Run

"You have to be careful." My therapist sat across from me, beautiful even with her makeup just slightly overdrawn, and talked to me about the exhaustion. "I see women all the time who've been diagnosed with depression when in fact they have anemia, or a thyroid problem. Make sure you get those checked."

It was 2006. I was crawling, guerilla style, through a terrifying divorce of my own choosing. I was bone tired and living on a pendulum and, as was so often the case over the last several years, something felt intrinsically wrong. My therapist was right about everything but I wouldn't know it for years.

Soon after I left her care I was diagnosed with depression. And when I went back months later with an 8.5 x 11" piece of paper covered with a list of symptoms, explaining again that something seemed to be wrong, I was diagnosed with depression again. At that point, after that second diagnosis when the iron levels kept looking good enough and my thyroid showed no signs of distress, I finally called my friends and started trying to accept what my doctor was telling me. It wasn't cancer and I didn't have diabetes and my thyroid was fine and the horrible depletion I could feel in my bones, the strange drugged out distance I felt from my environements at times, the fear and anxiety and the debilitating exhaustion: they were all a result of an imbalance in my brain. It felt wrong but I knew that must be a symptom too, that displacement in my gut from the reality I was trying to face. I. Was. Depressed.

Except I wasn't. I had Crohn's and nobody knew it.

I was running this morning at 8 am, my legs eating up the miles with more hunger and speed than they have since last December, when I thought of that conversation with my therapist. I thought of struggling for a year to see myself as depressed. The rush in my legs as I ran this morning; my body's thrilled willingness to respond now that I am healing and nourishing myself correctly; the happiness I feel when I am working hard at a goal: they all tell me something so completely different from that diagnosis. Through all of this I have felt and wanted and pushed. It wasn't depression that held me under; it was bleeding, edema and heat in my bowels, and an inability to absorb the fundamental building blocks of survival.

The most romantic moment in my recent memory starts with me, several weeks ago, sobbing in the driver's seat of my minivan. My boyfriend Stephen is leaning in through the door and I am falling apart, just coming loose with my desperate need to be well. I have run recently, harder and faster than any other time since I got sick, and it has felt amazing. Except that now I have pain in my hips like glass shards and splintering bones. After only 1.5 miles of hard-earned freedom, I have arthritis that makes me waddle through the house and forces me to push myself out of chairs with my arms. I have failed to win, failed to control things enough to achieve that rush without horrible consequences, and I feel that something crucial has been stolen from me.

"I just want to run. I want to run again so badly." I gasp-gasp for breath and cry giant, kitchen faucet tears that chase each other down my face.

Stephen leans further in. His deltoid swells and strains the cotton of his t-shirt as he grips the edge of the door. His smile is made of indulgence, patience and admiration. "You're like a fucking Nike commercial, I swear to God."

I felt, in that moment, so proud to be fighting; proud to be stretching myself and wanting the best and risking, again and again, for what I love. And this morning, as I ran and felt my body kick into one gear higher than it did the last time I ran, as I risked arthritis and setbacks to test the boundaries again, I felt that same pride. I am not depressed; I am the furthest thing from it. All I lack is the physical strength to follow through on who I believe myself to be. Today, Asics steadily hitting the ground and chest free of pain, I came one of a million steps closer.