I guess I can say I'm a Runner now.

I've never liked running...

My legs are short and I'm slow. That's just how I'm built at 5' 1". I don't enjoy being out of breath and sweating is gross. (I really hate sweat, even though I work out a lot. It's so gross and stinky.) My dad, who got it from my grandpa, always says, "We're Buell's. We may be short... but we're slow!" Dad, that is NOT a good thing. And then of course they would both chuckle with how plain and ordinary our gene pool is when it comes to height and speed. That saying makes me roll my eyes WAY too far back.

I've honestly tried liking running. I've gone through multiple phases in my life where I tell myself, "This is the time... you're going to do it and you're going to like it dammit!" People always say that there is this thing called a runner's high. I had never found it. It was more like runners "die" to me. I was constantly exhausted. (And don't even get me started on how hungry I always was after running. I still wonder how runners are so dang skinny when they eat so freaking much.)

But in January, my friend Anna texted me and asked if I would want to do an 8 kilometer run with her in March. I said sure before looking up how many miles an 8k was.... IT'S FIVE MILES?! I can barely even run 2 miles!! How in the hell am I going to run 5 miles?! I started panicking. I figured the only way to keep myself accountable was to buy that darn race entry. $45 later, I was hyperventilating. Anna and I determined that if we ran four out of the five miles, we'd call it a success, so that night we drew up our race training schedules while watching the Golden Globes and started running next day.

Throughout the running, the sweating and the exhaustive breathing, I learned a heck of a lot.


Adrenaline can be your best friend.
Seriously, it's how mothers pull cars off of their babies and how Edward saves Bella in Twilight... oh wait, just kidding, that was just his cover story. But seriously, on the day of the race, I was practically giddy. No I wasn't doing the half-marathon, I was only doing five miles but those were the five miles that would become my PR of distance at this point in my life. I couldn't stop moving. Even when my knees were hurting. Even when I started feeling those blisters forming around mile 2.5 (and let me tell you, that was UNCOMFORTABLE!). I couldn't stop, because the adrenaline was helping push me to the end of that five miles.

Sometimes you need someone to challenge you.
On the days where I didn't want to run, I knew that my running partner had invited me to do this with her. She might not "need" me to run with her, but she was training. She was putting the effort in. She was in this too. I had that accountability to hold on to, even if we weren't running together every day.

You will hit setbacks.
In my case, it was getting rear-ended on my way to work. In the middle of my training schedule, I was told that I wasn't allowed to workout for 2 weeks, and then for 2 weeks after that I was limited to low impact workouts. I started panicking again. "I've only gotten to three and a half miles!! I'm going to lose all of my hard work!" (In case you hadn't figured out, I'm good at panicking...)

But in the end it's up to you.
You can choose to give up, or you can choose to keep moving. I kept walking. That was all I was allowed to do according to my doctor, so I walked. You find ways to keep moving towards your goal, even if it's slowly walking at an incline on a treadmill. You have the power to see a situation in a positive light.

You have people cheering you on. (Even strangers!)
My favorite sign of the whole day was one that said "GO STRANGER, GO!" That was one of the profound moments in the run. People wanted to see you succeed. Even if they don't know you. And sometimes you see people you do know, and they cheer you on, or you cheer them on! The point is that even though there will be haters and jerks, people love seeing success.

You don't have to have the coolest gear, but having the RIGHT gear is important.
Cuz if your stuff looks cool but gives you massive blisters, it sucks. Period.

I underestimate myself.
This is something that I learn time and time again, yet I never quite expect how it will slap me in the face. It's funny because over the last couple years, I have surprised myself so many times through resilience, strength and perseverance. I somehow made it through college with my support system living 2500 miles away. I have managed to keep almost 20 pounds off for a year. I am working toward becoming a Zumba instructor. And yesterday, for the first time, I ran five miles.... and couldn't wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.



Anna and I ran the whole five miles, accompanied by her dad and 8,000 other 8k runners (the irony of 8,000 runners running 8,000 meters is not lost on me...). We did it. We didn't even walk the mile that we had originally planned on walking. And guess what's the craziest part? I'm ready to find another race!

I might have run the race slowly, but I ran 5 miles, so I guess you could say I'm a Runner now. And believe it or not, I think I might continue to be a Runner.

Why the world needs more Strong Women, and less Hard Women.

