NEWSLETTER - vol. 9

My left knee is temporarily wrecked, my groin is tight and I'm not running or riding for a while. That's the deal I made with myself this week, after asking too much of myself too fast. These are small injuries with a large lesson attached, and the lesson showed up everywhere else too.

Somebody at the rink watched me squeegee the glass Saturday (it gets very humid inside the arena and the early weekend games have foggy glass) and said something about how that couldn't be much of a job. I told him I'd recently left a corporate role that paid a lot better and took a lot more out of me. Another parent a few seats down laughed and said, "I bet this job is great then." I told them it sure is. I haven't seen the inside of a laptop in weeks. We all laughed and I moved on to cleaning up a tipped over garbage can underneath where they were sitting.

I've been sitting with a question all week about whether I have to be the hero of my own story, or whether there's a version of this life where I'm simply the guide, useful to the people actually doing the hard thing in front of me. The glass moment answered part of it without trying to. Nobody in those stands knows my name. They know the glass is clear and they can watch their kid skate. That's the whole job in that moment, and it was enough. It didn't need me to also be interesting, but I inserted myself anyway (I’m working through all of this).

The knee complicates the answer though. I ratcheted my mileage up faster than I should have because I had grand visions of my own success (my entire trouble from birth to date). I also stacked it on top of the increased walking and stair climbing the rink already demands, and now I'm the one who needs tending instead of the one doing it. Being useful to other people doesn't exempt you from needing something yourself. I keep wanting the guide role to mean I've solved the neediness. It doesn't. It just changes who I'm asking.

I made another decision this week, smaller than the knee but in the same direction. I'm letting chrisskogen.com go. It doesn't make money and it never did, and keeping a website alive so I can be a certain kind of person online is a luxury I can't justify right now. It was built for the hero version of this, the one with a byline and a unique perspective. Watching it go is easier than I expected, which tells me something about how much I actually needed it.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Nora is carrying a Grand Slam summer and working two jobs on top of watching me change everything about how I work and what I earn, and that's real weight on both of us and we still have the capstone of the Wasatch 100 in front of us. The kids are packing for their first big road trip and my oldest is in the middle of something hard with her mother that isn't mine to write about, only to stand near. I don't have a clean way to be useful to any of them right now beyond showing up and staying out of the way when that's what's needed instead of what I'd choose. That's the actual test of the guide question, not the glass, not the strangers in the stands. Whether I can do it for the people who don't get to read this as a stranger.

I don't get graded on this one and the paychecks don’t get bigger when I get it right. Nobody in my own house is going to tell me the job was harder than it looked or laugh and say I've got it easy now. There's no glass to squeegee at home, no clean line of sight into whether I'm doing it right. Just the knee still not operating at one-hundred, the website on it’s way out, and some people who need something from me that I can't google my way into knowing. I'd probably choose easier if I could. I don't get to and I know I’ll be glad for that later.

Music this week: Big Thief, Masterpiece - raw and unpolished in a way that fits a week where the finished version of me kept slipping. Apple Music | Spotify

Thanks for reading. See you next Monday.