I Rawdogged a 5k at PHL
and totally crushed that jawn
It’s been a very eventful week here in Lasagna Land! My youngest started high school; our lovely city hosted a debate and the people watching was fantastic; I learned that the reason I’m getting shorter is because the discs in my neck want to get closer to each other (so sweet!) and I started physical therapy; I wrote an entire book in my notes app while brushing my teeth and packing lunch. This morning I ran a 5k without having trained properly for anything but eating noodles from our new noodle shop up the street. Yay carbs!
And now here I am on the sofa wearing my sweaty running clothes munching my way through the free chips and cheese puffs from the nutrition table (I ate the banana while walking it off) and writing to you. I smell bad. My feet hurt. There’s a good chance I won’t be able to get up from the sofa which is less than ideal as I have cleaning and laundry and shopping to do today and also a kid who desperately needs a haircut.
Everything is just as it should be in this moment.
This is not a running Substack, but it also kind of is, because running is 1/8 of what I do in this season as an Octopus Person.
I was signed up to do Run PHL last September but was so overwhelmed I decided to skip it and sleep in. My dad had just died. I was in the last month of my marriage. I’d just signed a lease on an apartment I didn’t feel financially ready to take on and was frantically packing to move house while preparing for a civil RICO trial, trying to figure out how I was going to survive moving in the middle of trial while working 16-hour days.
I survived and then crashed hard for almost an entire year.
Because of this, I’ve had to scale my definition of success waaaaaay back. To me, success is simply showing up, ergo I fucking crushed this jawn.
As we were milling around on the tarmac before the race, waiting for everyone to clear the security checkpoint, I was thinking about how each person there had a story running through their head about how this race was going to go for them.
I didn’t sleep well last night.
Will I make it to the finish line?
Will my knee/ankle/hip hold up?
Will people think I’m weird if I stop to take pictures of planes in the middle of the race?
I need to remember to pay this bill when I get home.
What was that thing my kid said they needed this weekend?
I really should have peed before I got to the corral.
Am I hydrated enough?
Oh God please don’t let me be last.
My legs feel like lead.
I should have stretched more.
Fuck I’m so hungover. That was dumb.
And then I noticed the drone gazing upon us from just beyond the starting gate, lazily buzzing around appreciating the hundreds of people who woke up obscenely early on a Saturday morning to do something they love. The video of the crowd will end up on social media and people will be like “awwwww how inspiring look at all those people having fun I need to do this race next year!” And, having finished the race by the time we see those videos, our stupid little worries before the race will be replaced with happy memories when we watch them.
Why do we have to do the icky thinking thing first, when we could just show up and enjoy the fun we’re having? Because it IS fun! We end up missing a bunch of it because our heads are so messy.
For most of us, it takes time and discipline to be able to run a 5k. I learned how to run after gaining weight during the pandemic thanks to my wine and hummus diet plan. It was HARD. I couldn’t run for more than two minutes when I started. I didn’t follow a couch-to-5k plan because that felt too hard. Instead, I applied what I learned from Atomic Habits and made running so easy it would have been stupid not to do it. Each time I ran I made it a tiny bit harder by running an extra 15 seconds. When it started to get too challenging, I stopped making it harder until it felt manageable, and then I once again added more time. It took six months to be ready for my first 5k.
The point of saying all of this is that when you have this big, looming impossible thing you want to accomplish and you make doing That Thing your definition of success, you’re going to miss celebrating all of the smaller successes you have along the way to doing That Thing. Showing up is something to celebrate. So is progress. So is failure, because that is your best teacher if you’re willing to take the lesson.
For years I’ve had this idea that I want art and writing to be the thing I do professionally, instead of the paralegal thing I do now. I’ve always looked at this as a scenario where I continue to do my work-work full time and do art and writing in my free time (HA) until that is successful enough that I can leave my day job in the dust. I’ve mapped out plans. I’ve broken goals into bite-sized pieces. I’ve made vision boards. I’ve started and stopped and given up and started again more times than I can count.
And also! I’m interested in SO many things! I make a bazillion different kinds of art, incessantly write and journal, run (not as much as I’d like to!), and hover up books like my life depends on it.
See also: I’m a single mom.
The long and short of it is that I never feel like I’m working on what I’m supposed to be doing. When I don’t accomplish my goals I feel like I’m failing. I’m frustrated with how many hours my work-work takes - not the work itself, but rather the three hours of commuting, the hour to get ready to be away from home all day, the hour of putting everything back together when I get home.
On top of that, the bitch who lives in my head tells me I’m a flaky artist who never finishes anything. I try to explain that chaos is part of my process but she ain’t havin’ it.
Fuck her.
This isn’t a special struggle — lots of us are in this place — but it feels like life has a personal vendetta against me some days when all I want to do is get the fucking art and words in my brain out of my brain so I can fucking do something with them that will move me in the direction of what I’d like to be doing with my life but instead I’ve got to hurry up and put on makeup I hate wearing and slam subpar food into my lunch bag so I can go sit in fucking traffic for an hour and forget all of the things I want to create by the time I get a chance to do anything with them.
What this has done to me creatively is that I end up telling myself stories like the ones we were all telling ourselves before the race. I’m totally missing the fun. I’m failing to appreciate the ONE small creative thing I get to do in five minutes of spare time because it’s washed over with the frustration of not being able to do the whole thing all of the time.
That, my friendos, is no way to go through life.
As I was bashing my head into my art desk last weekend I stumbled across this post and this post, which helped me realize that in addition to being a sentient lasagna, I am also an Octopus Person.
In a clamshell, an Octopus Person is someone who has many different interests and can synthesize information across domains. This is an amazing thing to be able to do! But it can also be incredibly frustrating in a world where we are commanded to specialize and niche down into Just One Thing.
Working with this framework while staying in my lane, here are my tentacles:
(Art, writing, running, motivation, feminism, reading, crafting, tarot.)
Applying the lessons of:
defining what success looks like for myself
celebrating any win no matter how small
embracing my inner octopus AND my wise lasagna
working with my energy and my interests as they are, not as I’d like them to be
is a more workable plan.
Having all of the things I care about spread out on the sea floor where I can see them will make it easier for me to appreciate small efforts when I have time to reach out my tentacles and boop them. And, more importantly, knowing I have many paths to my ultimate goal, where before I could only see one, is incredibly helpful.
When I started this Substack I had grand ideas of publishing at least twice a week. HA. That’s just not gonna happen. And now that I have this Octopus Person framework, that’s not an ideal publishing schedule. I’m not in the business of making noise to please an algorithm, and I’m not gonna write a bunch of garbage just to meet an “x number of posts per week” goal, which is a ridiculous commitment I should have known better than to have made in the first place (this is me taking the lesson!).
NEW DEAL: I’ll write when I have something to say. Maybe you get three posts in one week. Maybe you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Who knows? It will be a mystery to both of us until it happens.
I can promise you this: quality > quantity. I may not say much, but when I do it’s gonna be good!
Deal?
Come say hi (and share this post!) on Threads if you’re over there.