Ep #321 I’m Back, B*tches!

Welcome to The Run Your Best Life edition of the Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a GenX woman whose brain still feels like a member of the breakfast club but the person you see in the mirror is starting to look a lot like your parents, you are in the right place. I’m your host, Jill Angie and we’re gonna dive into all the weird shit Gen X women are facing right now, so you feel less alone and a lot more empowered. Are you ready? Let’s fucking go!

I’m back, b*tches. How have you been? I have missed you. Thank you so much for hanging in while I took a few months to gather myself, to rest, to think and create and decide what the future of this podcast will be. And before I share what’s next, I need to take you back in time way back, almost 50 years. So when I was little, I talked incessantly, incessantly in grade school, I, I just couldn’t control myself.

I had so much to say, I was whispering to my friends and passing notes and shouting out answers and in the third grade, my teacher basically had enough and she made me stand in the hall to teach me a lesson and I had to stand up. I don’t know. It felt like all day. It was probably like 20 minutes, but it was humiliating because I had to face into the wall outside the classroom the whole time.

I mean, sometimes I would kind of like peek through the door window to see what was going on, but basically I had to stand facing the wall all by myself in the empty hallway. And, you know, maybe somebody would walk by and ask me why I was standing there and I had to explain that I talked too much and this was my punishment.

I would love to say it happened once and it never happened again, but it happened again and again. And it never worked. I was still a chatterbox. And in the fourth grade, my teacher took a different approach. She made me write, I will not talk in class 100 times on the blackboard. I shit you not. And it still did not work.

I got excellent grades, but every single report card said some version of I talked too much. I needed to learn to be quiet and respectful of others and blah, blah, blah. Fortunately, my parents weren’t actually too concerned about it. They just chalked it up to me not being challenged enough by the classwork.

They were probably right. They gave me a lot of books to read. They got me a piano. They encouraged me to be creative. They tried to keep my brain busy. By the seventh grade, I was, I was getting like, I’d kind of gotten into some of the more advanced classes and I was also able to get through my classes without whispering in the back row.

So Maybe coincidentally, maybe not coincidentally, by that point I had discovered boys, which is a whole other problem, right? My poor mom. I’m sure some of you can relate to that. But here’s the thing. I am so glad that my teachers were not able to stifle my voice and that my parents encouraged me to express myself because I grew up believing that my thoughts had value, that they were worth sharing.

And as a result, when I have something to say, I usually say it. And I know how very lucky I am to have been raised to believe in myself so hard. I know lots of people don’t get that kind of encouragement and support from their families and the other people they interact with and it affects their whole life.

And so I am deeply grateful. But anyway, I carried on with my chatty self all through my corporate career. I never got in trouble for talking. Actually, I take that back. I think I did have a boss who was like, listen. You need to work more and talk less, because I just, I’m just a very naturally chatty person, but it did serve me well that I am able to talk to people very easily because it allows me to network and you know, made me, it made it easy for me to talk to my bosses and other co workers and I was generally a very well liked person around the office.

So, when I did hit my 40s and realized that I was being called to something different than working in the pharmaceutical industry, I had no problem finding my voice. I had already, like, practiced sharing my opinions for years and years. So I started a blog, I wrote three books, I created a Facebook group that now has almost 30, 000 members.

I basically spread the message far and wide that you can be athletic at any size, right? That you can be a runner. You can be a triathlete. You can be whatever you want to do. You can do it at any size. And eventually that led me to start this podcast. And honestly, it never occurred to me that I would run out of things to say.

It’s like 50 years. What would I, I never had run out of it before. And so I was a little bit surprised. It took 320 episodes and almost six years, but it did finally happen this summer. I just felt like I had gotten to the end of all of my opinions and my thoughts and beliefs about being a runner and an athlete in a fat body.And about being a fat person in general, I felt like I was just done.

So I stopped talking just to see what would happen. So my whole life, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, age 56, I was like, what might happen if I stopped? So I went quiet here on this show. I slowed my social media posting way down and I truly thought I just needed to rest my voice and then I will be ready to come back and talk about all things running in the new year.

