Unit 6: Selection Vocabulary 4

I (want to) believe my worth as a human being does not reside in my size or appearance.

I know, having grown up in a culture that is generally toxic to women and constantly trying to discipline women’s bodies, that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body or any body should look.

When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face.

Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine.

My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.

Listen to the production of this. Production’s like uh, “Abbey Road” or something.

“I try to keep myself occupied.”

Yeah, I think she’s about to get her master’s degree.

Yeah, you know, you just gotta separate yourself from the pack in some way. Excel at something, you know, and then you have your pick of the litter when them front-running hussies start sniffing around.

The race consists of five loops on a course that’s been officially listed at twenty miles, but is probably more like twenty-six. The moral of this slanted truth is that standard metrics are irrelevant. The moral of a lot of Barkley’s slanted truths is that standard metrics are irrelevant.

They bring camouflage tents and orange hunting vests and skeptical girlfriends and acclimated wives and tiny travel towels and tiny dogs.

He speaks to “his runners” with comfort and fondness, as if they are a batch of wayward sons turned feral for each year at the flick of his lighter.

The sheer ferocity of the effort implies that the effort is somehow worth it.

This is benevolence as surprise, evidence of a grace beyond the self that has, of course, come from the self—the same self that loaded the fanny pack hours before, whose role has been obscured by bone-weary delusion, turned other by the sheer fact of the body losing its own mind.