"Aren't you glad you decided to change your life?"
I am, though I resent the presumptuous tone of the app asking the question. It's not even talking about bicycling. I have a different app for that. This one displays a motivational mantra each time I turn it on. It writes of dreams, fire and bravery, determination and success. It tells me that I am much stronger today than I was only one month ago. It lists my Awesome Wins and it is never sarcastic. I am not yet confident enough to trust it when it trills "Well done! See you again in a couple of days!" at the end of every session. I am worried that I will disappoint it, or that one of us will get bored and wander off.
I can run for eight minutes now without stopping. I could probably run for longer but I haven't tried, because after eight minutes the app pings and a soft American voice tells me to slow down and walk and so I do, grateful and tired. I listen to Shelly Kagan talking about death while I run, and I think about everything else. If something were chasing me, I think I could run for longer. I know that I could run faster. I don't want to. Just to run at all will do.
I will one day run a marathon. I decided this during a yoga nidra class a few weeks ago, where the instructor asked us to visualise a goal while we lay on the floor, swaddled in blankets, trying not to fall asleep (I fell asleep). My goal is to love and be loved and I am, already. So I visualised a goal I might be given a medal for.
Yoga nidra? Visualising goals? Running? What the fuck, I think. You'd have to laugh.
Yoga nidra? Visualising goals? Running? What the fuck, I think. You'd have to laugh.
I know that I will one day run a marathon because for approximately two minutes during my eight minute run on Monday night I forgot that I was running at all. And because I overheard my husband (who loves me) telling my mother (who loves me) that I am "very determined". I was just out of the shower, stomping around my parents' holiday home dressed in a towel and searching for a tweezers to pluck an ingrown hair from one of my nipples, when I heard them talking about me in the kitchen. "Why were you telling my mam that I'm stubborn?" I asked Andrew later.
The nipple hair is a symptom. Since coming off all medication for PCOS, the downy hair on my breasts has darkened and wiry, stubborn hairs have sprouted around my areolae. The hair on my upper lip has darkened and thickened too, and it grows now in the cleft beneath my lower lip, on my chin and underneath, all the way down to where it meets my neck. The hospital prescribed a cream to help, but it doesn't. It cost €130, though I didn't know that when I asked the chemist to fill the prescription. I was too embarrassed then to ask her to put it back, I just handed over my credit card. I still use it, when I remember to, but mostly I use a depilatory cream and burn my shame into the sensitive skin of my face.
A thick waist, hirsutism, amenorrhea, anovulation; three words with red lines underneath that I need to check the spelling of, three symptoms of an endocrine disorder and nothing to be ashamed of, I tell myself.
"Step up on the scales" says the consultant.
And so it's hard.
But oh, so much good has come of it and running, yes, that's something.