Strength is such a broad and often generic word. He is so strong, she is so strong. Are you talking about a body builder or a cancer survivor? Are you talking about the kid who lost half of his leg, or the sexual abuse victim? Is it mental, is it physical, is it emotional?

I was thinking this morning on my drive to work about some of the women in my life. I've been blessed with a huge pool of female role models, from family members, to supervisors, to coworkers and friends. So many of these women have incredibly admirable qualities, one of the biggest of the bunch is their strength. I've also seen some women who take strength to a whole new zip code. They want to be strong so they become hard. They become unapproachable, cynical, and straight up rude. They go from women who have endured, to women who have calloused.

So, with two words that can sometimes be so similar and sometimes be so opposite, I decided to ask some of my loyal readers what they thought were the differences between hard women and strong women. Of course they didn't disappoint...

Well I feel like a strong woman knows when she is in a vulnerable position and can learn from that experience in order to become stronger or gain strength. A hard woman, I feel, is someone who is not emotionally stable. Someone who puts on a facade of "Im too tough to cry even though I feel like my whole world is crumbling"- Gal, 24

The difference is the way they deal with difficult times and how many of those times they've had to deal with. - Guy, 26

A hard woman to me means cynical, cold, unfeeling. She lets the things in her life build walls around her heart. Strong women still have feelings. They let themselves feel things but they are mature enough to see what they can gain or learn from really tough experiences. - Gal, 25

First off let me say, a strong woman is very sexy. I'm not entirely sure why, but watching a woman confidently -not like a psycho though- put a man in his place cracks me up (insert shit eating grin here). She's classy, very smart, works her tail off. Plus she will rock the bedroom because, well, she knows her man wants it but will make him work for it, otherwise it wouldn't be a challenge. Hard women? To me that sounds like an old landlord of mine. Crazy ass "strong willed independent woman." Asks her husband to do things, then tears him a new one just to do it.Always in control. She's probably incredibly self conscious so she built walls and acted tough, then got angry when those walls kept people out. Strong women are legit, they are true. There isn't a whole made up story or layer of BS to cover up mistakes or heartbreaks. It's awesome. I think it's the confidence and the ability to realize a mistake is just a learning experience. - Guy, 24

So the general consensus is that strong women still feel. Hard women are flat liners.

To be honest, I expected people to interpret the strong woman vs. hard woman in terms of job-related qualities, but was surprised when the descriptions of the differences were personal characteristics. I thought  it was interesting that the four people I asked ALL addressed the question from a place of conflict. This question had no background info attached, so for all four individuals to relate it to how women react in conflict was fascinating to me.

I think it is SO important to encourage women to be strong without being hard. I know far too many millennial women (and women of other generations as well) who are heading down what I believe to be the unhealthier of the strong vs. hard decision. They get their hearts broken, they find conflict in work, or they give up on something and say "I will never let this happen again," when a strong women would say, "how can I learn from this?" By closing yourself off to opportunities because of a bad experience, how will you ever grow?! So you had a crappy boss... The whole industry isn't out to get you. You fell in love and it didn't work out? You're not going to die alone. You gave up on a dream? There's still time.... go get it.

Strong women have so much to offer. They are compassionate but stern. Driven but not obsessed. They are vulnerable but they also know when the pity party is over. A strong woman is aware of her self, but she is also aware of how she treats others. A strong woman teaches, a hard woman dictates. A strong woman strives to understand, a hard woman points the finger. If we become a generation of women that become too hard, we will lose sight of our resilient strength.

Even if you're not a woman reading this, it's important to encourage the women in your life to stay away from the callousness and lean toward the understanding. Learn from your experiences. Let them shape you but not change you. I love the quote by Michelangelo, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." This is the perfect analogy for staying strong without becoming hard. You have to make small adjustments in little pieces, but you don't change the material. You don't change yourself, you change the final product.

Question: Right Choice vs. Wrong Choice? Answer: FALSE.

We live in a generation that is obsessed with making the right choice.

It's all over our culture...

In movies:

The Dark Knight- Alfred: They'll hate you for it, but that's the point of Batman, he can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make, the right choice.

If I Stay- Gayle Forman: Sometime you make choices, and sometimes choices make you. 

Pitch Perfect- Fat Amy: Sometimes I have a feeling I can do crystal meth.. But them I think; mmmm better not! (Maybe not the perfect example of choice, but it's Fat Amy, so it's great life advice...)

