The main character

You didn't know you were living someone else's story. Neither did I.

Read time: 4 minutes

Last weekend I went on a hike. The trail is called L'Erablière.

That quiet is why I hike. Not the exercise. The silence from technology. The smell of wood and humidity. The birds — and there are always birds — sounding like they have no idea there is anything outside these trees worth paying attention to. On a trail, I am just a body moving through a forest, merging with nature.

About halfway up I noticed myself being out of breath. I looked up and noticed the trail incline. I kept on walking. Lungs working. Legs slowing. Breath louder.

My next thought: "Stephanie, you haven't been training your cardiovascular capacity lately. It's showing."

It wasn't always this way.

The hike I remember differently

Twelve years ago I was on a trail called Hilton Falls, outside Oakville, Ontario. Steeper than the one I walked last weekend. I was out of breath at roughly the same level I was last weekend.

But the thoughts were completely different.

The whole climb, I was managing. Scanning the trail around me. Calculating what the other hikers were seeing when they looked at me. Deciding that if I was out of breath, it was because I was fat, and if I was fat, it was because I hadn't tried hard enough, and if I hadn't tried hard enough, it was because I was broken in some fundamental way that other people could see and I could not fix.

Yet I was in a body ten pant sizes smaller than the one I'm in now.

I was more out of breath managing the opinions of hikers than I was from the climb itself.

When your body runs the show

My body was the main character of my life then. Not a supporting character. The main character. The lens through which every experience was filtered.

It showed up everywhere.

Yes, with the obvious — like food. I performed. In public, I ate like someone who had it under control. Alone, I ate everything I'd withheld, because my body had been starved of permission all day.

But also in less obvious places.

At work, I was in rooms full of men, alone as the only woman, and the entire time I was calculating how to prove I belonged there. Not through my ideas. Through my performance of being acceptable despite my body. I took positions I didn't want. I worked hours that hollowed me out. I wasn't building a career. I was building a case for my own worthiness.

In relationships, I stayed in ones that were wrong for me because being seen as someone who could be loved, even badly, felt safer than being alone and proving the voice right. The voice that said nobody would want me. That my body made me unlovable.

The main character was like a pair of glasses I put on every morning. It decided how I was going to see the world. My interpretation of it and therefore my decisions. And the main character was my body weight.

The plot change

What I didn't understand then is that we get to choose the main character.

We get to decide which glasses we put on each day. Which filter our experience runs through. I didn't know that was a choice. I thought my body's relationship to other people's judgment was just the condition of being alive in a body like mine.

It isn't.

The main character of my life today is me. My pleasure. My safety. My sense of what is enough. The question I live inside now is not what will people think of this, but what do I think of this. What do I want. What do I need. How do I want to feel.

At work, the question is whether I enjoy what I'm doing. Whether I want to work this way. In relationships, the question is whether I feel safe. Whether there is real partnership. Whether I am having fun.

Those sound like simple questions. They are not.

Asking myself what I want, genuinely, without immediately filtering it through what other people will think of my answer, is some of the hardest and most deliberate work I have done and keep doing.

It requires me to show up for myself, day after day, with more curiosity than judgment.

It means choosing my main character intentionally and not letting the unintentional one lead.

But it changes everything, including what hiking means.

What breathlessness means now

Last weekend on L'Erablière, I observed my short and louder breath pattern and kept walking.

I was not performing for anyone on that trail. I was not calculating. I was just there, in my body, in the woods, present to the experience of being alive in a way I could not have accessed twelve years ago.

I live in a much larger body now than I did on that trail in Ontario. By every metric the world uses to judge a woman's body, I should be suffering more. Hiding more. Apologizing more. Performing more.

And I sure should be focusing all my resources on trying to exist in a smaller body.

I am living better. Not in spite of my body. Because I am no longer asking my body to carry the weight of other people's opinions of it.

That is what changed. Not my size. The main character.

The bottom line

For most of my life I thought other people held the verdict on whether I was enough. My job was to manage their conclusion. My body was the primary evidence in that case, and I was always, in some way, on trial.

What I know now is that the verdict was never theirs to give. It is mine to decide and give to myself.

Changing the main character of my life did not change my body. It changed what my body gets to mean. It changed what exercise and food mean, what a boardroom means, what a relationship means. It changed what breathlessness means.

I live better now, in this body, than I ever lived trying to shrink into a smaller one. Not because everything got easier. Because I stopped outsourcing the question of my own worth.

So here is my question for you: who is the main character of your life right now, and is that a choice you made, or one that was made for you?

Reply and tell me. While I can't reply to everyone, I read every single response.

With love,

Stephanie