive results.  It has enabled me to befriend macro tracking and meal prepping and measuring meals so that it is simply what I do, and not a chore.  It has enabled me to do my PT exactly as prescribed, so that my surgeon thinks I’m a Rockstar and can move forward without restriction (aside from the natural cues my body sends me after not being weight bearing for 3 months).  It enables me to get a lot of shit done in a day, whereas many people I know scramble to figure out how to balance their time and to still take care of themselves and to still feel human at the end of it all.  It’s enabled me to help people like that.

Box checking works, until it doesn’t.  Until it seeps into the spaces where the magic happens – the magic of vulnerability and tenderness.  Until it robs me of the ability to stay still long enough to celebrate the wins and process the losses.  Until it becomes a routine that I do and not an intention that I seek.  Until it isolates me from feeling, from being transparent, from attaching my head and my heart, still often the furthest distance I’ve ever had to travel.

I had no idea that I was starting to check boxes in my relationship.  I had no idea that I was quantifying things in order to feel like we were doing it right, that we were happy, and that we were OK.  I was quantifying time spent together and time being intimate, in order to justify the ebbs and flows that any two people might experience.  I was trying to quantify time together despite living in the same space, because despite cohabitating, we still function on very different planes.

I was forgetting that my intention for anything in life must start with asking myself why and slowing down long enough to hear the true answer.  Why do I want to spend time with someone?  Because I care about them and want to be their friend.  Why do I ask about their day, how they’re feeling, what they’re doing?  Because I want to get to know them better and to be a part of their process.  Why do I want to be intimate, really?  Because it’s a way to express affection and be as exposed and vulnerable as one can be.  It’s a place that I struggle, and I know that the growth happens from that very place, not dancing around it.

In order for me to start to see the light, it took some mild unmanageability and making somebody else feel that way with me.  My seemingly extra vulnerability and sensitivity lately were being masked by irritation and grumpiness.  My unwillingness to slow down and to just be tender was being trumped by fear.  I was having flashbacks of years past and old times, times when I didn’t believe I deserved better and therefore attracted that into my life.  I was stuck on the things that I didn’t like, magnifying them by the second and totally forgetting about what I do like.  As a result, I was starting to check boxes instead of being present and here for the ride.  There’s never irony that when my life is going well and that I’m experiencing tremendous success, that the old voice in my head that tells me I’m undeserving comes back in and lands in the space that I still struggle.  It’s usually my body, but it’s also now my relationship with Mike.

Relationships are hard, even the very best ones.  They introduce us to our innermost selves.  They show us where we fall short, where we miss and how we are when we’re most susceptible.  They bring some of the highest highs, and also some of the lower lows.  They are also why we’re all here.  We are not meant to be alone.  Human connection and interaction of any kind provide a kind of magic that I don’t think we can get anywhere else.  Not even from my longest runs and my biggest wins.  We get it in connecting with others, fulfilling our purpose to serve.

But in order to really connect, we have to know ourselves.  In order to really connect, we have to show up and be ready to be rocked.  Not that other people are out to get us, but it’s been my experience that in order to show up fully and prepare myself to be better today than I was yesterday, I must be willing to be wrong.  I must be willing to be different.  I must be willing to be wrong and different without feeling like I don’t have value. 

Lately I have been confused and having flashbacks because I have never been in a relationship with someone that didn’t explicitly need me.  I have never been in a relationship with someone who didn’t rely on me for their value, and who didn’t rely on me to live their life.  This shit is confusing!!!!  What do you mean you don’t need me?  What do you mean you don’t have to wait for me to decide for yourself?  What do you mean you are independent and self-sufficient, and I can be too?

This is new.  This is lovely.  And it is strangely terrifying.  I am my own person and allowed to be, even encouraged. 

And as usual, I wouldn’t have it any other way.