“Rock bottom has a basement”

One of my really good friends once said this to me when life was giving me a rough time.  I cried to her that I thought I had already hit rock bottom and I was on the up, but I was just going right back down.  She told me, “I know how you feel; rock bottom has a basement.”  I thought to myself: holy shit, she is right.  It wasn’t until that moment that I truly believed I could bring myself out of the basement and climb out of rock bottom.

It takes a lot to realize that you are not in a good place in your life and you need to make a change.  It takes even more out of you to make that change, and I was going to start making that change.  I was having a hard time at work and living at home wasn’t helping my situation either because I was fighting with my parents non-stop.  Deep down all I wanted was to just start my life and be able to move forward.  It felt like every time I tried to move forward life just dragged me back down.  I had to recognize first that I was stuck in order to move forward.

One day after finding out really bad news at work and having a really hard time processing all of what was going on in my life, I went for a run.  I was training for my second half marathon and was honestly doing a pretty bad job of sticking to a running routine.  My schedule was off and I was having a hard time with the longer runs.  My body did not want to get out of bed, my mind was still asleep, and my heart was not in the uplifting place it normally was.  I managed to drag myself out of bed, put on some leggings, blasted some music, and started to run. 

The second I began running my whole world turned around.  I was running faster than normal, it was so beautiful outside, and I just wanted to scream “fuck yeah I’m alive.”  I was breathing and smiling and that was all that mattered.  The rest of it can be fixed.  All it took was putting one foot in front of the other to change my perspective on my spiraling life.  I didn’t know that run would change the course of my day, or even week but it did.  I was back to my smiling happy self.

Sometimes you have no idea what will help your current situation.  Maybe it is doing what you normally do, or maybe it is getting out of your comfort zone and doing something you don’t want to do.  You can’t try and change the course of your life in one day; it takes time.  All you can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep breathing and smiling. 

Have faith that you are strong enough alone to climb out from rock bottom and one day make it to the top of your mountain and stay there.  There will always be peaks and valleys but you have to know that your current point is not forever.