"It's the soul that needs the surgery..."

After my 16 km run I was stretching while watching the M3 channel music countdown, and Beyonce's "Pretty Hurts" song comes on. Story of my life, not as bad as some, but bad enough for me. Just about every girl to some degree knows what it is like to only feel worth based on her appearance, eventually the self-hate creeps in and clogs up the soul and like a clogged artery, confidence and love are slow and too small to feed you properly. What I'm trying to say is that girls (and boys too nowadays) live in confidence and love malnourishment. It's terrible but true. There were too many days in the past when my skin crawled with self loathing because of what people told me I should be, why I am not enough and probably never will be. Show more skin, eat less, put on more makeup, sound less smart...

I am naturally a bit thin, so when I started working out more seriously I started to gain weight from the increased muscle mass. Freaked out because I felt fat. Ugly. It has taken me over a year to really start to feel good about it. I work in a setting that has a lot of elderly people, and I have found that is one of the best ways exorcise some self hate. All of these lovely people of the older generations say: "Stay healthy. Looks will always fade, but it is your health that keeps you strong well into old age. It keeps you grateful for what you have." And as mother once told me "Gratitude unlocks the Fullness of Life". I want that tattooed on my arm one day.

Gratitude. Gratitude is one of the reasons that I continue to run. I am grateful that I can walk, run, go for long hikes and see amazing views at the top of BC's amazing mountains. I am grateful that I am no longer in pain just about every day. A friend from high school went into liver failure (he had an autoimmune disease that attacked the liver. He was basically left paralyzed and almost blind. My father was diagnosed with parkinson's about a 1.5 years ago, he can still run a little and stays active as best he can but his mobility is ever more and more limited as time goes on.


I run because it is surgery for the soul when I run; I am so humbled that I was blessed with the ability to do so, and it could be taken away from me at any moment. When I come back from a long run and I look at myself in the mirror I am just...so... happy. I smile. Damn I look good! I feel like my soul is in every inch of my skin in that moment.

Pretty may hurt sometimes but beautiful is in my soul when I run. I can be beautiful. Everyone can.