So I joined a run club.
I want to be clear about how out of character this is. I am not a runner. My cardio is opening the group chat and reacting to forty messages I didn’t read. The last time I ran voluntarily, a bee was involved.
But there I was. Tuesday. 5:45 AM. In a matching set I bought specifically for (motions) this, standing with fourteen strangers and a guy named Dylan who says “let’s get after it” – it’s his whole personality, smh.
And I felt amazing. Genuinely. Endorphins, sunrise, the whole damn thing.
Then, five blocks in, gasping, I caught myself doing the thing.
I was composing the caption.
Not out loud. In my head, where all my worst work happens. Something like “new era, new routine, choosing me every morning.” I was already picturing the post. The slightly sweaty selfie. The sunrise in the background doing the emotional heavy lifting. And underneath the picturing, quieter, the actual engine of the whole operation:
I hope he sees it.
(Narrator: There it is.)
Not my friends. Not the fourteen strangers. Not Dylan, who at that point was somewhere up ahead getting after it. Him… The guy I left. The guy I have not spoken to in eleven weeks. I was running through Brooklyn at dawn, lungs on fire, performing a one-woman play called “Look How Well She’s Doing” for a man who was, at that exact moment, almost certainly asleep and not thinking about me at all.
I stopped running. Partly for the revelation. Mostly because I couldn’t frickin breathe.
Here’s the thing I had to sit with on that curb while Dylan’s little pack disappeared into the distance. I have been doing all the right things. The run club. The therapy. The books stacked on my nightstand with the spines uncracked but the intentions pure. The friends, the boundaries, the deleting and re-downloading and re-deleting of the apps. From the outside, I look like a woman healing.
And a solid sixty damn percent of it has been aimed at him.
I wasn’t getting my life together. I was building a case. A gorgeous, well-lit, cardio-based case, and the jury was one specific man who wasn’t even in the courtroom. Every improvement had a little asterisk on it, and the asterisk said “so he’ll regret it, big time.”
Let me walk you through the crime scene, because it gets worse.
I got a haircut. A good haircut. A blow-out that broadcasted that glow-up energy I read about in some rando $29.99 text-your-ex-back course from TT. And my first thought, before I’d even left the stylist’s chair, was whether it would come up in a photo he might somehow see. No, love, I didn’t get the haircut for me. I got it for a hypothetical future in which he witnesses the haircut and is utterly fucking destroyed by it. omfg…
I made plans. Fun plans. Rooftop, friends, the kind of night you’re supposed to have. And I spent a chunk of it angling my phone, not to remember the night, but to document proof of the night. Evidence for a man who wasn’t subpoenaed.
I even, and this is the one that made me put my face in my hands, felt a flicker of disappointment when a really good day happened and there was no way for him to know about it. Like the day didn’t fully count. Like joy needs a witness, and I’d assigned the role to the one person who lost the right to it.
That’s when I understood what I’d actually done. I left the relationship. But I kept him. I evicted him from my life and immediately re-hired him as the audience for it. He wasn’t my boyfriend anymore. He was the imaginary camera I was performing my whole recovery into.
And a phantom audience is a brutal director. You can’t ever satisfy them, because they aren’t there. You post the thing and refresh, and there’s no reaction, because there’s no one in the seat. So you do a bigger thing. A better-lit thing. You mistake the silence for “he’s not impressed yet” instead of “he genuinely is not watching this show.” You keep raising the production budget for an empty theater.
The physical part is what gives it away, by the way. There’s a specific hollow feeling when you catch yourself doing this. You do the good thing, and for a second it’s real, and then your brain hands the moment to him for grading, and your stomach does this small drop, this little flatline, because deep down you know the grade is never coming. That drop is your body telling you the truth your caption won’t: you’re not living this. You’re submitting it.
Real recovery, it turns out, is boring and unwitnessed. It’s the run you don’t post. It’s the good haircut you forget to think about by lunch. It’s the rooftop night you’re so inside of that you don’t reach for the phone once. Nobody claps. There’s no montage. There’s no moment where he sees the new you and crumbles, because that moment lives in the same fantasy warehouse as every other thing you built about him, and the warehouse was always empty.
I finished the run. Walked it, honestly, wheezing, dead last, Dylan waiting at the end with a water and a “you crushed it!” Bro, please stop. And I didn’t post it. Not as a rule. Not as some big statement about digital detoxing. I just didn’t feel the pull, for once. The run was mine. It happened. Nobody needs to sign off on it.
You know where your phantom audience is. You know which improvements you’ve been making for him and which ones you’d still make if you were guaranteed he’d never, ever find out. That second list is your actual life. The first one is a play.
You can close the show whenever you’re ready. The theater’s been empty this whole time anyway.
Suffering is optional, babe.
xoxo, Ares
P.S. If you just realized you’ve been curating a whole “thriving” persona for a man who blocked you, first of all, same. Second of all, delete the draft. It’s not to punish yourself. A good day can be a good day. It doesn’t have to be exhibit A.
P.P.S. Still get that fire haircut, and go for a run, and hang out with friends – for yourself. You deserve all good things, love.
