Swimming Upstream, Running Uphill: On Belonging

I have always wanted to write something lasting. I have always wanted the great tango of intellect and imagination to be my life. That matters to me.

I started running at age forty. At dawn, I ran.

Let me pause and say that I am not an athlete. At least, that’s not how I see myself. The people I think of as athletes spend months building up to triathlons or marathons. At the marathons I ran, there were these types of athletes, people in great shape. The winner of one of my marathons won in a little over two hours. I mean, come on, that’s bicycle speed. He was lean and tight and ran in shorts. He didn’t need anything other than his strength.

I don’t feel like an athlete, even with early morning running, Pilates, swimming, walking. With swimming, something I do often, I’m not close to competing in anything like a marathon. My friend, David, swam Alcatraz last year and got a medal. He’s a good swimmer, and his son, our adopted grandson, is a good swimmer, too. Maybe he will do Alcatraz when he gets older.

At forty, I finished my PhD. I wanted to be a woman with a PhD so I wouldn’t be pushed around as much. The other night, my husband and I had dinner with one of my classmates who hadn’t finished his dissertation. I only vaguely remembered him. He had a chapter to go, he said. But he had a company he had inherited from his parents, so he had the luxury of not finishing his work without consequence. I didn’t have that. I would have been stomped. I was stomped.

For my own dissertation, I finished the last 120 pages over Thanksgiving weekend and ate nothing but tuna. I taught nine classes that semester. I raised three children. I was a madwoman. Still, I told myself that I hadn’t done anything with my life. Get going, I’d think. Get your ass in gear.

But I thought, what a loser I am. I had all this potential. I got out of the cult. I started a publishing company, even though nobody gave a damn about it yet. I taught fifteen classes a year to support my family. But at forty, I felt that I needed to do something more. By then, I wanted to have written a big book. I kept reading about Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, who impacted the world through impossible circumstances. Get off your ass, Kate, I thought.

I started pushing myself physically. I climbed Mount Whitney in a single day with my husband and stepson, Jack, up and down on no food. That wasn’t the plan, but I got altitude sickness after the first hour, so no food. Gatorade all the way up, all the way down, on that long climb.

Are we doing this every year? Jack asked. No way, my husband and I said. But I had done it.

This wasn’t enough. Nothing seemed to be enough. Demons chased me, night and day. Loser, loser, loser.

Maybe a lot of people have impostor syndrome, but at some point, it must help if you are paid well or acknowledged for your work. The problem with the non-profit and small press publishing worlds is that your work is often invisible. You go on working, but thinking, Who am I? Am I invisible, too?

My kids joked with me to try to help me go easier on myself. You could get another PhD! You’ll always be a loser to us! We love you no matter what. Mama, you need to relax.

What are you talking about? Relax. Do you know what you’re asking?

At some point, I decided to sign up for my first marathon and started training. Twenty weeks; forty miles a week. Running at dawn. During the week, I ran five to eight miles a day, and on the weekends, I ran twelve to fifteen miles. I returned from my runs and stood with the fridge wide open, drinking orange juice out of the container like a teenager, even after my husband asked me to close the door. I’d just run fifteen miles; I would do what I wanted with my own fridge.

I didn’t want to be a runner. I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have time to write. But I ran.

Year after year, I ran.

One year, I ran a trail marathon in the Bay through poison oak, so if you had to use the bathroom, you had to pee on the trail to avoid getting a rash. It was a hard run. Almost everyone else was in the military.

“Don’t run down the hills,” my husband warned. “Don’t fall.”

At the trailhead, as two hundred of us stood around, everyone else looked so fit. A woman asked, “What do you do?” I must’ve looked like the only non-Marine.

“I’m a poet who runs,” I said.

“I bet you are,” she replied. She had a flat stomach; she looked like a magazine athlete. She wasn’t impressed with me.

She shook her head. “A poet.”

The race started. Later in the marathon, as I came around a tree, I saw that magazine girl on the ground. She had been going too fast and fallen flat on her face. As I leaned over her, there was blood everywhere. I gave her some water. She didn’t look good.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “I get help.”

“Everyone’s been running by me,” she said.

At the next aid station, I alerted the marathon crew and got someone to go back with a stretcher. Shortly after, I heard the whirr of helicopter blades.

My family was waiting for me when I, slow little poet, arrived at the finish line.

For many more years, I kept running. To prove that I wasn’t a loser, out in the winning field. To prove that I could be forgiven.

Now, I love to swim. Swimming isn’t something I do competitively. Swimming, like walking or dancing, is the life of my body. I don’t want to compete, because in swimming, I don’t have to prove anything. I’m just living.

But I believe that I left the cult of my childhood to do something important in the world, not to wander out and drink margaritas and pay the rent. It isn’t easy to know if you are doing anything that matters in the whoosh and rush and pilloried crush, especially in the arts. There is no pause, no gratitude, no real vacations, no bonus, no moment of glory, no pedestal, no island, no floor, no window, no spar, no acknowledgement, no paycheck that gets you ahead, and no way to ever stop. You stay on the merry-go-round. You’re forced to keep proving yourself to keep your work alive.

I met a friend this week who said, “Are you sure you want to keep going? Other presses are closing left and right. You could move to Ireland.”

It is getting hot in Los Angeles. I am no longer sleeping. We have an espresso machine, so I drink too much coffee. Ireland is far away. But despite the impostor syndrome, despite my attention being pulled in a million directions, I want to be a great writer. I want to spend more time on my work. I have always wanted to write something lasting. I have always wanted the great tango of intellect and imagination to be my life. That matters to me.

I still have game. I’m in this. Someday, I’ll feel I belong. I will walk into the room and know how I got there. I won’t have to prove it.

For now, I’m swimming upstream. Above me is waterfall. But I swim. I write. There is no win or lose, I tell myself. I will give it my all. I will save nothing for the swim back.