Running in the Rain

On Sex and Demons

Untitled by Albert Konig, c. 1920

I.

There is a saying that one addiction can only be replaced with another. In my recovery from alcoholism, running became my replacement addiction. Not long after I knew my drinking days were forever done, I felt the call of the hilly, one-way road between my apartment and the nearby park. I’d always loathed running, but then again, I’d always loathed myself. If the latter could change, why not the former too?

So on September 11, 2023, seven long days sober, I laced up dusty sneakers and went for a run. My pear-shaped body, 194 lbs sitting heavy on my 5’10” frame, could hardly make it up the first hill before I was out of breath, gasping for air as sweat beaded my forehead. I went onward, back and forth between walking and jogging. I made it to the park and back. The resistance running provided to my newly-discovered sense of determination was exhilarating, and something in me immediately knew this was going to be a new part of my life.

The days turned to weeks and the weeks months. Running became a ritual, and each time I got a little faster and lighter on my feet. I lost over 40 pounds. I became svelte and fuckable, although it would take a good while longer still for me to feel that way. I started pushing myself on distance. One mile, two mile. 5k, 10k. Half-marathon.

Nietzsche once wrote, “Look at your habits: are they the product of numberless little acts of cowardice and laziness, or of your bravery and inventive reason?” Well, habits are tough to parse this way because life is fluid. When I was one week sober, running was a courageous act of renewal. But by the time I was one year sober, my relationship with running had morphed into something else… a new cope… a way for me to avoid confronting certain fears. I was, quite literally, running from my own demons.

A part of me had secretly hoped sobriety would be the solution to all my problems, as if overcoming that vice was the only thing standing between me and a better life. Unfortunately, alcoholism was more of a symptom rather than a root cause of what ailed me, and even replacing it with running was still more band-aid than cure. It would be nice if it were so simple, but courage and growth are never automatic. What’s good for you one day can start working against you the next. Whenever you think you’ve figured everything out and summited that final mountain of understanding, it is just as likely a warning sign that your clarity is due for dissolution.

Like any addiction, running carries the risk of self-harm. Over a ten-day stretch in November, I ran my knees past their limit, grinding them to dust, forcing me the hard way to come face to face with what I had been avoiding. Questions like, What is so wrong with me? How, at 34 years of age, does it feel like I still haven’t figured out a single damn thing about life? Why don’t I feel worthy of love?

The truth is, there’s really only one reason a man would abuse alcohol, a depressant, for over a decade despite the universe sending him sign after sign clearly shouting, “Stop! Stop doing that!” It is the same reason that would drive a man to run until his body tells him he can run no more.

Pain.

There was an experience in my childhood which left ugly scars on my spirit. Much of my life since has revolved around trying to hide that limp, to avoid feeling that pain, which manifests as a deeply-felt sense that I am a uniquely terrible person who is unworthy of love or friendship. Downstream of this pain, I’ve made many mistakes: I lived a flattened life, repressing myself sexually and emotionally. I held my feelings close and guarded them like a dragon, jealous and paranoid. Shame burns white-hot to me, and whenever someone tries to humiliate me there is a part of me—small, scared, and loud—that screams, “DESTROY THEM BACK!” I am a perceptive and intelligent man and that comes with being able to read people’s insecurities. Some of the most shameful moments in my life came from weaponizing those insights. All because I was afraid for too long to look the pain I carried in the eyes.

No more running.

It is time for me to make peace with my past and discover new and unfamiliar mistakes. To know that my shadow is a part of me and I can carry this timid, painful, scared orb inside of me for the rest of my life without letting it destroy or overwhelm me. To accept that good things will come from it. Beautiful things, even. To stop resisting it and instead surrender to its imperfectness, loving it unconditionally. It is part of the machinery of my self and it cares about me, in its own way.

Emotions persist when you resist them. This is the story of what went wrong in my life, the hurt I resisted for too many years, and how running in the rain helped me heal.

Life Saving Patrol by Edward Moran, c. 1925

II.

On a gloomy November 2024 evening, I went to bed and decided I was going to wake up feeling great. Exactly as manifested, I jumped out of bed with energy and ambition at sunrise. One glass of water and feeding my cats later, I set out on a long morning run. The sky was gray, sun barely above the horizon. Moisture clung to the grass and air. My breath puffed out in little clouds as I ran. The vibe was half-marathon.

