The Fifty-Third Question: Not Meeting The Bar
And we're back! Still thinking about friendship and what happens when we fail to meet our own expectations.
Oops!
Always do my best to give you a heads-up when I’ll be taking a week off, but last weekend really got the best of me. My hope was to schedule the weekly question to you in advance, but it was a pretty chaotic weekend for me and I just lost track. Why was it so wild you ask? Oh, I’ll tell you.
I ran the Los Angeles Marathon.
Yep, you read that right! I trained for and completed my first marathon. This was a major milestone for me. A year ago I wasn’t even running on the regular, and now I’m a marathon finisher. To be blunt, I don’t think I’ve ever been quite this proud of myself. I’ve been riding the high of this finish all week, and wearing my medal just about anywhere I can. Feel free to congratulate me at your leisure, I am accepting flowers indefinitely.
And given the lag time from our last prompt, I’m going to punt on answering that here and instead tell you how thankful this experience has made me for journaling.
When I sat down to write my pages Monday morning (the day after the race), I wanted to use that opportunity to reflect on both what I had done and how far I had come. To do that, I cracked open journals from earlier this year and the end of last year. I expected to see a narrative of self-doubt and disbelief. What I found surprised me. Dating back to when I signed up, I did express fear and uncertainty, but I was never in doubt of my ability to accomplish this. In that first entry I wrote “No idea how I’m going to get there, but I know I’m going to cross that finish line.” Wow. That kind of confidence? No idea I had the capacity to express that. Having those words committed to the page entirely changes the narrative I had about my training and race experience from one of proving myself wrong, to one of proving myself right. That feels really empowering.
I’m able to rewrite that narrative because of my journals!
The Fifty-Third Question
Hopefully, you didn’t forget that our focus for the month was on friendship, and I’ve still got two more questions up my sleeve for you.
Where have you fallen short in friendships?
The previous two prompts looked at what friendship means to you, and how you convey those expectations. Now, we think about how we’ve failed to live up to our own standards.
Are there any similarities in the situations where you’ve fallen short, or in the people to whom you have failed to be a good friend too?
When you fall short, who calls it out: you, or the friend?
When these situations are highlighted, how do you handle them?
What did you learn about being a friend from those situations?
How would you handle them differently now?
This Week’s Jam: “Do Yourself A Favor”
Introducing my Prince break-up track.
The history of this song is long and a bit confusing, so if you want to know more visit Prince Vault. Only released in 2019 as part of the 1999 deluxe album, this track quickly became a staple of my Prince playlists. I mean, isn’t this so relatable:
If you see me walkin' down the street one day
Don't say nothin' to me
No, no, nothin'
'Cause you did me wrong when I was doing bad
So bad, I didn't think I was gonna make it
Now I'm alone, feelin' free
Freer than the butterfly, flyin' high now, yeah, yeah, baby
I don't claim no riches or any miracles
But I'm doin' better on my own
Preach, O Purple One!
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See you next weekend!