Being Good Enough: How to Separate Who You Are From What You Do

The caption says "Not good enough for Beijing." Well there go my dreams of ever being a champion head lifter.

I'm nervous. Not nervous in a betrayed-by-my-bowels kind of way. Yet. (Which speaking of being betrayed by one's nethers, ESPN had the most fascinating article on explosive pooping while racing. Seriously, you must read it. It was in their Body Issue which I want to hate because it feels like using naked chicks to sell more copies a la the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is so tired and yet I love it. Think less bikinis on the beach and more biceps. Lots more muscles. The cover even features a paraplegic tennis player! Of course she's gorgeous and starkers except for a strategically placed tennis racket but how cool is it that they put a woman in a wheelchair on the cover? There's such a fine line between art and artifice.)

I'm nervous for my race on Saturday. You know, the one that I signed up to run "just for fun" and have managed to suck all the fun right out of. (Well, almost. Gym Buddies Allison, Megan and I are running in sparkly tutus - mine's purple! - and striped knee-high socks. Fun!) I'm worried that I'm not going to be good enough. What is good enough, you ask? No idea! Like Alice at the fork in the woods, I don't know what the end goal is. Of course Alice had the Cheshire cat mocking her and her angst. At least I'm feline free. And like Alice, I realized today that I need to decide now, before I take even one step in the race, what the end is going to be. That whatever I do is going to be good enough. Finishing will be good enough. Even if I don't run my 100% best race, I'll still be good enough.

This is difficult for me to believe because I'm so used to defining myself by what I do. At times this has worked well for me. Like when I got straight A's in school then I was Charlotte the Smart Girl. It cuts both ways though. I remember the first time I decided that I was Charlotte the Bad Person because of something I'd done.

"Charlotte?" My high school teacher frowned at the note, "You're to go to the office. The police want to talk to you." Yeah he actually read it out loud. There were some gasps, lots of snickers. Nothing says fun like getting pulled out of 3rd period by the police! By the time I got to the office I was shaking head to toe. I was having visions of being an unwitting drug mule like Brokedown Palace and I'm nowhere near as cute as Claire Danes in prison clothes. Does the U.S. deport underage non-cute unknown-package acceptors?

Someone handed me the phone. "Charlotte? This is Detective Johnson from the Police Department. Do you know a Nathaniel X?"

My mouth went dry and I knew this phone call had been a long time coming. "Yes," I squeaked. Nathaniel and I worked together at the local university and even now it's hard for me to describe our relationship without putting unsure quotation marks around each descriptor. We were "friends", certainly. For awhile "best" friends even. We were together all the time. Despite our ten-year age difference, I had a massive school-girl crush on him. He might have had one on me too. To this day I don't know whether he really loved me, just thought he loved me or was only pretending to love me in order to manipulate me. He was the first boy to tell me he loved me. He was the first boy to tell me I was sexy. He was also as crazy as a guy's night out with Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, Michael Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. And unfortunately his brand of crazy manifested as pervert. Which meshed perfectly with my brand of crazy - insecure.

I became his confidant for things that no fifteen-year-old should know. Every conversation with him would start "You can never tell anyone this. Do you promise me? You're the only person I trust." I was too young to know that anytime anyone says this, that telling anyone and everyone is exactly what you should do. So I kept his secrets. And became a erstwhile victim of some of them. The more he told me, the less I wanted to know and the more I believed him when he said I was a part of all this.

The police, apparently, agreed. "Do you know where Sara is?"

"Isn't she in school?" I whispered.

"No, I'm afraid Sara's gone missing." The detective added, "And her parents think you might know where she is." Sara was one of my oldest friends and even though we'd grown apart since the advent of high school - she was cool, I was not - when Nathaniel had asked me for her number I gave it to him. Do not misunderstand the magnitude of this. I knew what he was. I pimped out the girl with whom I still had the "friends" half of a "friends forever" heart necklace.

