The Road Not Chosen
Spoiler alert: It doesn't matter how far you run, your brain comes with you, and so do your stories.
Fun fact about me: I love training montages. You know, the part of the movie where the hero runs up endless staircases, explores their brand new superpowers, studies deep into the night to win the big case, creates a new cheer routine for nationals, drinks raw eggs. It’s that transition sequence that takes you from who you were before into the hero you are about to be, and if my life were a movie, the three years after Mom died would have been one long training montage.
Granted, I’m eating bagels instead of drinking raw eggs, and instead of reading endless transcripts to get my client acquitted of the unjust charges against them I’m working on 800 versions of a PowerPoint deck for my storytelling workshops, and when you watch the endless footage of me running, you might say, why did we move to slow motion for this part, and I would have to sadly inform you that no, this is not slow motion, this is just how fast I run.
The truth is, when I think back on the years 2014-2016, mostly what I think about is running. When Mom got sick, I started to run, and the sicker she got the more I ran. I ran on the day she died. I ran the day of her funeral, in a blinding ice storm, and now this training montage has definitely become a comedy sequence, depicting a middle-aged female in leggings and tennis shoes crawling on her hands and knees through a neighbor’s front yard because the paved road is covered in black ice and she keeps falling down, but I ran, no matter what, I ran, and for four years I hardly ever stopped.
The week after Mom’s funeral, I signed up for a half marathon, and after training six months to finish that one, I hired a running coach so I could improve my times, and in 2015 I signed up for a full year race schedule. I placed second in the Masters Division for the French Broad Adventure Triathlon, also second to last in the entire field, but you know which story I’m telling.
I feel a lot of things when I reflect on those years, and look at those pictures. I remember how hard I worked: never harder in my life, running and running and running, because I was on a hero’s journey, and if I kept going, surely I would triumph. That’s how training montages work. That’s how working works. If we try hard enough, if we run in the storms, if we keep going, if we fear not and fight back and find why, everything will be okay.
But my story was not that simple.
Not the River I Wanted To Run
I signed up for a 5k on New Year’s Day, 2016. I had a new Garmin race watch and I also tracked my runs on Map My Run, which calculated my pace and announced interval targets. My running times and distances had started to decline, and so I was doubling down: more training, more races, more trying.
But halfway through, winding through a quiet mountain road, just behind a group of fit 30 something women, feeling proud that I was keeping pace with them, my leg froze.
Just froze. It was strange. I limped the rest of the way home, shook it off. I had a schedule to keep. A few days later, I drove my car to my starting point for my scheduled long run, locked the door behind me, tucked the key into my tights, clicked my watch and started to move forward, but I couldn’t make my legs turn over. Literally couldn’t make them turn. I felt like a puppet with tangled strings.
I went to a physical therapist, who diagnosed a frozen psoas, and said it was caused by a constant level of stress cortisol dripping onto my muscles, and paralyzing them.
“Are you under high amounts of stress?” she asked.
“Not that I can think of.”
I didn’t think I was lying. It just seemed weird to me that I couldn’t lift my legs.
I started going to physical therapy once a week; for a hundred dollars, she would do dry needling, and literally unlock my muscles so I could keep running. I couldn’t walk down stairs without clinging to a banister, I limped whenever I encountered an uphill slope, but I kept running.
There was part of me that thought it was odd this was going on, but I didn’t stop.
I didn’t stop.
This isn’t a story about running.
This is a story about running away.
It is arguably one of the most famous lines in poetry — the road less traveled by. When you read analyses of the poem, they’re all about the choice the traveler made, between the two roads. We like to imagine that we can choose the road we’re going to travel, the river we’re going to run, the life we’re going to have.
But note that Robert Frost does not say “I chose the one less traveled by.” He said “I took the one less traveled by.”
And I wonder if possibly that distinction means something. So often, we don’t get to choose the road we travel. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we are cast onto a river that we never, ever, ever would have chosen to run. Sometimes we are dragged into the current kicking and screaming, desperate to go the other way.
This is a story about two roads, two rivers. And me, trying so hard to go one way, but going the other one. As we all do, sometimes.
The Shadow Current
I have never tried harder at anything in my life, then I tried to be brave, resilient, and strong after Mom died. Fear Not! Fight Back! Find Why! Mine was a story about perseverance and resilience and hope, and strength, and running. This was a hero’s story and goddamnit I was going to be a hero.
But there was another story. A darker river, with a current that kept pulling at me from underneath.
The sociologist Arlie Hotschild refers to the concept of the deep story. This is the story inside that feels true, even if it isn’t. The deep story comes from the deep, non-rational part of ourselves. It’s the thing we believe without knowing why we believe it.
(Something is terribly wrong.)
My deep story was a voice buried so deep that for years I didn’t even notice it, and then after I did notice it, I tried to ignore it.
(You probably have colon cancer.)
I’ve always had health anxiety, and after Mom got sick, it started to spiral. I tried to tamp it down (I can’t be sick! Look at me run!) but the deep story is relentless and irrational. I spent two years lying awake at night, my heart racing, breath quick, absolutely certain I could feel the cancer growing. I did finally get up the nerve to get a colonoscopy (pre-cancerous polyps removed! Get your colonoscopies and prevent 99% of the cancer that killed my mom!) I didn’t have colon cancer but the current didn’t stop pulling.
(It’s probably a degenerative neurological disease. Or something. Something. Something.)
For years, a constant tug of war, with me pulling so hard toward the person I wanted to be, and the current inside me, the deep story, the story beneath the story, pulling me somewhere else.
Stories, you see, can do as much damage as any storm. And mine were spiraling out of control.
(Everything is falling apart. Everything everything everything everything everything.)
I still had a lot to learn about stories, and deep stories, and unreliable narrators, and the stories we believe, no matter how hard we try not to.
I wasn’t at the end of my grief. I was barely at the beginning of it.
I want to say one thing now, before we follow this river I didn’t choose. This is something I didn’t understand back then.
The hero doesn’t always get to choose the journey. But maybe that’s okay. Just because it’s not the road you chose, just because you’re not the hero you set out to be, doesn’t mean you’re not a hero.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To find out how it began, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter every Tuesday.
Another revelation,my dear. Like unpeeling that damn onion!
I could notice my heart pounding a little just reading this chapter. "This isn't a story about running. This is a story about running away." You have such a way with words. I feel you.