My plan had been to go up and down the Stanford foothills, looping past its iconic giant satellite dishes, but I was surprised to find the gate bolted shut. “TRAIL CLOSED: FIRE WARNING” read a hastily printed sign. “Right…” I muttered as I felt the rain drizzling on my cheek. So I kept running down the road instead, apprehension abruptly blossoming in my chest as I realized it would lead towards the private Catholic middle school I went to.

If you’re wondering why I was nervous, it’s because middle school was, pound for pound, the most painful time in my life. My class was small, ~30 students, all rich, preppy, and “with it” in a way that I was not. I was smart, taking math with high schoolers by the end of 6th grade, but I was shy, awkward, and overly sheltered. I didn’t fit in. In 6th grade History, my very first class at a new school, we played an icebreaker, “pick an adjective that describes you plus your name.” I introduced myself to this room full of strangers as Meticulous Matt. It took me a long time to make any friends, and you can probably guess that I was not part of the “cool” kids.

Amidst the chaos of a new school environment was the even greater chaos of puberty. Everyone started to get very interested in each other’s bodies around this time. Girls were getting their tits and boys discovered their dicks doing new and unpredictable things. As a teenage boy with unrestricted internet access and a bedroom door that locked, it was only a matter of time before I stumbled onto pornography. Nothing crazy, mind you; I don’t think I was even looking at sex so much as nudity. But there definitely were naked women on the internet. And with the zeal of age-appropriate curiosity, I secretly studied the splendor of the female form in my bedroom.

One day, I was showing one of my few friends a video I had downloaded on my laptop, a Halo 2 montage (you have my permission to make fun of me). On dial-up internet, downloading a video was a massive endeavor; anyone else using the phone line was all it took to kick you off and back to square one. Having a cool video downloaded was worth something back then and I was excited to show it to my friend. Well, Windows Media Player, it turned out, had this feature where it would automatically play the next most recent video. I didn’t realize this feature existed until my montage ended and blurry footage of a naked woman suddenly popped up on screen. My face burned as I tried to close the video, but too late. I’d been exposed as a being with sexual desire.

The next week at school, going to my locker after my morning classes my heart jumped out of my chest when I saw a message scrawled on my locker. WE KNOW (porn). I remember my face burning again as I tried to suffocate the intensity of the fear and shame I felt. Some part of me knew not to react visibly. That felt important. And so I fake-calmly opened my locker, pulled out an eraser, and wiped the message away. I am grateful to this day that they used pencil instead of ink.

I still didn’t think this would be a really big deal, but apparently it was. My friends no longer wanted anything to do with me. I tried a few times. At first they would make an excuse before walking away. Then they started just walking away. The message is pretty clear when you try to sit down in a group and everybody is consciously ignoring you. Not responding to anything you do or say… just a total icing out. Do you know what you call the person who gets ejected from the bottom clique on the social totem pole? You call them alone.

Thus, most of 8th grade became an exercise in daily dread. My classmates would interact with me the bare minimum required in class, then ignore me during breaks or lunch. I still craved social interaction so I kept trying, like some kind of hurt and retarded animal. But eventually I got the message and it became too much to keep trying. I learned to find the quiet corners on campus and lose myself in books. I mastered the art of eating lunch where nobody can see you and becoming invisible.

Something rather sad happened to me, I think, from the prolonged repetition of this. Every day the grooves wore a little deeper in my soul, the message written a little deeper, feeling more permanent and true. Nobody likes you. And it’s not a misunderstanding. This is who you are.

I knew the situation was not redeemable and I told my parents I’d like to change schools and go to the public high school next year. They didn’t fully understand and I couldn’t tell them in a way that would make them understand without exposing them to my shame and loneliness, but I eventually convinced them and the course for the next chapter of my life was set.

In a stroke of irony, I ended up being class valedictorian. It was the last thing I wanted to do, getting on stage at graduation and speaking to everyone. Honestly, a cruel prank: make a boy learn invisibility, and then force him to pop back into existence one last time in front of everyone. There was a part of me that wanted to turn it down or fake illness… but I delivered my speech, and I did it with clear eyes and clear heart, knowing that it was the final test between me and a new life at a new school.

