I am a Closet Crier

When I decided to do something new each week for a year, I expected such an adventurous year would be wildly happy, but sometimes it was the exact opposite.

All these new experiences did make me happier overall, but only after facing people and parts of myself that left me sobbing in my bed at times I felt I should be smiling. I am a closet crier; I cry more often than people probably realize, since it's almost always when alone.

I am afraid of being rejected for showing my true feelings. I carried that fear with me when I wrote the first draft of my manuscript. Like a good girl, I edited out all the pain I experienced, keeping it as hidden as I could.

A good example of this is my chapter about the Ogden Half Marathon. I never thought I would run 13.1 miles; I still have my finisher's medal hanging by my window. But what I remember most from that day happened right after the marathon, and I dared not write a word about it.

I had met someone as a result of my new experiences. I ran faster during my half marathon because I knew he would be waiting at the finish line. My family would also be there, and this is the first time he would meet them.

I was twenty-six at the time; he was nineteen. I looked up to him because he lived on his own and in some ways had more life experience than I did, seven years his senior.

As I ran, I imagined how great it would be for him to meet my family. In Utah, most people marry young; the average age for a woman to marry is nineteen, and here I was twenty-six. My family sometimes wondered why I was single, and now I had someone to introduce to them.

When they met him, my younger sister, Tiffani, also nineteen, looked like a younger version of me with perfect makeup and hair in contrast to my sweaty self. I could not help but make the comparison. I even had orange legs! In an attempt to look more attractive for this guy, I had used a spray-on tanner that didn't quite match the rest of me, so I looked like I had eaten one too many carrots.

Later that day when I asked my older sister, Cari, what she thought of this guy, she said, "I probably shouldn't tell you." Of course this only made me press for an answer, so she said, "Well, he was looking at Tiffani a lot."

I already knew it was true even before she said it. I knew exactly what she meant by it, too. I could only be grateful that we were alone at the time.

I certainly did not want to write about that in a book. Instead I wrote about the different kinds of buses driving runners down Ogden Valley to the starting line, about conversations I had with people who have no significance in the story, and about the color of my timing chip that recorded my time during the race. Riveting, I know!

The truth is that for a long time after this guy met my family right after my race, I felt like a failure; regardless of how far or fast I ran, in the end, I am undesirable.

By censoring the real feelings I had that day, I do not give myself a chance to overcome the bigger picture: not just 13.1 miles, but the damaging self-images that kept my heart in chains.

The crushing disappointment of this guy meeting my family is now going in the book.