First Steps Club

How Walking Changed My Life

A great long stretch of dirt road opens up, reaching into the floating distance of downtown’s glow. Scrubby patches of vegetation and rocks delineate its edges, giving way to the backdrop of distant, illuminated buildings. There’s something surreal about the view, the city, hundreds of feet below and miles away, seems to rest delicately at the crest of this gentle rise, as if geography has bowed before us and made a presentation of it.

The whole thing is gilded by an incandescent moon, throwing long, dramatic shadows into the foreground. It looks like the opening shot of some magnum opus of triumph—and yet I am furious about the 3% incline that marks the start of our walk.

Scott calls it a walk, says it’s really barely a hill. We argue about the difference between a hill and a mountain before I finally and outright refuse to participate. It’s a principled stance, I’d been mislead, wronged in that way, and so I resentfully wait in the car while my friends took in the magical view offered by Runyon Canyon at night.

Decades ago, there was a recurring theme in my life: watching from the sidelines. Non participation.

Some part of me believed Scott cared less about the view, and more about getting me moving, which destroyed it for me. Not that I wouldn’t have found some other reason to sit it out were circumstances different. How dare he encourage me under such pretense.

The real battle was inside me, even more than the one I fought—gracefully and outwardly—with my friends. Had he asked differently, had he used the more honest word hike instead of walk, had he simply asked one more time, I’d have offered a resistance free yes.

Please ask again. Just once more, and I’ll acquiesce.

There was a gentleness between my friends and me, a kind of dance where they tried to save me, and I tried to redirect their attention anywhere else. None of it was blunt or forceful. There was a passivity to their solutions for me, merciful invitations to take part in their healthy lifestyles.

I heard their summons to play basketball and go on hikes as calls specifically designed to improve me.

I suppose it was possible that Scott simply wanted to share the view with me. But I doubt it.

I wanted so badly to see it—that elusive, scenic outlook I believed existed just beyond reach. I wanted to feel it too: the elation of movement, gathering force and passing a ball through space and time so that it arrived, punctuated, in a friend’s hands. I believed these experiences were available to me only with the perfect invitation.

But I fought off the invitations from my friends because I knew them to be about something else, a desire to see me improved, fixed, made smaller or better. I told myself that had there ever been just the pureness of sharing an experience with me, with no strings attached, no hidden agendas, I would have said yes.

Of course that wasn’t true either.

Eventually, the invitations did come, wrapped only in affection. There was a kind of magic when a girl took interest in me. It happened exactly the way I’d always imagined. Since I couldn’t rely on aesthetic appeal, I leaned on wit and a decent retention of trivial knowledge to impress.

But then Brandy invited me to the beach.

There was no hidden plea for me to move, no covert attempt for her to save me tucked inside her invitation. Just amazing rock outcroppings and sandy nooks waiting for us at El Matador, a secluded beach north of Malibu.

It was the perfect invitation.

I imagined an immaculate scene, a blanket spread atop the sand, two beach chairs and an umbrella. Sea foam and mist keeping us cool as we took in the Pacific ocean in all it’s glory. My own girth felt minuscule next to that body of water—so that even my size, usually grotesque in my mind, seemed less monstrous in the images her invitation conjured. All of it was simply to enjoy the beach with me.

And I declined.

The tranquility of the fantasy was quickly dispelled by the realities I couldn’t escape. That beach was at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, and there were always other people there. It wasn’t crowded like Zuma or Venice Beach, but it was never empty. I imagined the exhaustion from the stairs, the embarrassing, omnipresent beach t-shirt, the fact that I’d never feel comfortable with her around other people.

It turns out, the type of invitation didn’t matter at all. I was simply an active non-participant in life. Some part of me felt inept, but also unworthy, unqualified. I was unwelcoming to myself. Even when I thought an activity would be fun, when the only eyes on me would be those of people who loved me, I often begged off because I didn’t feel I deserved to have those experiences. I ran from effort. I ran from pain. I buried my head in the sand and participated as little as possible.

I rode the momentum of no like a freight train. I said it so often that even when I wanted to, I didn’t know how to say yes. I didn’t know how to participate. My own self-judgment always opted out. The inertia of my no had no braking system and so it propelled me like a bullet, locked to the tracks of my own resistance.

I’d spent so long doing the bare minimum that anything beyond it felt reckless, like I was setting off some elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of a life, one that could only end in tragedy.

