live your life with purpose
Most people exercise for now. They want to lose weight now. Fit into the jeans now. Look better in pictures now. Or survive swimsuit season. Which swimsuit season? It’s July. In Australia it’s December. Somewhere, it’s always swimsuit season. That’s marketing, not reality. There’s nothing …
I’ve been redefining discipline since I was 16 years old. Gymnastics gave me an eating disorder. It also gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life. Discipline. Both statements are true. That’s what has made this word so fucking complicated for me. Gymnastics …
The Fringe Tells You Exactly Where Your Bullshit Lives
I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot lately.
The fringe. That edge. That place where your brain starts feeding yourself every excuse in the book. Every reason why you can’t. Every reason why you shouldn’t.
I’ve realized that the fringe tells me exactly where my bullshit lives. Think about it. You aren’t weak. You aren’t incapable. Every story we tell ourself gets louder right before we grow. Right before we grow. Right before we cross the fringe.
I’m not ready. What if I fail? What if people judge me? I’m too fucking old. Maybe later. Bullshit, bullshit and more bullshit.
It doesn’t mean those thoughts aren’t real. They are really fucking real. But are they really true? Probably not. And the interesting part is that everyone’s fringe is different.
Mine today is definitely not the same as it was ten years ago.
When I first started posting on social media, that was definitely my fringe. Fuck. People can be awful. I worried what people would think and wondered if they would judge. Then, I just got tired of giving a shit. I know I have good information to share. If someone doesn’t like it, they can keep scrolling. Or as my friend, Pay Flynn, says – they can take the breadsticks and leave. Keep your comments to yourself.
Fringe crossed.
Same thing with writing. Years ago I blogged all the time. I wasn’t teaching, I was telling stories. The Euclid house. The Prospect house. The kid I used to be. Kid Peggie. Those stories weren’t workouts or macros. They were pieces of my childhood. That was a different kind of vulnerable. I wrote them anyway. They mattered to me. I didn’t expect everyone to understand them.
Fringe crossed.
So my fringe is not social media anymore. It’s somewhere else.
Last year it was saying yes to a photoshoot with three incredible women and fellow coaches, Beth, Amy and Kelly. My fringe wasn’t the photoshoot itself, it was everything my mean girl voice tried to tell me before the photoshoot. You’re 61. You don’t belong here. This is for younger women. People are going to judge you. But that’s where the actual work was. It wasn’t in the workouts or the other things that went along with it. It was calling bullshit on every single one of those thoughts. More than once the voice crept in, but I kept going.
Fringe crossed.
Right now though, the fringe is doing another photoshoot. The fringe is getting Snatched again. Same badass fellow coaches. All of us together doing it again. You would think doing one photoshoot would make the second one easy. It doesn’t. The bullshit started reading the new script. You will be 62! Do you really want to do this again? Jesus Fuck. What if this one isn’t as good? There it is. The fringe. And it’s not because of the camera. It’s because of the story and that voice. People already saw you once. Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead. That’s exactly how bullshit works. Fringe not crossed….yet.
I also find my fringe in places that don’t make for exciting instagram posts. Letting people help me. That’s hard. I like doing things myself and I like figuring things out. But maybe this next version of me doesn’t have to carry everything This version might ask and might delegate and maybe let go of some things.
See what I mean. Bullshit. Different story. Same fringe. Haha.
But who knew that the fringe moves?
What scares the shit out of me today, will probably be normal in a year. Then something else becomes the edge. Something else becomes the fringe. That’s the point. We are never done. We just keep meeting new versions of ourselves.
The life I live isn’t on the comfortable side of the line. It’s on the other side of my bullshit. I cross it and then I find the next fringe.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life negotiating with the same bullshit. I want new bullshit. Bigger bullshit. The kind that shows up because I kept growing. The things that used to scare the hell out of me don’t anymore. Now I have new edges. I have new stories and I have new fringes. You never outgrow fear, you just outgrow old fears and meet new ones. I hope I never stop meeting them.
Fringe crossed. Now where’s the next one?
The Ten Minutes Count Every morning, I give myself ten minutes. Coffee. Birds. Quiet. That’s it. No phone. No food logging. No writing out my get shit done list. No mentally rehearsing the day before the day even starts. And this morning, I caught myself …
Ain’t a lot of boys named Gary these days…
Man it’s been a while since I’ve written. But today the pull is strong.
I heard a new song. Gary by Stephen Wilson, Jr.
Songs always pull the memories out of hiding…
But grief has its own compass, and it always knows the way. I felt it today.
The pull to visit.
When I stopped, I scanned the rows and rows and for a minute I couldn’t find your name. But then there you were. Steady as ever.
It’s November. That heavy season.
The dark season.
The “thinking about you more than usual” season. The holidays
The missing you season.
Twenty-six years next June.
How the hell does time do that?
It sure as shit doesn’t go straight. It zigzags, hits walls, circles back and then somehow we’re supposed to pretend it makes sense.
It doesn’t.
But it’s pretty here.
Forty-four degrees and wind barely four.
The kind of stillness that makes you think maybe the world slows down for the people we loved.
Winter’s almost here.The grass is still holding on to green and the are letting go of what they no longer need. The next season is coming.
I’m having coffee with you for a few minutes.
Just me talking into the quiet,
wondering if you’d still be funny,
if your laugh would’ve changed,
if you’d still give me that look when I said something ridiculous or flipped me off when you really thought you were being funny. Ain’t a lot of guys like Gary these days. LOL
A groundskeeper stopped by while I was there,
picking up leftover Memorial Day flowers.
Said he knew you.
Said you used to deliver gas to them back in the day.
Said he mowed Uncle Bob’s lawn for ten years as a kid.
Five thousand five hundred headstones.
And somehow he still remembered you.
You were never forgettable.
It’s been a while since I’ve written.
Life gets loud.
But today the pull was stronger than the noise. So I showed up.
The way I know you would’ve wanted me to.
I’ll be back soon, Dad.
See you next time.
At what point to we become accepting and maybe even content? As a victim of diet culture and body image issues for what seems like my whole life, I am leaning in to contentment. All the cliche phrases come to mind about just fucking love …
This prompt is a good one.
When I was little we lived in Hurley, SD. We moved to Pierre when I started Kindergarten.
I played with my cousins all the time. My earliest memory is when I was probably around 4. There was a giant tree that had a platform quasi tree house in it. I wanted to be up there so badly. There were pieces of wood pounded into the tree trunk in order to climb up it. The steps.
It seemed like everyone could get up there except me. I was determined. I was going to climb that tree. So, I did.
One day, while wearing a dress with a pattern of anchors, I climbed that tree. The whole dress thing confuses me. I was such a tom boy that I can’t believe I was wearing a dress, but that’s the way the memory is forming. But the anchors apparently helped.
I climbed that tree. I was scared! I got about half way up and looked down. I was scared. But I couldn’t stop. I wanted to see what was up there. Finally. I could see EVERYTHING. It was amazing.
Now what? I couldn’t get down. I was scared. I ended up wetting my pants. And that’s the last I remember.
Brave – Courageous, dauntless, perhaps a little bit daring, a person who is brave faces dangerous or difficult situations with courage. Do it brave. That’s how I look at myself. Doing things that are uncomfortable. Talking into my phone camera every morning, usually around 4:30am, telling …