I burst into hysterical tears, sobbing mascara streaks all over the secretary's shoulder. I didn't know where she was and that was the truth. But what I did know was that she was alternately intrigued by and afraid of Nathaniel and his overwhelming advances. Much like myself, I suppose. And now Sara was gone. Plucked, so they told me, right off the street when she went to take care of a vacationing neighbor's pet. Would she have gone willingly with Nathaniel? Perhaps. Would he have taken her if she hadn't? Did he? I didn't ask why he hadn't taken me.

"Can you contact Nathaniel?"

I could. I had his private pager number. I had his e-mail. I knew the chat rooms to find him in. I knew he would answer if I called him. And so the sting was set with me as the bait. Even then I was conflicted. Torn between wanting to warn him, an impulse that baffles me today, and wanting him caught as soon as possible. It dragged on for weeks as I printed out copies of every cryptic e-mail, had short stilted phone conversations with an officer listening on the other line and typed in chat rooms with a cop taking notes next to me. I only talked to Sara once and she told me she was fine and to leave her alone before he took the phone from her and hung it up. I cried as I listened to the dial tone for 10 minutes.

If this were TV, this would be the climactic moment where I jump in and do something terribly risky and yet heroic like drive out to the deserted barn and unchain my friend while fighting him off with a horse whip and my razor wit. Instead... nothing happened. Eventually Sara showed back up at home. Except she wasn't really Sara anymore. I didn't see her smile or laugh for a long time. In fact I didn't see much of her period. Nathaniel, on the other hand, was more in than out of my life for the next several years. Sara had refused to talk to the police, refused to press any charges and the information from me was not enough to convict so he was free to do as he wished. What is a girl to do after she's participated in a police sting that ends messily with the perpetrator still in her life and the cops totally out of it?

I internalized it. I made it my All My Fault because that was the only thing I had control over. I ended up tearily apologizing to Sara for not protecting her (which only earned me a glassy stare) and then tearily apologizing to him for the betrayal (which got me this). And with every word I knew: Charlotte was Bad. I created this terrible thing and therefore I must be terrible. The worst effect of this was how perfectly it set me up for the next man to abuse me, for the horrific spectacle of the Very Bad Boyfriend.

Charlotte back then had no intrinsic self worth, I was only a sum of my actions. And as extreme as this sounds, it's a belief that much of our society reinforces today. People are made and taken apart for what they do in their jobs, in sports, with their bodies. You are only as good as your next big accomplishment and only as far away from bad as your next big failure. And nothing is ever good enough.

But I refuse this black and white interpretation. I am not fifteen anymore. There has got to be a line between who I am and what I can do. I just need to take a deep breath so I can find it. Because in the end, this fear of failure is permission not to try. And I'm better than that.

There is great power in good enough.

There are some posts that I really agonize about posting and this is one of them. (And yes, some of them do remain unpublished.) I may regret writing this but I'm putting it out there in the hope that perhaps you can tell me how you figured out how to separate who you are from what you do. How do you get over that paralyzing fear that you will never be good enough? How do you stop feeling like you always have to one-up yourself? And was anyone else totally fascinated by that ESPN race-pooping article??

Blogging About Sexual Assault

April is sexual assault awareness month. Approximately 1 in 4 women will be assaulted in their lifetime. Look around you at the 4 closest women and then... start talking.

I used you. I'll admit it. I started this blog as a way to talk about all the health and fitness research that I geek out over so much in real life, thereby giving my long-suffering friends and family a break. But as I got writing, I discovered that for me blogging is so much more than just words. It's free therapy! And in my mind, one can never have too much therapy.

It all started when I first delved into the reasons that I got into exercise. Sure it was to lose some baby weight but the timing was no coincidence. When I was just a few weeks pregnant with my second son, I found out an ex-boyfriend of mine from college (referred to on this site as simply G. or occasionally as Very Bad Boyfriend - not because I'm afraid of being sued or that he'll find me again but because saying his name still turns my stomach.) had been arrested for sexually assaulting a girl in my old college town. After five years of nightmares, I realized for the first time that what had happened between us wasn't just between us after all. I decided to go to the police.

