I’ve tried to start this post a couple of times but I think I needed a little more perspective before I was ready to process the past few days.

Things are fine. I am fine…ish. I always come out of the holidays a little rougher for the wear and I thought maybe this year I had escaped the worst of it, in spite of a lot of big and little things that would have normally thrown me on a pretty hard loop. I’ve been surprised by emotion more than usual lately, songs that I’ve heard many times suddenly causing those familiar tidal waves that I was ready to let go of for now.

Dropping the kids off tonight I was slammed when I got in the car. The empty space just feels more empty right now. I’ve had students struggling all over the place with serious personal issues; a kid told me on Tuesday that she was going to court to decide if she was going to live with her mom and abusive partner or a parent she hardly knew across the country. It was all I could do to try and tell this sweet child that people were watching out for her. That as scary as it was, things would work out for the best because the people in her life were looking out for her. I had a kid this afternoon come in woozy from PE after hitting her head and then pass out in my class. The nurse had to come get her out in a wheel chair and when she woke up she started crying because she didn’t know where she was. I talked to my class full of students after that about how things like that can be super serious and that it can have an emotional impact on everyone around the incident.

Some days I wake up and have that same feeling. I’ll never stop living with an open heart. It means I put myself out there in ways that will end up with me being hurt but at the same time, those emotions show me that I’m alive. I have more going on than just my job and my sport, there is a deeper current that can sometimes overwhelm me but it is part of who I am. So tonight, after I dropped the kids off, I drove to the climbing gym and probably should have pulled over on the shoulder for a minute to compose myself before I kept driving. I climbed for about 40 minutes until my fingers hurt from the crimp holds I was trying on some new routes and realized if I kept going I was going to hurt myself. I’m going down to run a 50k on Sunday, got talked into setting up a race in Graham on Saturday and so I’ll be driving myself down and back this weekend for a race. I’m in shape for it, I’ve worked hard to get to where I’m at but I have to get my heart back in the game. I’ve got to remember that I’m doing this for myself and that I have to be, or get to be(?), my own cheerleader and I also have to remind myself that this isn’t new. I’ve always had to be my own cheerleader so what is different?

I couldn’t tell you.