I have fuzzy memories of the middle school graduation party. People seemed a little nicer to me? Maybe they liked my speech, or maybe it was just because they knew they wouldn’t need to be around me for much longer. It’s easier to pretend to tolerate someone for a few hours. As I was getting ready to leave, I said goodbye to a girl I had always liked, not a crush—please, be serious—but more just like, “this is someone who is smart and pretty and kind.” She started to say something, trailed off mid-sentence, and then flung her arms around me and hugged me tightly. “I’m actually going to miss you.” She emphasized the word actually. It was the only moment where I doubted for even a fraction of a second if I was making the right decision.

Scène de naufrage by Philippe Tanneur, c. 1850

III.

I went into high school knowing I did not want history to repeat itself. I started paying close attention to social dynamics and hierarchies. I spent my freshman year hanging out with some older friends I knew from my old neighborhood, “nerds” but good people. I was happy. I was not alone.

As I became more comfortable and confident, I started making closer friends in my own grade. I actually fell in with some cool kids, thus becoming somewhat cool myself. I was not naturally cool, but I was funny and smart enough to figure out the rules and socially insecure enough to care about them. I became worth keeping around. Being cool came with doing cool things: driving to lunch off campus, skipping a class here or there, drinking, and hanging out with girls. Drinking and hanging out with girls was pretty much the coolest thing a high school boy could do.

Late on a Saturday night early in my junior year, a small group of us went to the park to drink. It was two cute cheerleaders a grade younger, me, and two guys from my grade (one of whom was our DD; he had a long-time girlfriend and was just along for the ride). We drank Captain Morgan, plundered from a parent’s liquor cabinet, out of a plastic Adidas bottle. We talked and laughed as we passed the bottle around, our faces flushed. “I want to go on a walk,” one of the girls announced suddenly. She looked me in the eyes and stuck out her hand. “Come with me.”

We held hands and walked under the star-filled sky, stumbling like fawns. I talked about God knows what with my heart racing while she giggled melodically. Once we were far enough away from the group, she stopped, said, “Okay,” and kissed me. We collapsed against a hill and made out for what felt like forever.

The temperature eventually dropped too low for comfort, so we all snuck into our friend’s house to pick up where we left off. His room was on the other side as his parents—if they heard us and discovered we had smuggled girls into the property there would be hell to pay, but that was all part of the fun. We wasted no time from there, me and my girl, and my friend and her friend too, all cuddling on a futon while our DD was alone in his bunk bed above us. We kissed sloppily, hungrily, innocently. Eventually, we had to take the girls home so they could sneak back in and the night was over. It was my first time “hooking up” with a girl, and I remember feeling this incredibly pure sense of connection and joy.

It was not to last.

At school the next week, I felt the buzz of rumor in the air. My suspicions were confirmed when, hanging out in the parking lot after class, my friend’s younger brother—the world’s biggest idiot at the time, although now an unusually mature and soft-spoken man who I quite admire—ran up to me and yelled, “YOO I HEARD YOU GOT YOUR DICK SUCKED BY [redacted] LAST WEEKEND!” while trying to give me a high-five.

I remember my head spinning. What?! Yes, we hooked up, but we only made out. And I didn’t tell anyone? I asked him who told him that and he named our DD. I guess when you’re alone on a top bunk while two pairs hook up below you, all of that kissing can sound like… something else.

I was furious at my friend and confronted him using the full force of my teen-brained vocabulary. He felt bad, I think, and he definitely didn’t like being yelled at. He eventually apologized (sincerely enough), I forgave him (begrudgingly enough), and at that point there wasn’t anything else to do.

But the shame and powerlessness I felt about this situation was overwhelming. In my mind, I had failed to protect this sweet, beautiful girl who was now on the wrong end of false rumors. Because of how our culture works, that’s much harder on women – the story going I’m the cool guy who hooked up with someone and she’s the slut for hooking up with me. Like many cultural stories in America, it was also false; I did not feel cool. My male brain didn’t know how to “fight” a rumor. Can you punch rumors? No. I would have if I could. But a man is fundamentally, almost viscerally useless in an environment dominated by information and gossip. Might as well ask a pig to fly.

