I almost barfed in the testing center the day I took the GRE. The noise-canceling headphones, provided as a courtesy, seemed like a good idea at the time.

They triggered a migraine. I saw stars and said goodbye to my peripherals.

This is to say, I sometimes get myself into trouble. Even—especially?—in the pursuit of the big stuff. It’s never a moonshot I’m after, just run-of-the-mill high-achieving, meaningful-sounding nonsense. Like graduate degrees, or switching industries because I can. (Tosses hair.)

I’ve never aimed to do something that’s never been done. And still, I sometimes get myself into trouble. Now I am just days away from having to show up for a big, dumb goal I made 11 months ago.

I still don’t know why I’m doing it. I’m wondering if I’d be more comfortable if I’d never said the thing out loud, if I had quietly let the registration window come and go. If I’d doubled-down on this notion of being allowed to change my mind.

Here’s the story. Last November, I was stuck in traffic along the route of The Good Life Halfsy, a half-marathon here in Nebraska’s capital city. As I watched bodies of many shapes and sizes walk and run, it occurred to me, “I could do that.”

(Famous last words.)

People looked like they were having fun. Some of them were running, and many walked—or did the low-and-slow version of running I now favor but would barely call a run. I’m a “wrunner” at best.

Knowing the pull of accountability, even the internet’s tenuous version where I type words into the void and their weight mostly exists in my mind, I said I was going to do it. I gave it a name, because that makes a slippery thing more real, too: “My Stretchy November Project.” I mistakenly predicted the race would happen on the same weekend in 2024 that it had in 2023 (the first Sunday in November).

It’s not. It’s in October this year.

God, now it just sounds like a terrible name for a failed band.

Of course I can do this thing, and it will be fine. It’s a few hours of one day of my entire life. So was the GRE, for that matter. Or my licensing exams.

But my ambivalence is tilting toward anger right now. What gives? If I’ve decided this is a thing I’m doing just because I can, then what’s any of it matter?

Who knew trying to be chill would be so confronting.

Did I think I’d have some epiphany by now? A book deal based on this year of my life? A Netflix special for which I’m underpaid and get to kvetch about for the rest of my life?

This is no Brittany Runs a Marathon. It’s not a weight loss story, though weight (gain and) loss became a chapter of it. It’s not exactly a sobriety story, but I wouldn’t be doing this thing without mine. It’s a mental health story—I picked up two new diagnoses and dropped one over the last year—but I’m not running “for” mental health.

This is not an exercise I dedicate to the sake of awareness.

It is in memory of nothing and no one.

I buy glue gun glue sticks not by the count but by the pound, which is to say, I can make something out of anything. That’s not my problem. I’ve made careers attaching and assembling and connecting and communicating the meaning of things. I’ve been doing it for fun and by instinct since those little language pathways in my brain first lit up.

Instead, here’s where I am now: I’m stuck with this reality that there’s no such thing as anti-meaning. The mathematical zero still has a job. Silence has its relationship to sound. Yin and yang.

So what the actual fuck am I doing?

I’m wrunning a half-marathon. That’s all I know. See you on the other side.

---