In books:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban- Albus Dumbledore: It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. (It wouldn't be my blog if I didn't have an HP reference...)

Alice in Wonderland: Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.

"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire Cat.

"I don't know," Alice answered.

'Then,' said the Cat, "it doesn't matter."   

And then there are just the badass quotes about choice:

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice.
-Wayne Dyer

May your choices in life reflect your hopes, not your fears.- Nelson Mandela (BRILLIANT.)

Choose Happiness. - Some Dumb Pinterest picture 

I love the idea of choices. You have the capability of deciding how you want your story to go, how your direction moves and how you handle situations. But we live in a convoluted society that gives the impression that there is a RIGHT and a WRONG choice. Oh, how wrong that is....

My belief is that there is not a RIGHT and a WRONG choice. Yes, there are moral values that might be compromised in a decision. There are paths that are more desirable to the end result but there isnt a WRONG one.

Every choice you make guides you to the path of where you're supposed to be. I truly believe that our experiences shape us. I have been in some pretty rough places in the past. POSSIBLE OVER SHARE ALERT: For those of you who don't know, I was a victim of child molestation when I was seven years old. Many of you are gasping right now for one of two reasons; 1) Holy crap, I never knew that, or 2) Holy crap, why is she sharing that with the whole freaking internet?!

Well, the reasons I share this are : A) It's not my fault, and I'm not ashamed to talk about it, B) Talking about my history does not make me an attention whore, C) It's going to help me make my point about choices, D) Advocacy is best inspired by people who have gone through the situations and I am willing to talk about my experience with ANYONE as long as the conversation is about how to advocate for knowledge and support. **SIDE NOTE**If this is a cause you'd be interested in supporting, there's an incredible organization that helped me and so many others called the Children's Advocacy Center in Jackson County (for more info, click HERE )

I was so young when that happened to me and my conscious mind has blocked out a lot of what my little seven year old self went through. HOWEVER, I'd be lying if I said I was completely unaffected by my experience. Because I was so young, I don't know how I would have turned out if I hadn't gone through something so traumatic, but I know that telling my mom about what happened was my first BIG lesson on choices. I was told not to tell my parents, but I knew that wasn't what I should do. I told my mom. I made a huge choice. It would be considered a morally right decision by most, but many others in the situation similar to mine did NOT tell about what happened to them. Is that saying they made the WRONG decision? No. It's just a choice that can lead to a VERY different outcome for most people who were in my shoes.

Heavy stuff, sorry, but choices are a heavy topic. Way too many of my friends are afraid of making the wrong decision. They're too caught up in how their decision will be perceived. They're worried about doing what's right, even to the point of shutting down and panicking about their decision, making it so that nothing ends up coming from their situation (which is a choice in itself). But what if there isn't a right or wrong decision? What if there are just alternate endings? I think that goes back to the original premise of this blog, NO END IN SIGHT, taking something that is negatively viewed in our culture and then turning it to the positive. Eliminating the negative verbage.

Choices are beautiful.
The freedom of choice is something that we Americans take for granted very frequently. You can choose to go to college. You can choose to drop out of high school. Neither choice is right. Neither choice is wrong. Choices in life aren't a 2+2=4 equation. They're more like giving a crazy word problem from a physics exam to a group of sixth graders and asking them to come up with the back-story of why a train was traveling from Atlanta to HongKong. The reality is that each sixth grader will come up with a different story as to why/how the train was able to cross the ocean and multiple countries. None of the stories are right. Heck, the question is made up, right? And the idea of making all the right decisions is made up, too.

The real trick is to learn from your choices, to make a few mistakes, but to gain something from each experience. In my story, confiding in my mother set us up for a relationship that was strengthened to the core by a level of communication that we might not have had if I hadn't gone through what I did. I wouldn't have been able to advocate at City Hall as a third graader for an organization that truly saved so many children from terrible acts. I wouldn't have been able to get together with a group of young women through a teen mentorship program that taught me SO MUCH, about myself and about the resiliance of humans, period. I would never wish my scenario on anyone, but I also wouldn't change it because it made me the woman I am today.

Remember that your choices are important and still require much deliberation but breathe in the fact that you'll always have the ability to make a change in your situation.  Whatever choice you make is the right choice.