Here’s something that is not fun for me to admit.
I do not like showing the moments when I am weak.
Yes, I will share them after the fact. After all, we are all human. I’ll tell you about the struggle once I have processed it. I’ll write about the failure once I’ve figured out what it taught me. I’ll talk about the hard moment when I can wrap it up with a little bow and say, “See? This is what I learned.”
But in the actual moment of weakness?
That’s different.
I get incredibly self-conscious. I want to push through without anyone seeing me sweat, stumble, struggle or — God forbid — stop.
And when you are someone like me who perceives herself as being pretty open about the messy parts of life, catching yourself actually not wanting anyone to see the mess can be quite humbling.
Recently, I was out for a run.
I’m building myself back up again. A few weeks ago, I started with 2 miles at around a 12-minute pace. Coming from someone who has run marathons and even an ultra, you might think that would kill my ego.
Honestly, it doesn’t.
I’ve started here before. Actually, I’ve started even lower than this before. I know what it feels like to slowly build your body into something it couldn’t do before. I know that consistency matters more than what the watch says on any given day.
And a few weeks in, I’m back to running 3 miles a few times a week and getting under a 10:30 pace.
I’m good with that.
But the other day, I was running what I think was only supposed to be 2 miles.
And my body needed a pause.
I knew it. So when I reached a certain area in my neighborhood, I stopped.
I caught my breath. I waited until my pulse settled back into a comfortable place. I gave my body what it was asking for instead of forcing it to do something just because my brain thought it should be able to.
Then I started running again.
No big deal, right?
Except then I saw a family standing outside, probably waiting for the school bus.
And I immediately felt embarrassed.
They probably didn’t care. They probably didn’t think twice. There is a very good chance they didn’t even notice me.
Yet there I was, feeling ashamed and somehow less than because I couldn’t hack my short run that morning without taking a break.
It’s crazy how the ego works.
Because my body was doing exactly what I had spent years learning to let it do: communicating with me.
I listened.
That should have felt like a win.
Instead, the second I thought someone else might have witnessed it, I turned it into a weakness.
At first, I did what I often do. I found a way to make myself feel better.
“Well, at least those kids saw that you can stop and start again.”
And maybe they did.
But I think the lesson was actually meant for me.
Because how often do we give ourselves permission to struggle only when nobody else is watching? And maybe the bigger question is, how long do we stay in things simply because we believe people are watching?
That family probably wasn’t thinking about me at all. I was the one thinking about me. I created an entire story in my head about what they might have thought when they saw me stop running, when the reality is they were probably just standing there waiting for the school bus and barely noticed me.
Yet we do this all the time, and not just during a run. We stay because of what we think other people might say. We say yes when we want to say no. We keep going when something inside us is telling us to stop. We pretend everything is fine because admitting that something isn’t working anymore feels harder when we think someone else might see it.
The funny thing is, most people probably aren’t watching nearly as closely as we think they are. They’re busy living their own lives, worrying about their own decisions and, ironically, probably wondering what everyone else thinks about them.
Maybe the bigger lesson for me wasn’t that I stopped and started running again. Maybe it was realizing how quickly I gave an imaginary audience power over how I felt about myself.
Because stopping doesn’t always mean failing. Sometimes it means listening to yourself closely enough to know what you need. Sometimes it means recognizing that something no longer fits. Sometimes it means changing direction. And sometimes, like that morning, it simply means catching your breath so you can keep going.
That morning, I needed a minute. I took it, caught my breath, and started running again. But it made me wonder how many times in my life I have needed a much bigger pause and refused to take it because I was worried about who might see me stop.
Maybe that’s something worth thinking about. Are we still moving forward because it’s where we truly want to go, or are we afraid of what it might look like if someone sees us stop?
There is a big difference.
And maybe learning that difference is part of knowing when to keep running, when to catch your breath, and when it’s perfectly okay to choose an entirely different road.
Mother, author, entrepreneur and founder of Dandelion-Inc, Lisa Resnick wants to hear your story. Share memories with her by emailing [email protected].
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