When brave doesn't feel brave
Earlier this month, I posted a video of myself skiing on Facebook. I was very proud that I had learned to ski with low vision.
The video has garnered a ton of likes and comments from friends and family. People are still mentioning it when I see them in person.
Learning to ski while legally blind is definitely brave, though it certainly helps to have two expert adaptive skiing coaches right beside you while you wear a giant, bright orange bib that says “BLIND SKIER” in huge letters.
I’m not diminishing the accomplishment; adaptive skiing changed my life, and attempting to ski without coaches and a bib would be dangerous and irresponsible.
I’m just saying that skiing while blind is only one kind of brave.
This morning I woke up with an overwhelming sense of sadness. Without heading too far into the deep end of the pity pool, here’s what happened:
I noticed that the front page of my Kindle library is filled with hundreds of books about how to be better: better at making money, lifting weights, finding your life purpose, meditating, making small talk and a million other things that I would like to get better at. While normally, those books make me happy, today it occurred to me that maybe I have an unhealthy obsession with being better. Maybe I am obsessed with how I am doing LIFE wrong. This made me sad.
My vision is bad. Like, a new level of bad. I was supposed to go to my eye doctor this morning, hoping to get some relief in the form of steroid shots. But the office called yesterday and canceled (AGAIN, this time due to the doctor being ill). So now I am forced to sit, for a whole weekend, with the terrible unknowing of whether this new, shitty bad vision is now my new normal — or just a temporary blip.
I have spent the last 7 days writing on the internet about how brave and amazing I am. There was bound to be an emotional hangover from this kind of unbalanced, public self-introspection eventually.
There were other things this morning that made me sad, like how my dog Howie is a total asshole in the morning and the house was filled with the smell of burned eggs AGAIN, but those are minor things in comparison.
So when my husband asked me from the sunroom if I was ready to take the dogs for a walk, I burst into tears.
He gathered me into his arms and told me that this was all very hard and that I needed to know I was enough. Of course he was right.
I am now writing this in the cafe at our local botanical gardens, where my husband and I sometimes go to work. The cherry blossoms in the Japanese garden are in bloom, and I’m hoping they might cheer me up.
When I first sat down, I didn't feel like writing. So I opened the book of essays Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic For A Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living by Shauna Niequist, and there was this quote:
“Sometimes brave looks more like staying when you want to leave, telling the truth when all you want to do is change the subject.”
And I thought, yes, brave is skiing down a mountain while blind. But maybe it’s also crying in your kitchen because all your self-help Kindle books triggered your perfectionism as your dog barked at you to give him his f*king food already, as the smell of burned breakfast choked your nostrils. And then to top it all off, your phone alerted you that it’s time to leave for your eye doctor appointment that was supposed to help you, but instead had been canceled (again).
And you think, If only I could go skiing right now. If only I was back in Aspen, being brave, rather than crying in my kitchen. That seems totally preferable to all this bullshit.
Or maybe that’s not brave at all; it’s just life. And life often sucks, and you have these days where all you can manage is to cry in your kitchen, let your husband comfort you and later walk in the sun amongst the cherry blossoms.