That phone call irrevocably changed my life. I discovered that he had abused other girls before me. And that in the five years since we'd broken up, he'd not only continued to molest but the attacks had increased in severity. He'd even earned himself a nickname in the local paper: The Night Stalker, due to his preferred modus operandi. Clearly he needed to be stopped. In the end, only three of his victims decided to press charges. That was a decision that I am admittedly ambivalent about. Law & Order: SVU, it wasn't. Quite honestly I still don't know if I did the right thing.

The court case lasted 9 months, the entire duration of my pregnancy. I was a wreck. I didn't eat. I slept too much. I had massive PTSD attacks. I barely managed to care for my older son, much less myself. And I cried more in those 9 months than I have in my entire life. When at long last he was finally sentenced - he got a year in prison with time served, mandatory sex offender counseling and seven years on the sex offender registry - my body heaved one last sigh and my baby was born the next day. At ten pounds, he was outwardly healthy but he had complications I blamed myself for. See, they've done studies that show when a woman is under severe stress during her second trimester - and it was at 6 months along that I faced him in the courtroom - that the baby suffers long-term neurological issues, particularly those related to elevated cortisol like anxiety disorders.

Guilt. About not reporting him sooner. About reporting him at all. About my baby and his extreme colic. It was omnipresent and overwhelming. So I did what felt reasonable at the time: I ran away. First I started with the hill next to our condo. Soon every morning I was rising before dawn to pound out my emotions on the pavement and drown them out with angry music in my ears (I refer to that as my A.F.I. System of a Down Chemical Romance phase). And that's how I got into fitness! Not exactly the inspiring story you thought it would be, eh? Well not yet anyhow.

I still hadn't learned to talk about it. I felt like people would be disgusted if they knew what had happened to me, what I had done. Stifled in real life, the words wanted out and they found a way. I wrote a book about my assault and it's 1,000 unedited pages (no joke) of unmitigated pain. I hadn't healed enough to write the final chapter of redemption. It ended the way it started: me, broken, on the floor. Fast forward a couple of years and a few timid attempts to tell people what I'd been through and I found blogging. Suddenly those words that had heretofore only been read by my sister and father had a more public outlet. It was you.

I reached out to you and despite my posts relating only tangentially to fitness, you reached back for me. And we held each other and cried. You offered me a listening ear, support, anger when I couldn't manage it myself and even the precious gift of your own stories.

Writing it all out here has been key in my healing. (Note: it didn't replace regular therapy - I did PLENTY of that too. I love me my therapy.) Where I used to have nightmares, I now have peaceful sleep. Where I used to feel my story pressing behind my lips waiting to be whispered to the next passerby, now the psychic pressure is gone. There was a phase after the court case where I couldn't read enough about the experiences of other women with rape, sexual assault, domestic violence and the court system. I think the librarian - if she ever bothered to look at my account, which I'm sure they're too busy to do - must have thought I had one hardcore fetish. And that need too is gone now. Thanks to all of you.

Why all this now? For some reason, several people have recently approached me about this subject in real life and on the Internet. And I have found myself telling my story again. But this time it's different. I'm finally speaking of it from a place of relative peace. I'll never feel great about it. Some regret will always lay like a sigh across my heart. But I don't fear the telling. Not anymore. So in an effort to consolidate all my posts dealing with my abusive relationship, sexual assault, the court case and the aftermath, I'm writing this as a clearinghouse of sorts. Here's my story.

The night I was assaulted and the question I still can't answer about myself.

The morning after.

More details about the assault, my abusive relationship and what I did to protect myself.

The connection between eating disorders and sexual abuse.

What it's like taking your attacker to court.

