Past, Present, and Future

My blog is finally functioning correctly again. Hurrah!

I am finally able to run daily again and I can't even explain how happy I am about it. I am trying to be careful though, since I am not 100% healed just yet, and keep my runs relatively short for the time being. It's really crazy just how easy it is to forget how blessed we are for everything that we have. My new goal is to make a constant effort to take time to appreciate all that I have and all that I am able to do. I also think that it's really important to not simply overcome the struggles and hardships that we encounter and then move on and forget them. Sure, they are often situations that we would rather pretend never happened, but we shouldn't and here is why...

Well for starters, there are about 69378 quotes about learning from the past. Here are some excellent examples:

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”
- Mother Teresa

"You must understand and learn from your past to live your best now and be able to plan for your future."

-Jerry Bruckner

"The past can hurt, but the way I see it, you can either run from it or you can learn from it."

-The Lion King

And now I'm going to get a little more personal.  The other day I was doing the "backwards photo test" on my Facebook pictures.  In case you don't know what this is, it is when you go to someone's most recent Facebook picture, and instead of going to the right, you go left and see the oldest pictures that they have.  It's usually pretty funny because you come across their high school prom and homecoming pictures and embarrassing stuff like that.  When I did this on my own Facebook, I came across some pictures from high school cross country.  It was gross.  My body was so terribly thin.  I looked sickly.  

I am happy to report that I've gained about about 14 pounds since I was at my all time low in highs school.  You might not know this about me, but I lost an extreme amount of weight in high school to the point where it was dangerously low.  I know that this might be hard to believe considering I'm still on the rather thin side, but it's the truth.  I stepped on the scale at the rec. a week ago, and I am FINALLY in the healthy weight/BMI range.  Gaining weight isn't as easy as it may seem.  It is a long, slow, and painful process.

I am/was an interesting case because I was not in denial that I was too thin.  I knew that I needed to gain weight, but when you run as much as I do and eat as healthy as I do, it's not exactly easy.  Today, I decided that I would put on jeans for the first time in...hmm maybe a month, or more?  One of the pairs of jeans that I have was waaay too tight.  I couldn't get them over my hips.  Victory! It's little instances like this one that let me know that I CAN do this.  I can maintain a healthy weight and be completely okay with what goes along with it.  

This is really unlike me and I feel sort of awkward about posting this, but I think that it really emphasized just how far I have come.  

I don't want to forget those hellish years of my life, when I was skin and bones and felt helpless, depresses and lost.  Instead, I want to use that experience as something that I can both learn from and move on from.  Everyday is a new day.  Florence Welsh says it beautiful in one of my favorite songs of hers, "It's always darkest before the dawn."