My friends were there to stay. While their invitations might have grown apathetic, they themselves weren’t going anywhere. Brandy was a different story. I understood that the nature of our relationship required more participation from me. We could remain friend’s, and I could keep my distance, stay uninvolved, but that wasn’t the relationship I wanted.

It would be easy to say she changed everything, but that wouldn’t be true. What she offered wasn’t a rescue, but a reflection. The way she invited me in, without agenda, showed me what I had been denying myself for years. The shift didn’t happen because she showed up, but because, for once, I saw myself as someone worth showing up for.

That was my breaking point. The limit had been reached with a simple reflection on the life I wanted with her. That desire opened a much wider doorway, into the kind of life I wanted for myself. I wish I could say self-acceptance came first. But sometimes a single viewpoint offers many new perspectives, and it was through the lens of my relationship with Brandy that I was able to glimpse an entire life that might be mine.

My first yes was to myself. At that point, even walking from my front doorstep to my car took immense energy. It required a specific and definitive decision, an intentionally deep and held breath, followed by sustained effort. On the morning of revelation, with the urgency of change looming, a single thought arrived: I could walk past my car, to the end of my driveway.

It landed in my head like one of my friend’s invitations, strings and all. A nudge toward extra effort, offered in the name of betterment.

But then, a tidal wave of no collapsed over me. I felt my breath squeezed from my lungs in sheer embarrassment—at the thought, hope, audacity of trying. Useless steps, I told myself. Steps that got me quite literally nowhere.

I almost didn’t make it out of my house. The weight of futility was so heavy, I even contemplated whether walking to my car was worth the effort.

In that moment, my entire life seemed to cave in.

A backward flood of every no I’d ever said rushed past me, like a life flashing before death. Further and further back I went, through a life unlived, through all the experiences I’d denied myself.

The grief and emotional swell brought me back to the beginning of it all. I’m 5 years old, sitting on the beach, and I’ve just learned I was fat. My t-shirt clings to me and does little to disguise my form. I’m watching my friends play, throwing a ball back and forth. They call to me, inviting me to join in. It’s a game of equal parts dodging the approaching waves and some chaotic version of football. Their joy is palpable, and I desperately want be with them, to feel the freedom and exhilaration they seem to breathe so effortlessly.

But I was glued to my towel, affixed in place by my own weight and the knowledge of my difference. Every set of eyes on that beach felt trained on me in judgement. Their stares were deafening, drowning out the surf, the wind, and even the shouts of my friends.

I wanted to run down the beach, onlookers be damned. My no came so effortlessly. I could almost touch the idea of elation through flight—wind whipping up a frenzy behind me, Ode To Joy scoring the moment. The path to a life well lived was right there for the taking.

But my no became everything.

Coming out of the devastation of that memory, one thing was clear: the only way I could begin to make amends to myself, was simply to start saying yes.

My very first yes was just walking past my car, to the end of the driveway.

A tentative, halting cadence brought my foot down on the asphalt, one simple step beyond what was necessary to get me into the car, then another. Slowly, with almost imperceptible confidence building, I made it to the sidewalk.

It seemed like such a small first step, but more than anything, it was movement toward the affirmative. Pride bloomed in the quiet knowledge that I’d taken my very first step in a new direction.

I wish I could say that everything shifted effortlessly from that moment on. The truth is, positive momentum has always been tenuous for me. Still, every time I manage to push back against my own resistance, I move forward.

That shift—the move from instinctual no to considered yes—has started to spill into all areas of my life. Where the desire to share a life with someone else once opened the door to self-acceptance, now it’s a deeper need: to meet my gut negativity with openness. I no longer trust every reflexive no. Instead, I try to meet those gut reactions with curiosity.

I don’t say yes to everything. But I’m far more open to the possibility now.

A couple years ago, a strange thought occurred to me: What if I took other people for a walk? Nothing about it felt comfortable. What good is one little walk? What if no one shows up? What if they do, and they’re serial killers? But I managed to quiet the noise and I sent out an open invitation on social media: Anyone want to go for a walk?

People showed up. And it was glorious.

I’m so grateful those strangers were willing to show up for me. I only wish I’d been able to do the same, years ago, with my closest friends—even if only for myself.

These days, no matter what’s happening in my life, moving my body outside enhances it in ways I’d never imagined. I am deeply grateful to have fallen in love with something as simple, and as profound, as going for a walk.

First Steps Club, April 28, 2024, Calgary

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