The girl was incredibly mature about the situation, but the deflation in her spirit was palpable. “It’s whatever,” she wrote me on AOL Instant Messenger. “It was a good hookup.”

I felt terrible.

The lesson I internalized from this was not, “Sometimes stupid things happen for reasons beyond your control.” It was, “This happened because you hooked up with her. You could’ve protected her by not doing that.” Between this and middle school, the wires between sex and shame were tightly crossed for me. And so I learned to repress myself sexually in a maladaptive attempt to regain control over that shame.

Untitled by Laura Makabresku, c. 2024

IV.

As I look back on my life, other sexual and romantic failures flit by, almost too fast to perceive, like memories carried on a passing train.

There was me, blacked out at a high school New Years Eve party, somehow ending up in a bedroom with an older girl I was very much not attracted to. She insisted on kissing me while I tried to get the room to stop spinning. The memories are blurry and uncomfortable. I eventually got out and passed out on the floor in a different room. The next morning, someone loudly asked, “Kramer, what’s that on your neck?” and that’s how I learned she had given me a hickey. What’s that on my neck? Ah, yes, just a visible marker of shame and regret. Thank you for noticing.

There was the cute lacrosse player, one year ahead of me at a nearby university, who drove to my college dorm to spend the night with me while my roommate was out of town for a rowing tournament. Surely this is when sex will happen? Well, she’d stealthily been drinking before coming over and with a frightening efficiency she drank herself into a state of alcohol poisoning. One moment she was hugging me and talking about how much she loved me, the next she was puking on my floor and terrifyingly non-verbal. The image of her limp body being lifted into a tarp by paramedics at 2am is seared into my brain. She turned out fine but our relationship never recovered; the shame she felt was too deep, and I didn’t know how to forgive her in a way that would release her from it. More evidence for the merits of repressing yourself sexually.

There was the sharp-witted girl with a button nose I became drinking buddies with after college. I developed a long-time crush on her but kept waiting for “the right moment” to ask her out. Some banter at the right time led to her asking me out for drinks on Valentine’s Day. “It’s a date.” she told me. “Can’t wait!” I dared to be hopeful that this could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

She ended up ghosting me on the day of.

That hurt quite badly, but with the benefit of hindsight, an unsurprising outcome: hot girls rarely date guys with low self-esteem, and Valentine’s is a risky first date even in the best of conditions. With time, it became easier to forgive her, too. She was dealing with the same demons as I was with alcohol. How could I not come to forgive that?

For a while after that, though, I just stopped trying altogether. I lost myself in liquor, my hobbies, my career. Days, weeks, months… years. Just circling and never landing, afraid to make contact with the tarmac of my own soul or to acknowledge the holes I was carrying in my heart. I had no romantic encounters or relationships to speak of for almost a decade. I didn’t allow myself to even think about experiencing hope because the fear of getting hurt again felt razor-sharp, untouchable.

As the years dragged on, the sense that something was horribly wrong with me grew louder and louder and my drinking became more and more desperate. I was deeply unwell. It wasn’t inconceivable that I might have circled the drain forever, my life being nothing more than the sad, cautionary tale of a person who turned out… wrong.

But thanks to the grace of God and the power of faith, I experienced a spiritual rebirth when I needed healing the most. Every day since then has been like a breath of fresh air. I’ve been living, actually living, growing, healing, and slowly coming face to face with the things I’d been running away from.

It’s easy to tell a version of this story in which I am some poor helpless fool, a perennial victim of bad luck. Not just easy, but tempting. My life is somebody else’s fault. But it would be a lie. The truth is, you make your own luck. A more honest and courageous version of me could have cut through any or all of these painful scenarios by taking different actions. Nobody, not even God Himself, will hand you the life or relationships you want on a platter. You must make them yourselves, shaping something formless into existence with your own clay-covered hands. Expect imperfect conditions and you won’t be disappointed. Wait for smooth seas and you could be waiting the rest of your life.

One of the lessons that our schooling system and the default culture tried to instill in me is that trying is not cool. Well, fuck that. Apathy and irony are for feeble-minded losers. Effort is everything. You can treat every problem in life, including your mindset and relationship with yourself, as a skill issue. Become as skilled as you can at everything you do. Take your life seriously. This is not the practice run. Don’t wait for someone else to volunteer to be the master of your fate, the captain of your soul. That’s a job for you and you alone.

