A Beautiful Work In Progress

by Mirna Valerio

I love the experience of digging deep,

pulling layer after layer off the onion that is me, discovering the most profound parts of myself over and over again.

I soon discovered how wrong I was. After running a few laps around the field (I nearly died during and after each one), we did a timed mile. What did it feel like? It felt like an asthma attack, a gunshot wound, a kick in the stomach and kidneys, slow suffocation—all topped with the whipping cream of death.

like Winston Carrington, the skinny Jamaican guy who kept his apartment heated like a Caribbean beach, but perhaps more importantly had questioned my desire to continue singing classical music and asked me what my real job was going to be in the future.

Sigh. Why Winston?

I’m angry and sad for my mother and countless other women who suffered (both knowingly and unknowingly) from a system that could only view them as baby-makers, babysitters, and caretakers of the elderly. Their worth was seen in their ability to care for other human beings. No wonder so many women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generations are physically ill; these women who are the bedrock of their respective families have cracked and fissured. Their foundations crumble and they become sick from years, decades even, of standing and bending and folding and cooking and shouldering without a second thought—an automatic erasure of self, self-worth, health, and longevity, like the bedding planes eroded by seeping water.

Those legs also stood strong to carry her own sleeping children, holding us up, providing a firm place to rest our heads, protecting us from falling, standing at school plays and Juilliard recitals, and walking the walk of the mythical strong black woman everyone needed her to be.

The children ran around the park, playing tag, Mother May I, and Red Light Green Light in the “courtyard” at the Cumberland houses until the sky suddenly became dark and heavy with clouds.

Aww, my childhood

I do this at every race: look for the fat people. I always

wonder what their journey is and how it has been for them.

Nobody ever achieved anything epic without doing the requisite work, even if the work itself is humdrum, boring, run-of-the-mill kind of work. Getting your weekly miles in, doing cross-training to strengthen your muscles and lessen the likelihood of overuse injuries, (for some) having a stretching/yoga regimen, eating to fuel (and enjoy life), and taking rest and recovery seriously (I admit that I haven’t always done this) are all part of getting the work done.

But then I encounter the counter with all its mail to organize, lesson plans to rework, books to read, blog-post ideas to outline from brainstorms scribbled on random scraps of paper and sticky notes.

Same

When you can see the power that you have—the physical and mental prowess you were likely born with, but your belief in it has been squashed due to various life events and others’ perceptions of you—and then you realize that you had it in you the whole time and you just had to coax it out at the right minute in the right situation, you start to believe that you can do anything. And this power is heady. It’s dangerous even, especially to folks who had ever told you or hinted that you couldn’t do something, that you wouldn’t be able to achieve something. Acknowledging and welcoming your self-worth, your own extraordinary power, is incredible. You become unstoppable.

My real friends were books and adults. Books didn’t care that I could hold an interesting conversation with adults. They also didn’t care that I wasn’t quick-witted.

Instead of being ashamed of doing what you do or being what you are, I ask two important questions: Why not celebrate it? Why not be proud of the fact that the body you are in can do great things?

You can put that medal right here.

There is still a beauty about simply doing the difficult thing that I will never be good at, for the pure pleasure of having engaged in the process.

I’d like to think that most of us are moving toward something, somewhere, or at least if we aren’t, we’re open to the idea that if we’re stuck, maybe we should try something new, something else. What we are now is not what we were. Where we are now is not where we will be, unless we want to continue existing in the same reality over and over again.

This body isn’t meant to stagnate or cease moving. When we stop moving in mind, body, and spirit, we stop learning. When we stop learning, we stop living. Therefore, when we stop moving, we stop living. We stop evolving toward being the humans we are destined to be.

This body is fierce, beautiful, and unapologetic. It’s meant to move through the world as it wishes: lifting, walking, and running, rolls and all. Love handles, bouncy boobs, curves, tummy, butt, back fat, and all. I honor her by continuing to move along the spectrum of health and wellness, and in turn she honors me by living vibrantly.