Whisper #29I Was the Toxic One

I hate running.
Not cardio.
Running.

But I have a ritual with running.

Every two or three years, when life gets louder than I know what to do with, I disappear for four hours and run.

Two weeks ago, I went for one.

I took off my necklace.
Took off my earrings.
Left the music behind.

And started running.

The same road I had run after university.
The same road I had run after losing things I thought would last.
The same road I had run whenever life became too large for language.

At first it felt like every other run.

The rhythm of my feet against the pavement.

The negotiation between the body and the mind that always happens after the first hour.

Keep going.
Strong people know when to stop.

Stop.
You’re weak.

Damned if you do.
Damned if you don’t.

Shut up.
Keep running.

A few hours in, I saw a karate kid running with his father.

White kimono.
Small frame.
Trying to keep up.

And suddenly I was no longer on that road.

I don’t know how long I cried for.

I only know that something in me broke open.

The kind of crying that arrives before understanding does.

The kind that makes you realize your body has been carrying something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

I kept running.
Crying.

Wondering why the sight of a kid in a karate uniform had hit me so hard.

I was seventeen again.

Three fights away from a gold medal.

My ankle was injured.
My wrist was injured.

Between fights, my sensei looked at me and said:

“You’re done.”

I shook my head.

“You can’t continue like this.”

I shook my head again.

“If you walk into that fight, I won’t stand in your corner.”

They called my name for the next fight.

I walked in anyway.

Angry.
Certain.

Certain that strong people push through pain.
Certain that stopping meant weakness.
Certain that finishing mattered more than listening.

Three referee warnings later, the fight was over.

So were the nationals.

Eight hours on a bus afterward.

My wrist throbbing.
My ankle swollen.

Crying my heart out while staring through the window.

And somewhere between the pain and the tears, something in me already knew.

That would be the last Karate competition of my life.

Years later, that injury led me to yoga.

And somewhere along the way, I convinced myself I knew my body.

After all, I had spent decades training it.

Karate.
Yoga.
Handstands.
Splits.
Discipline.

I knew how far it could bend.
How long it could hold discomfort.
How much pain it could tolerate.

What I didn’t know was the relationship underneath all of it.

Because somewhere between trying to become stronger, more flexible, more resilient and more disciplined, I started seeing my body as a tool.

A project.
A problem to fix.

And once I saw that, a hundred things suddenly made sense.

Why the handstand mattered so much.
Why I spent 2 years waking up at 4:30 am practicing for 2h.

Why there was always another goal.
Another weakness.
Another thing that needed work.

The voice was never cruel.

It was just never satisfied.

Not enough.
A little more.
Keep going.

Fix that next.
Then that.
Then that.

The strange thing is that all of it worked.

Karate worked.
Discipline worked.
Yoga worked.

The resilience was real.
The strength was real.
The flexibility was real.

People would praise my discipline.
Some were inspired by it.

That’s what made it so hard to see.

The problem was never the training.

The problem was that I had spent years relating to my body almost exclusively through improvement.

I thought I was loving it.

I just didn’t know another way to love it besides trying to change it.

As if its worth lived somewhere in the future.
As if it had to earn its place.

I fed it.
Trained it.
Rested it.

From the outside, it probably looked like care.

But if my body had been a person,

I would’ve been the toxic one.

Always demanding.
Rarely listening.
Never quite satisfied.
Never enough.

And for the first time in years, I saw something I had missed all along.

A body that carried me through every version of my life.

Every heartbreak.
Every success.
Every beginning.
Every loss.

A body that let me touch, taste, see, hear, grieve and love.

A body that had been with me through all of it.

And somehow, I had left it outside my own compassion.

Nothing changed after that run.

The same strengths.
The same limitations.
The same scars.
The same tight places.

But something felt different.

For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t looking at something that needed work.

I was looking at something that belonged exclusively to me.

And the feeling was strangely familiar.

Like coming home.
Like my body was learning my name for the first time.

With Love & Stillness,
Saf