One of the best things about trying your ass off at something is it automatically humbles you. You don’t get to confront the limits of your ability if you don’t try your hardest. The effort I poured into running helped me recover from alcoholism, and I now have 15 months of sobriety and 3 half-marathons under my belt. For the rest of my life, I am going to keep trying so hard it’s embarrassing.

On the topic of sexual repression, I am grateful to share I’ve been healing from that as well. Needless to say, it was not an overnight process. You’ll likely be unsurprised to hear that I did not have sex for the first time at a “normal age.” Far from it. I was over 30 years old when I lost my virginity. That makes me a statistical outlier, something for sociologists to raise an eyebrow at while they think to themselves, “Neat.”

Speaking as an expert in the field: sexual repression is a form of living suicide, a way of slowly killing yourself with nothing other than your own mind and the passage of time. As Kyra writes, “Sensuality and sexuality are an expression of vitality. Sex is the source of life itself.” To deny this in yourself is a rejection of your own vitality and a perversion of the wellspring of your psychic energy. Please do not do to yourself what I did to myself. Nothing good can come from it. Trust me.

Healing from sexual repression required unlearning many of the lies we are taught culturally about men and women alike, and learning to correctly view sexual desire as a sacred source of existential vitality instead of something to be ashamed of.

There may have been, uh, a few other things involved in the healing process but that is left as an exercise to the reader.

When I reflect on the broader culture around sex in America, I cannot help being struck by the fact that sex-negativity is a bipartisan project. The right wing hates female sexuality. Liberals and progressives hate male sexuality.

Both are fucking retarded.

The Life Line by Winslow Homer, c. 1884

V.

“Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking- had he the gold? or the gold him?”

― John Ruskin, Unto This Last

Sometimes I cannot help but wonder if it is me that has memories or memories that have me. I suspect there is a universalism to this. We all carry—and are carried by—memories which are load-bearing on the architecture of our souls. Can we ever transcend the narratives we craft about ourselves with the hazy combination of reality and recollection? I am not so sure. A maze where you cannot find the exit is a prison.

All of these thoughts were racing through my head on that rainy November morning as I ran towards my middle school. I felt the weight of returning to it in my body, with all the complex emotions it evokes. The source of my core wound, yes, and a painful place… but maybe, just maybe, it was also the genesis of the formative spiritual and aesthetic experiences that made me who I am today. Beauty and suffering, joy and despair, growth and annihilation… what strange yet frequent pairings they make.

I thought more about the stories we tell ourselves. They are often just as false as the stories other people might tell about us, but far more dangerous since they feel true. The critical voice in your head is louder and closer to your heart than anyone on the outside. I decided earlier this year I am no longer letting mine tell me the story that I am a bad person who is unworthy of love or affection. It is false. It was always false.

I ran past the campus I once knew so well, elegant, monastic architecture nestled against cornucopia-colored forest hills. It felt like I was peering through time in the morning mist. Something called for me to come closer, and almost immediately a fearful voice inside of me cried not to. I kept running.

A half-mile later, I turned around to begin my six-mile return home. I passed the campus again. I ran past the soccer fields where we used to have PE. Memories flowed like a river, time spent walking the track by myself, alone, friendless. I looked at the field and felt that wound again. For a moment, the tether of cowardice almost won, ready to drag me home, safe and unexamined. But a different voice inside of me, not that critical voice crying out in fear but a braver, wiser, more loving voice, said, “No. Now is the time.”

And so I turned around again, jogging back to a gap in the fence and thick trees bordering the field and I cut through onto the dewy grass. Permissionless, trespassing, and no longer afraid. I was doing something inexplicable that I was meant to and that was all that mattered.

On the field that November morning, it was me, a well-bundled groundskeeper driving rows with his mower, and God. As I ran laps around my memories, I suddenly felt the clarity of truth deep in my body. I was not the same person who had known so much pain here decades ago. And this was not the same place. Understanding washed over me and a great weight lifted from my shoulders. I smiled and ran home as the wind began to howl.