Running 11 Miles In My Shoes

Imagine that you're running a six-mile race. You don't want to. You're a fat kid. Fat kids like Chinese food and Hostess cupcakes. Fat kids do not do marathons.

But everyone decides that it will be "good for you." So guess what, fatty? You're running those six miles.

But not only are you running six miles, you’ve also been assigned two hecklers. One is a micro-managing control freak mother figure. The other is a moody, bi-polar adult/hormonal teenager who hates you…and most other people.

You start off well. You think, "Hey, this is easy. I can do this!” And then you trip. And everyone will always remember that you tripped. Especially your hecklers. And they bring it up all the time. And the pressure and embarrassment causes you to trip over and over until you’re a bumbling failure, constantly on the verge of giving up.

But you’re getting close to the end. Thank. God. The end is finally near! You can see the finish line…and somebody walking up to it…and moving it back another two miles. What. The. Hell.
Alright, fine. Eight miles! You’ve done six already. You can do just two more. Two miles. Huffing and puffing and jiggling and gaining weight out of stress and depression and fighting with your friends and family and taking everything much harder than you normally would. You start to cry. You cry for the next two miles. And you want to die.

But it’s about to get better, right? You near the finish line. And time’s running out. But then you hear talk going around. They want the finish line pushed back another three miles. You’re desperate. Hysterical. You become anxious. Are the rumors true?

You could do six. You struggled through eight. But now 11? Nobody will tell you anything. They talk around you. The hecklers. The people in charge of you that decided this whole thing was “good for you” in the first place.

You begin to wonder when you’ll ever be in charge of your own life again. When YOU get to decide what’s good for YOU. And until then, you’re stuck in this limbo of Not Knowing.

And the hourglass is dwindling. What’s going to become of the fat kid trapped in perpetual motion?

Love,
Katie