I ran track in high school. I remember we had t-shirts for the track team that read "Track: where there is a place for everyone." And there was. I wasn't the best, but I got to compete, to try. I learned about how you could both be an individual and part of a team, that it is important to try new things and fail before having competency (let's just say triple jump is hard), and that sometimes your role is to cheer on the sidelines.
New year’s resolutions are like diets – many of us have tried them all: writing a list of our goals, picking a word for the year, imagining how you want the year to feel, the year of “yes” or the year of “no”. And most of them leave us feeling unfulfilled, shameful and, most of all, like we need to be fixed.
Today is my birthday and for the last 8 months I have been thinking I would be turning 49. Thing is, I am only turning 48. Time has become an amorphous thing during this pandemic - or maybe I am at the age where you lose track. However, I feel older. During the last year my body has begun decomposing. Or at least that is how I am thinking about my diagnosis with osteoarthritis that has shown up in my left hip and my neck, and the onset of chronic pain in the last few months.
For me, someone who has relied on my body to do so much – hike mountains and backpack in the wilderness, run half marathons, practice and teach yoga, biked hundreds of miles and more - this feels like a betrayal and a tenderness. Perhaps most accurately what I feel is grief. I have loved my body but also taken it for granted. I have pushed myself to my limits. My body is literally screaming out for a new way of being. I am learning, resisting and slowly accepting. Moving from always doing more to accepting that what I can do is enough. That I am enough.
I love Dolly Parton. Like really love her.
I remember seeing her on the Oprah show in the early 2000’s. Dolly talked about the importance of being humble - and the fact that she once lost a Dolly Parton drag competition. And she just laughed. That laugh.
I was completely hooked. You see, I have always loved her music. That twang, the sauciness. I adored 9 to 5 and all of the empowerment around gender equity. However, it was seeing her on the television, in person, just being herself that I realized how unapologetically and unabashedly Dolly she is. In a grounded, loving way – from the core of her being.
It was Dolly who taught – and is still teaching me – about boundaries.