I am happy to report that the silence was amazing. It was amazing to just shut up and listen for a bit. Cause I also realized this past summer that I was feeling incredibly stressed and anxious all the time, all the time, no matter what. And I wasn’t sure why. But in the silence of not forming opinions and putting them out there into a podcast or social media or, or where else I could finally hear myself think. I could finally hear my own voice inside, right?

My, my inside, that quiet voice that So often we want to listen to it, but I was drowning my own little voice out and it turns out there actually has been a lot of stuff sort of bubbling up inside me and I had no idea it was there until I took a break and really the clue was me feeling stressed and worried and overwhelmed all the time and I didn’t realize that that was the clue, but when I took a hot minute to listen to those emotions, they had a lot to say.

And here’s the thing, I have not been feeling like myself for probably at least four, maybe five years. And, oh, okay. No, wait, scratch that. I thought I wasn’t feeling like myself, but what I realized is I’m not even sure who myself even is at 56 and I’ve been thinking, well, I feel like I’m 20, but I actually don’t feel like I’m 20.

Right. In my twenties, I was needy and lonely and desperate to find somebody to share my life with. I wanted to hide most of the time because I was ashamed of my body. I’m very different from that now, but I think I was also romanticizing a lot of the things in my life that were happening when I was 20 years old, which was primarily that I was, you know, in my 20s and I was just starting out my career and I was excited about my career and, you know, I’d some really fun friends and I did lots of fun things, but the truth is that there was so much about being in my twenties and even in my early thirties, that was very, very painful.

And that’s not who I am right now. So when I say I don’t feel like myself, I realized like, it’s not that I don’t feel like myself anymore cause I for sure don’t. And I don’t want to feel like that person anymore, but I’m, I’m not sure what I want to feel like. I’m not sure. Who I am, who, what’s my baseline, right?

So again, it’s, it’s not that I’m not feeling like myself, but it’s more like I don’t know who the fuck I even am. At 56 years old, it is weird. Especially coming from somebody who has so many opinions to even hear myself say that out loud. It feels weird. But there it is. And maybe you can relate, right?

I think a lot of us in that age range can relate. I also realized I had a lot of thoughts about making the second half of my life as meaningful as possible. I’ve been letting go of a lot of societal expectations over the past few years. You know, like how a woman should look, and what she should do, and how she should act, and some of that is still coalescing and evolving.

It’s an ongoing process. I still have work to do to shed some of that programming, but I’m making a lot of progress. I’ve been thinking about aging and I’ve been thinking about, you know, I have. You know, I’ve lost both of my parents. Andy has lost both of his parents, but I’m now I’m kind of like, oh, I’m getting older and my siblings are older than me and like how do I make sure that I’m connecting with people in a deep meaningful way now so that I don’t have any regrets and how do I regret proof my own life?

Right? How do I, how do I do all these things? How do I make sure that I’m leaving the legacy that I want to leave? And again, I feel like I’ve done some work in that direction, but also I feel like I’ve been coasting and not really being as intentional as I want to be. And I am I’m struggling. I gotta tell you, this is just a word dump on you guys right now.

Hang with me. I promise I’m going somewhere with it. But I’m struggling with my identity of feeling 20 something, right? That kind of like, oh, I still feel like I’m in my 20s, but the face in the mirror has gray hair and wrinkles and a body that feels kind of creaky and stiff. And, you know, sometimes I feel invisible and irrelevant because I don’t have that youthful look anymore.

Sometimes I want to dress like a 20 year old to feel that age again and feel that sort of rebellious sort of spirit. Sometimes I forget things and I wonder if it’s an early sign of dementia and sometimes I feel angry and belligerent and defensive and I know it’s all part of aging, but. Whoa, it has been quite a ride.

And I also have noticed, and it’s not a surprise to me, but it really has started speaking louder to me. This feeling of terror that I have about the political direction that the United States is moving in and how scared I am for everyone who is going to be negatively impacted. If Donald Trump somehow manages to get reelected, especially women of reproductive age and people of color and LGBTQ folks and non Christians and people with lower incomes and so on.

