I haven’t eaten at The Olive Garden since January, 1999. I love the Olive Garden. It’s a fantastic restaurant, but that endless salad bowl oasis held the first post-huge life letdown party that I ever experienced, and since gobbling down way too many breadsticks that snowy night in January, I haven’t gone back.

“The snow’s too heavy,’ My friend and roommate, Susie, reported after talking with her dad on the phone just after 5PM, ‘it’s too dangerous to drive.”

“Your car has four wheel drive, right?” I pleaded in my subtly persuasive, yet whiney youngest child tone I had spent every second perfecting since birth.

“Yeah, but this is too much. We can’t go to Park City. I'm sorry, T.”

I went to school in Colorado, but I didn’t go there to ski, and I wasn’t planning on hitting any slopes in Park City that weekend either, I wanted to go to Sundance, I needed to go to Sundance, but the snow blocked my chance to attend the most revered film festival in the country, so we went to The Olive Garden instead.

I was crushed.

Moments after finishing a track workout last Thursday.

Last Sunday I woke up rested. I thought. It was cloudy, but not raining. Yet. I didn’t care. I was excited to run. I knew it would be a hard workout, and probably even harder considering the piled up week of workouts I wanted to ignore, but couldn’t. Still, I believed I slept enough that I could do it. I could run as fast as I needed to, I would hit my splits rain or shine, eyes open or shut, I was ready for anything.

The rain moved in fast and pounded down quickly. I searched for an inch of blue sky in every direction, but the only color I saw above was grey and dark grey. Puddles were forming everywhere. Soon my ankles were flooded, and I started to slip, both my speed and confidence, and frustration took over.

I was drenched, upset, and still had ten miles to run.

I stopped at the end of the 6th mile, my second interval, and yelled….

I paced back and forth for a few seconds debating what to do? Yes, I would run through those conditions during a race, (Boston, 2018), or if a life depended on it, (hopefully, never), but not during a workout four weeks before the race I was training for. What if I got sick again?

What if I couldn’t breathe again?

Next, I climbed into my Jeep, drove home, cried, then progressed to the hyperventilating cry made famous by three year old’s, changed out of my soaked clothes and into dry ones, walked outside, ran a few steps, and stopped again. “No, I don’t want to do this.”

My legs were stiff, the workout was already ruined, and I was exhausted.

And soon catatonic.

Although, I didn’t go to The Olive Garden this time. Instead after bantering back and forth with Marion about what to do the rest of the day, I wandered around our neighborhood Von’s grocery store for ninety minutes shopping and re-shopping, looking and reaching for items that I thought would make me feel better, “Tortilla chips, salsa…. Nevermind.”

I was beyond sad. I felt like I was air, invisible to my fellow shoppers, empty, worthless.

To add salt on my gaping wound of fatigue-laced failure, the Oscars were on that night.

“I can’t watch the Oscars.” I told Marion when I walked through the door and caught a glimpse of red carpet coverage on our TV.

Then I started to cry again.

First it was the snow, next it was the rain, but really, it has always been my fear of failing at what I care about most, writing and directing movies, that has kept me feeling invisible all these years.

I’ve used running and triathlon as a distraction and reward system to keep me going while trying to ignore what is truly tugging at my heart, because I know what it will take to succeed as a screenwriter and director, everything.

I can’t do it all, at least not do it all well, and certainly not if I want to do something great.

Something has to give.

Before I decide what that is, I need to lay down.

UPDATE: I woke up feeling better this (Tuesday) morning. I want to keep this blog as part of my routine, but my routine has to change.