trading sweat for tears

It was maybe 2022, I still lived in the Bay Area, when I had the thought, “I don’t remember the last time I cried!”

I think I was happy. I was busy, both with life and with work. My life was moving in a direction I’ve imagined, I was working with my one of my best friends, Brandon, on the creative studio we’ve wanted since college, and we were making decent money. I was enjoying my fully blocked calendar of activities, and checking off my to do lists like I was making progress towards my goals. I found clarity and purpose in my busyness.

Especially on the bike.

I was riding hard. Solo hill repeats on Hawk Hill and intervals around the Polo Fields in GGP on the weekdays, suffering for four to five hours to Point Reyes on the weekends, and I enjoyed all of it. I was getting faster on the bike, and at the same time, the time itself was moving faster.

The speed of it all kept me focused, but this clarity felt forced. I’d push myself out the door on a beautiful winding valley road, breathe so hard I’d start coughing, and sometimes forget where I was unless I captured it with a photo that I’ve already imagined with my Strava ride title. I needed this picture to remember the feelings — which were often the feelings of tiredness.

I hadn’t learned how to find clarity without moving my body, without exhausting myself into stillness. And somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I couldn’t do this forever. That building my whole inner life around endurance sports was its own kind of trap. It was like I was collecting the sweat so I could drown my feelings. The equivalent of intellectualizing them so I might control them to my advantage.

But lately, those feelings I thought I drowned have floated to the surface. They’ve led my thoughts to shore, guided them with a trail of tears into the forest, and left my mind lost in this familiar unknown.

The last time I cried was from last week’s episode of The Pitt, an emergency room drama series on HBO Max. A husband was grieving alone in the darkness next to his wife who had just passed away from lung cancer. The tears led me to a memory of my mom, who worked as an ER nurse for the graveyard shift at SNHMC, when she would pick me up from school and share a painful experience of her patient who passed away that night.

Being comfortable with this sadness is a feeling she had taught me. A memory that I had almost forgotten from my childhood in New England.

The surrender to my inner child started with morning pages almost a year ago. Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist’s Way, shares her practice of writing three pages of stream of consciousness, longhand, first thing every morning, for no eyes but your own.

I’ve done them every day for over 300 days now, soon to surpass my longest Duolingo streak “learning” to speak Mandarin before our trip to China. Over 250,000 words I will likely never reread and never tag into Bear Notes categories or organize into an Obsidian Vault for Claude to “learn” me. By every measurable standard, 99% of what I’ve written is junk.

Somewhere around 800 words or the third page of writing, my vision dilates from seeing the ripples fade to noticing the greater wave underneath it. And slowly, without forcing it, I started to uncover the clarity I’d been digging deep to find for on the bike.

It’s this realization that not everything needs to be earned. That the nothing that exists now is as valuable as the everything that is yet to exist. I’m reminded every morning of this feeling that I already have it all.

What is more freeing than knowing you have nothing to lose?

This past month, Jenna and I spent hours talking about the next three years of our lives together. Not in a goal-setting way. In a messy, directionless, what-do-we-actually-want kind of way. Wababaland going full-time. Finances. Possibly being back in the Bay Area more for work. Committing to Vermont, for real. What we want our life together to actually look like, not just what we need it to look like.

Our conversation reminded me that purpose is just a carrot on a stick.

This past year, I’ve come back to my senses enough to see that joy is not the reward. It is not this thing waiting at the finish line after enough discipline or enough achievement. I had fallen into the common trap of confusing the suffering as commitment, and carelessly wearing it like a badge to attract the validation of others.

This motivation comes from agreeing to other’s terms and conditions. And by protecting their desired outcomes, we’re unintentionally borrowing their energy, and in return, paying off our debts with our energy defining others.

The destination we point to is never reached.

We accomplished nothing that night. We lost some sleep. We made no plans. We made no progress. Still the same distance from every goal we named. And yet I felt something I can only describe as arrival. Like we were already there. Like the future was somehow already true because we could see it together. We didn’t need it.

Need is defensive. It comes from fear, from protecting what we know. And somewhere in that conversation, without either of us announcing it, needing became wanting. Need to me feels like an endurance sport, something I white-knuckle and survive. Want feels like an energy pulling me forward. It feels generative to believe in the unknown. It feels like a prerequisite to love.

Trusting in this unreasonable nature is its own kind of surrender. It’s believing that it will all be okay when the wave takes me back into the ocean. It’s overwhelming and freeing at the same time. The fear has always existed in the joy.

Back in 2018, I had just started running as a way to cross train for cycling. There was one day when Jenna and I were sitting next to each other with our laptops, when she looked over and saw me type something like “how to run fast” in the YouTube search bar.

She laughed at me, and I remembered being confused about what was so funny. She felt how I thought that I wasn’t doing enough in life. How I was always accelerating, and frustrated for never being able to arrive.

Jenna became my counterbalance. My pacer. I’ve always been the hare in our relationship, and she teaches me that the tortoise doesn’t win being slow, but by not burning out, and still being in the race when it matters.

There is a version of self improvement that is really just self rejection in disguise. The constant need to be better, to become someone, to earn the right to rest. I confused that need for want for a long time. But needing to be better and wanting to grow are not the same thing. One starts from not enough. The other starts from already enough.

It’s Sunday afternoon. The snow is mostly gone. It’s foggy out, grey and wet and cold. Jenna and I are reading and writing on the couch together. The lamps are on and the light is warm. The footsteps of our cat wandering around the living room.

It’s so easy to overlook a moment like this, to feel the pull toward something more productive, something that moves the needle. But isn’t now, the destination, the purpose?

I’m practicing to love who I am now, because it often leads to who I want to be. And if it all ended now, this would have been enough.

-Pips