How the court case impacted my pregnancy and brought my eating disorder back.

The gut wrenching aftermath of the court case.

The many ways victims try to feel safe again.

I may have started by running away. But it was through kickboxing I finally found my scream.

Finally getting to punch someone as hard as I could was very therapeutic.

When the anger finally started to come out, it scared me. And thrilled me.

Dealing with my PTSD brought on in a fitness setting.

Managing physically intimidating situations in the gym.

My experience as a rape crisis counselor.

The problem with blogging about my sexual assault: banishing Internet trolls.

Why I don't condone reciprocal violence.

Teaching teenage girls to fight back.

The Not-Rape epidemic. Even when you aren't raped, sexual assault still hurts.

The regrets I still have.

What about you - have you ever blogged about anything intensely personal? Have you ever found healing by reading another person's story on their blog? Or does it make you uncomfortable when people overshare?

Girls Gone Violent

Check out this snippet I uncovered in which a popular celebrity talks about arguing with their significant other:

"I say, 'You have to go and stop talking to me, because I'm going to kill you. I'm going to stab you with something, please leave.' I'd never own a gun for that reason," says [name redacted]. "I wouldn't shoot to kill. But I would shoot them in the leg, for sure."

Who could it be? What if I told you it was a recorded phone conversation between Chris Brown and a buddy discussing the incident with Rihanna? Well, it isn't. And it's not OJ Simpson either. It's actually the ever-quotable Megan Fox talking about her fiancee Brian Austen Green.

Hilarious, right?

The other day I was talking to the group of teenaged girls from my church that I volunteer with every week. They are, to a one, smart, funny, beautiful and nice girls. And yet, when talk turned to how frustrating brothers can be, one girl said she deals with her sibling by hitting him.

"Why do you do that?" I asked her.

"To get him to shut up," she answered perfunctorily.

"Does he hit you when he gets upset?"

"Oh no!" she exclaimed. "He'd get in way too much trouble!"

I paused. "So why is it okay for you to hit him then?"

"Well it's not like I really hurt him. Besides, he thinks it's funny."

The truth is, she being quite petite and her older brother being quite big, she probably doesn't hurt him. But since when does the amount of pain inflicted justify violence? Working with domestic violence survivors - I did a year-long stint working at a battered women's shelter and nine months on call as a rape-crisis counselor - I have spent quite a bit of time trying to teach women that it's okay to fight back, to stand up for yourself. And being a survivor of dating violence, I've spent a lot of time telling myself that as well. I'm certainly not going to say that a woman needs to take abuse, but this doesn't give us a free pass to hurt another person.

Like the girl from the example above, many often cite the women-are-the-weaker-sex argument in their attempts to justify violent speech or behavior. I'd say that Megan Fox makes an excellent, if unintended point here: guns level that playing field. Yet somehow in our popular culture we have decided that violent females are cute, sexy - Megan Fox's current film Jennifer's Body is a horror movie based around the concept of a hot girl who literally eats men - or the most cringe-worthy: empowered. This idea of female empowerment = violence is so popular these days that I saw the chicks rule logo above on a t-shirt at Wal-Mart. In the little girls section.

I get that traditional horror flicks have long traded in victimized (in oh so many ways) females; it's one of the many reasons I detest horror movies. But does going so far in the other direction make it any better? Rather than striving to raise the number of female serial killers to equal that of men, I think our time would be better spent in not glamorizing serial killers of any gender. The funny thing is that apparently women love horror movies. The New York Times recently examined this paradox:

"Recent box office receipts show that women have an even bigger appetite for these films than men. Theories straining to address this particular head scratcher have their work cut out for them: Are female fans of “Saw” ironists? Masochists? Or just dying to get closer to their dates?"

What do you think about Megan's statement? Would you not take her seriously knowing that she's a petite, gorgeous girl? Do you find the "girls kick boys' butts" message empowering? Are you a girl who loves horror movies?