Writing Is Like Running A Marathon

Lesson #3/Part One

No one can make you do anything: Study, work hard, achieve, lose weight, pursue that dream job. You must first love and respect yourself before you can achieve any of those goals.

My mother and grandmother embodied unconditional love. What is unconditional love? To love without conditions. Sounds so simple, right? And, yet, my mother always said this was the hardest lesson to learn in the world.

How do too many of us in this world give and receive love? With conditions.

I will love you IF …

I will love you BUT ONLY …

Our love comes with strings, riders, attachments, asterisks.

Love of self comes with exactly the same things.

How did I get to that place in my life? I nearly ended mine. I was lonely, miserable, and I believed things would never change. I believed the world would be better without me in it.

But in the midst of the worst night of my life, I saw my mother, my grandmother, all of the people who loved me and believed in me. I remembered how my grandmother and grandfather scrimped and saved – tossing spare change they had into a crock in their garage until it was full, loading it into the back of their pickup truck and taking it to the community bank where they started a college fund for my mother, who would become the first in our family to graduate college – to have a better life. I thought of how hard the women in my life tried to protect me and loved me as me.

And I decided to honor myself in the same way.

When I began to write my first book, waking at four a.m., I also began to walk at dawn after I finished writing. At first, it was simply a way for me to clear my mind and walk the dog before work. Over time, it became routine. And routine is the only way to accomplish your dreams.

I would write for an hour and a half and then walk my neighborhood. I’m barely five-foot-seven. I weighed nearly 270 pounds at my highest. I could barely walk for ten minutes. I had never exercised or played sports my whole life. I was the funny, fat kid. I was the one in the stands.

Something happened, though, as I was waking early to write. I felt a purpose in my life. I found a calling. I found meaning. And that made me want to do not only do more with my day — to accomplish as much as humanly possible — but to do more with my life, be the person I dreamed, push myself.

And the more I wrote, the more I walked. As I did, something clicked. I began to see the concrete result of my efforts.

The pages piled up.

The pounds came off.