Lauren Fleshman

but I don’t have time to find a more accurate cliché than that and still get through some amount of writing that feels satisfying. Only right before bed though, which I feel obligated to tell you so you don’t worry that I’m home alone with my baby all day feeling that way. I don’t think she will wake all the way up, but I can’t be sure. I went down the only subject I had time to think of in this moment, and it was a dead end, and there isn’t really time to start over.

And my mind is full of mass shootings and asinine arguments and interpretations supporting inflated 2nd amendment rights, and protests being misinterpreted, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ realistically bleak view of the future of race in our country on Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel’s tears, and hurricane victims fighting for their lives, and bills being considered that make silencers easier to buy and abortions harder to get, and the Pulse nightclub, and lawmakers saying you can’t legislate behaviors while trying to control where people go to the fucking bathroom, and having a liability for a President who is making a joke out of America, and all roads seem to lead to this zenith historical manifestation of what Michelle Goldberg describes as the “tyranny of the minority,” this ability for a small group of people with a narrow focus to run the entire government out of line with the majority of citizens desires, with the help of the electoral college and campaign financing and gerrymandering and voter suppression. There are movements to stop ACA repeal that show us that resistance works, and Hillary Clinton’s book helping us make sense of the present to change the future, and people who used to perch safely on the fence standing up or kneeling and speaking out, and people lining up in Las Vegas to give blood, and countless acts of individual kindness from people of all beliefs and affiliations, and people waking up to their privilege and responsibility, and reasonably impressive journalistic efforts at catching all the wild pitches coming out of the haywire pitching machine at once, each catch analyzed and considered with importance that simultaneously makes it impossible to keep up, but maybe easier to find a theme later, if we ever get enough of a pause to synthesize it. To be honest, I have felt out of control this entire pregnancy, it being nothing like my first relatively-smooth-sailing one, and goddammit if I wouldn’t have appreciated a little more personal control these last 9 months to mitigate everything going on in the world. When I lost running (and aerobic exercise of any kind) early on in this pregnancy, I lost my primary mode of self-care, my anchor for my days, my independent narrative that was 20+ years long that will hopefully go on for 20+ more, spanning stages of life and political eras and countless events of human suffering and beauty in the world and on the news.

When I watch them walk past me and step out onto the track, their dreams as exposed as their skin, I feel the mondo track puncture, six little spike holes per deliberate step, as they walk in line, away from me toward the starting line. But the moment they place their foot just behind the line and stand ready for the gun, I am my own again. It doesn’t feel like it’s mine to have.

Back from a Bad Race (like a Badass) IT Band Hits Rock Bottom (if only this was about a rock group) How do I Increase Mileage Without Burning Out? How to Bounce Back from a Bad Race (like a Badass) IT Band Hits Rock Bottom (if only this was about a rock group) How do I Increase Mileage Without Burning Out?