Focusing on me

This week I dont have any work until Friday which is the last tutoring sesion so even that will be easy. I have decided that this week I will focus solely on myself and not on whether or not I am dissapointing others. I have been reminded by a few friends over the last few weeks that they will love me no matter what and are proud of me already. That is one thing that I think is finally getting through my hard head. Yes I am stubborn and yes things tend to take a while to get through this thick skull of mine. But dont worry I am pretty sure that all of you telling me you love me no matter what is making its way through my brain. For the next week I am going to focus solely on what I need to get done and what I want to do during the week. Right now this is what I want to do this week 1) Workout 2) get my clothes ready for the school year 3) get myself organized 4) Get my haircut 5) Finish my scrapbook before school starts. I am going to spend this week focusing on working out. I am going to plan most days around that. I am currently planning to get my run in the morning (currently it is 2 miles but may end up being longer) then in the afternoon I will either do another 2 mile run or go for a walk. The reason I am starting this now is because I think even during the school year I can fit in 2 workouts. I know I can fit in at least a mile run in the morning then I can do my longer run in the afternoon. I am beginning to find the parts of me that I loved again. Running is bringing back my spirit. I am always looking forward to my runs. Running is really what keeps me emotionally steady. I dont know why I didnt realize that before but I am finally realizing it now. I think that I just had a rebellious period, where running was expected of me and it was almost all that was expected of me, so I didnt want to do it. Running became my identity, and I think it had been my identity for soo long, (From 7th grade on I was the runner and thats what I was known to by everyone I went to HS with) I guess when you are the only girl in your grade who runs it just naturally becomes your identity. Looking back now I am actually quite proud of that :). Running was something I worked extremely hard on and for. It also gave me so many of the relationships that I have today. From relationships I made at Nipmuc, to Assumption to Framingham. Those relationships are something I will never give up and will do anything for those people. For some reason after College I slipped back into the younger mentality of myself, just wanting to be considered popular. And at that moment I didnt consider running popular. Looking back I was just being stupid and going through a bit of a crisis as it was the first time in 9 years that I was not on a xcountry team. Being part of a team helped me feel like I was part of something and for the first time when I joined xcountry I felt like i was part of something. Senior year of college with not having this I had a bit of an identity crisis. I also had trouble when I graduated balancing the working Carolyn and the other Carolyn. I mean come on by May of 2008 I was working two jobs and that following November I was working a combined 60 plus hours a week. Which was not the best idea. I now know that i need to balance everything out. But just because I need to balnce things out doesnt mean that I dont have priorities. My priority needs to be my health not work (its always been work in the past) The way I am going to make my health my priority is running daily and finding many ways to destress. Oh I am going to get my haircut tomorrow or Tuesday so a new picture will be posted once I get it cut, reminiscing over HS xcountry pictures (look at my facebook page to see those) has made me miss the haircut I had senior year of xcountry. It was so easy to handle and was actually really cute. Or at least I thought so.