Bravey: Chasing Dreams, Befriending Pain, and Other Big Ideas

by Alexi Pappas

I’ve learned that it’s not productive to wonder too much about what my life could have been like if things had been different. I once read that the chances of any person being born as themselves instead of as a different genetic combination is estimated to be the same as if two million people rolled a trillion-sided die and all got the same number. We are who we are.

i admire pickles because there is no one moment that makes a pickle a pickle. it is a thing that happens over time. pickles are patient.

There is no shortcut to becoming your best self. The responsibility is on you.

With a wiry body and unusually long limbs, I managed to become one of the top young runners in California. I finished fourth in the state my sophomore year.

That’s the thing about faulty systems; they will ruin individuals who then, in turn, pass the harm along to the next batch of people.

For that entire season, I would either shit my pants, throw up, or otherwise have to stop at some point during every single workout. We had two workouts per week and I never finished one all the way through, and that was by design.

There is a way that a coach and athlete love each other, which is a kind of love that’s not like any other. It revolves around a shared goal where each person plays a very specific and important role.

An athlete and a coach complete each other. An athlete has to learn how to get the most out of herself and also how to draw support and wisdom from the reservoir that is her coach. And the coach must learn how to best support, teach, and protect the athlete, and also when to push the athlete to the edge of her ability.

I accepted this reality with what I can only describe as a “new-summer-camp smile” plastered to my face—when you’re overwhelmed, excited, and scared all at once. It’s a disarming moment when you realize that you are not fully in control; you’re plopped into a new environment that you cannot change.

So much of my life has been spent trying to belong—and that’s often okay, because it means I’m stretching my boundaries. But this can also be very uncomfortable.

Among the Rolodex of memories, which includes the time in tenth grade when eleven friends and I all huddled around a single cell phone to receive step-by-step instructions from an upperclassman on how to give head,

Nerves are cousin to excitement, and excitement is cousin to gratitude. Pay attention to your nerves: If you feel nervous, it’s a sign that a Very Big Thing is unfolding. Be nervous for how good that thing can be.

The healthy thing to do before planning my next Olympic cycle would have been to take a vacation, or at least a mental break, to give myself time to absorb the enormity of what I had just experienced, and then start to plan my next steps with a clear mind and fresh perspective. But instead I felt I needed to keep my momentum going, so when I got back home to Eugene, I continued my training without pause.

All I knew at the moment was that I couldn’t sleep. Every night I’d lie in bed, frantically trying to figure out what to do next. It felt like I was brushing my brain with a brush whose bristles were made out of fear and anxiety. I’d rake the brush over my brain again and again, never actually accomplishing anything except depriving myself of sleep until it felt like my whole brain was a knotted tangle of fear.

I later learned that the mind is more susceptible to depression at higher altitudes.

When I was younger, I had sympathy for my mother—how sad she must have been! But now I felt empathy for her. This is the strongest connection I’ve ever felt to my mom: when I finally understood what it felt like to want to disappear.

Trail running in the woods is one of my favorite activities. It gives me a different type of joy than road running or racing; it’s a joy that touches every sense individually and makes me feel ebullient, present, and connected to the earth.

Actions change your thoughts over time, and over even more time thoughts change your feelings.

Racing is about understanding that pain is a sensation but not necessarily a threat, and if you continue to put one foot in front of the other you will break through your rough patch.

My favorite thing to visualize was an image of myself curled up inside a walnut shell, completely cozy and protected from the outside world.

he’d have me write down certain things over and over again, like when I had to write “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”

“I have a body but I’m not my body, I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts, I have feelings...

another day I had to write all the things I was mad at myself for and then forgive myself, like: “I forgive you for the contract,” or “I forgive you for being injured,” or “I forgive you for being mean to you...

the brain’s purpose is self-preservation—but the problem is, the brain goes into overdrive and starts recognizing the personal law in places it shouldn’t.

learned that during the late 1980s, when women in my mom’s generation were fully entering the corporate world alongside men, there was tremendous social pressure not to complain about anything that bothered them, big or small. They were told to be grateful for their newly upgraded status in society, and that complaining about the pressures of balancing a career with all the expectations of motherhood was seen as weakness or even proof that the women’s rights movement was wrong.

Death is private but suicide belongs to everyone.

my dad shared the staggering fact that of my mother’s six closest girlfriends during her young professional years in the Bay Area, three of them died by suicide. (One of the women who died was my mom’s maid of honor.)

I am an introvert, so while I love conversation and social interactions, I am not energized by them. I require lots of alone time. But once I started thinking more proactively about my willpower, I started bringing along headphones so that when I needed to, I could remove myself from the team chitchat and just stay focused on the task.

I’m not doing my job well enough, like, as completely as I could, but I’m kind of comfortable with that.

I’m trying my best and I forgive myself.”

many of us still have trouble seeing the forest for the trees when it comes to how we spend our willpower. We are so focused on what we think we should be doing that we make unwise choices about what is truly best for us.

understand when you’re feeling low on willpower: The world will be okay without you while you recharge, and in the long run, it will be even better.

This broad application of the word fine to cover up any strong feelings seems distinctly female to me. I wonder if this was a phenomenon unique to my particular experience with my teammates at Dartmouth, or if it’s a more universal trend among young women everywhere. I told myself to reconsider my choice of words, to open up and say how I really felt.

Guys can sometimes feel just as pressured to “perform” as girls feel pressured to “go with the flow”—and then the sex ends up happening as a mutual performance where each person is both the audience and the actor at once.

I think that’s why I took so well to running, because success in track and cross-country is directly related to how hard you can push yourself.

The good thing was that I believed, on some level, that anything was possible. But the bad thing was that when I wasn’t working, I felt anxious.

Soon enough, I became a work machine fueled by anxiety.

I couldn’t allow myself to stop because that damn anxiety would kick in.

could never step back and see the bigger picture of what I had accomplished in a given day without feeling guilty about everything I had left to do tomorrow.

No matter how much I was actually accomplishing, the anxiety was always there.

Simply say that it makes you uncomfortable. And if Mindy could pull off a move like that, why couldn’t I? The truth was, I did feel uncomfortable.

Why not believe in potential?

Before there is love, there is potential.

Optimism takes courage. You need courage to invest yourself in something that you hope can be great but might end up hurting you.

If you find someone who pulls you out of the real world and makes you feel like the two of you are inside your own little snow globe, hold on to them.

It’s just not worth it to spend your life with a “no” person. It isn’t always immediately obvious when someone is a “no” person—it starts small. Instead of encouraging you when you make an effort to chase a dream, they laugh at you as if you’re cute but misguided—and then before you know it, you’re living a life that doesn’t reflect the grandeur of your dreams, whatever they are.

As it turns out, post-Olympic depression for athletes and post-movie depression for directors are very similar.

I did notice a pattern of writers using quirky to describe Plumb.

“Quirky is not a compliment.”

quirky is a catchall term that writers use when they’re unsure how to cla...