And even if he doesn’t get reelected, it is clear to me that at least I see it that half of the country wants to take away the basic human rights of the other half. And I am sick over it, and I have tried really hard to keep my political opinions to myself on this show because I wanted to keep it neutral and I didn’t, I just didn’t want to go there, but that is starting to feel very disingenuous because I am such an advocate of speaking up, of telling the truth, of working to change what is not working and that pretending I’m apolitical is like standing in front of a burning building and saying. What fire, right?

So, you know, all of this, you’re probably wondering, what does this mean for the Not Your Average Runner podcast? Am I going to spend every single episode complaining about politicians and promoting my liberal feminist agenda? That does sound like fun, but no. I’m not going to do that, but I’m also not going to avoid those topics when it is appropriate, and I will state my opinion.

Primarily what I’m going to do is start to include a much wider variety of topics that affect women my age, in other words Gen X women give or take a few years, I know there are plenty of boomers out there listening and I am pretty sure that you are either experiencing some of these things or you have and you can relate and I know there’s plenty of millennial women listening who, Hey girls, like this is, this is what’s coming for you.

So maybe time to circle the wagons and have a listen. And it’s going to be topics like taking care of your aging parents chronic pain, dating after divorce, menopause, reinventing yourself in midlife. That’s just a sampling. But it’s really shit that we’re all struggling with right now, and it’s the things that make us feel alone and isolated because there’s, in my experience, not a lot of support and discussion about it, and hey, maybe there is, and somehow in my wide travels throughout the internet, I have not seen it, but really, I feel like there’s not a ton of support right now for Gen X women and all that we are going through.

And also because Gen X is all about being strong and independent, which is great, right? But because especially women, we are very strong, we’re very independent. You know, we like to say we are. The generation that was raised by wolves because we were the latchkey kids and we were just, you know, it was before the internet.

Most of us grew up without video games, right? That was maybe something that we got in our teen years. We kind of are, we are very independent and we are used to sort of making our own way, but on the flip side, that means that we don’t always need, we don’t always know how to ask for help, or we don’t always feel comfortable asking for help.

So with all of that said, I am very excited to announce the Run Your Best Life series of this podcast and. What I’m going to do is I, I have, we’re starting out with, I’ve queued up eight awesome episodes. We’ve already recorded them.

They are coming weekly over the next eight weeks. And it’s going to be me chatting with expert voices in their field about how to deal with life in your forties and your fifties. When your brain still feels like a member of the breakfast club, but the person you see in the mirror is starting to look a lot like your parents.

And the very first one in the series is kicking off next week. And I’m not even going to tell you who it is. You’re going to love it. It’s an amazing episode. It’s so, so fucking good. And I hope you’re going to join me because, first of all, this has been a really fun project to put together.

And I put it together with you in mind, right? I know there are so many of you that that, you know, these are things that, that you are struggling with. And so, Hey, I’ve done 320 episodes on running and I feel like it is time for me to start bringing other things to you that are going to be helpful and meaningful in your lives.

So I will be looking to you to see what other topics are affecting you that you would like to see covered. And please feel free to write in support@notyouraveragerunner. com and let me know. And now to answer the big question, will this ever go back to being a running podcast? Cause for the next two months, this is going to be Shit that Gen X women are dealing with podcast. After that, the truth is, I don’t know. I am not ruling it out and I absolutely love coaching my runners, and I’m still coaching them and that is not going to change. But, like I’ve said several times, there’s already 320 episodes about running while fat for y’all to listen to.

And I think, at least for the moment, I’ve said everything that I need to say about being a fat runner. So we will see. That is TBD. For right now, I am indulging myself and honoring the voice inside me and bringing in some other voices that I think are going to be valuable to you. So my friend, let’s fucking go.

I want you to tune in next week for the first one and please enjoy this ride with me. Thank you so much.

Real quick before you go! If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you have to check out Up and Running. It’s a thirty-day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to notyouraverageunner.com/upandrunning to find out when the next class starts. I’d love to be a part of your journey.