Confidence

As I was running my 10K the other day, I realized that I had some things to work on.  It wasn't a good race for me and I knew it was going to be tough after two down weeks of being sick.  But reflecting on it, my biggest area for improvement is in the emotional/mental aspect of my running.

I've never been known for having a great self esteem.  Those who know me well enough probably think that I'm pretty secure in myself but those who really know me know that my self esteem is crap.  So as I was running... fighting through the race... I started paying attention to how I talk to myself and it's pretty sad.

I would never talk to Chaney, Steve, or really anyone the way that I was talking to myself that day.  Ouch.

But there I was being all kinds of negative towards myself and that, I'm not so sure how to fix.  Where is that confidence supposed to come from?  Because more often than not I find myself being negative and holding back... just in case.

And then I get mad at myself for holding back and then the really negative stuff starts running through my head.  It's a tough thing to conquer; this self confidence thing.  I keep searching for the smallest of things that could give me a stepping stone towards confidence and even when I find it, I almost always end up holding back.

As I ran this morning I started thinking about the last time I fully embraced running.  That was 10 years ago when I trained for my marathon.  And while I'm in a completely different place in life now, I still have scars from that experience.  Less than a month after completing a destination marathon combined with a wonderful vacation my then husband began having an affair. 

Do I fear that happening now?  No, not at all.  But I'm being stretched and old scars hurt as they are stretched.  With each pop of the scar tissue those nagging, hurtful words from my past are released.  I didn't have good support the last time I ran and I actually had quite the opposite.  But I kept going, finished my marathon, and had lots of little successes along the way.

Problem was that those small victories, my growing self confidence, even my healthy life changes were not celebrated but instead thrown in my face as a reason, an excuse for my ex-husbands affairs.  That's a tough pill to swallow after coming as far as I had because somehow it was my fault.

So even after 10 years of healing, there's still that lingering scar tissue that at times makes me feel defeated and scared.  The key, I suppose, is finding away to turn those scars and the fear into fuel and motivation.

But that's the hard part.  The easier part is taking what I have been able to learn and that is that the words we say matter.  They stick with people long after we have said them and think that they have been forgotten. 

Our words are powerful, including the ones we speak to ourselves.