The hot girls are right about this one

Tip #3 : take a walk

This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to mid-November 2024, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.

Remember a while ago how everyone was like, obsessed with the Hot Girl Walk™️ and it was a whole thing to have a walk and get ready for your walk and share the insights gleaned from the earth during your walk?

Well, the hot girls are onto something with that one.

Walks legitimately changed my life.

Maybe even saved it (see this post for full context).

I started walking during covid when my kids were gone for the whole summer for the first time. Not because of the hot girls doing it on tiktok (but honestly that wasn’t un-helpful), but because I didn’t know how to feel anything and had never been alone, never been in charge of just myself, for that much time in a row - not ever before in my life.

There were days where I couldn’t sleep past 4:30am, days where I was so uncomfortable just sitting with my feelings that I started walking to give my body something to do while my brain just did whatever it needed to do.

In a little video I made introducing the value of walks for me on Instagram, I made this little comparison or like imaginary visual about how walks help me process things.

It feels like when I walk, my thoughts unravel from the tangle in my brain and leave this lovely orderly trail behind me as I move my body through space.

By the time the walk is done, my thoughts are in order, or at least improved, my feelings have had time to chill out if they’ve been unruly, and I have a noticeable increase of zen - every single time.

Back to the summer of 2020 - alone in my house for nearly 3 months with a silence of soul and energy and a total lack of everything that life had been full of until then - I was struggling. Hard core.

So many things flooded me that I didn’t know how to process and feel.

Decades of being emotionally on high alert was now being like, “hey yeah now you gotta deal with some of that.”

But I didn’t know how.

Literally didn’t know how.

All of that is why I started this process, and walking was literally the first thing that helped me start to gain real traction on everything else.

I was having trouble sleeping, significantly – in that it was not regular at all. Sometimes I slept for 14 hours at a time for days in a row and sometimes I couldn’t sleep past 4:30 am.

I was catching up and resting in body and soul for sure, but some mornings when I couldn’t sleep past 4:30 I would get up and go walk for a couple hours because what else was there to do?? And maybe if I moved my body more I would end up sleeping better than night. Sometimes it worked.

I didn’t do it to get skinnier or anything it was for mental health and safety reasons, though a healthier bod did result. I lost 30 pounds that summer - might be a big part of why my neighbor didn’t recognize me.

The weight loss was not intentional but it was needed. I hadn’t been healthy and hadn’t realized how UN-healthy I had actually been until the stress and pressure of everything traumatic that had been happening ceased.

I had used food as an escape, as a coping, as proof of the existence of pleasure (if a burrito tastes this good, surely other good things are possible) and walking helped me shed that as a defense and a coping, and helped me learn to hear what I needed, physically.

Honestly it wasn’t even intentional. It was a side effect, a by-product of finally trying to heal, protect myself, and develop positive steps.

It really is true that the body knows first, and will reject things before you might even be ready to consciously acknowledge them.

My body knew.

And as soon as there was room for relief, it began healing immediately.

I’ll discuss food and eating another time, but walking was another way I was able to come home to myself, physically start to get to know my individual person, and to realign my mind and corporeal form.

Anyway, back to actually walking.

I walked so that I could get through time without feeling like I was going to implode on my couch.

I walked to figure out how to sit with a feeling when I didn’t really know how to do that at all.

I walked when I was processing things and didn’t know how so I just walked until it felt better or worse or different.

I walked and listened to music, to podcasts, to audiobooks, so often to absolutely nothing.

It was like when my body was occupied with the walking my brain could sort and settle and begin to navigate the decades previous and what it all even was.

Now I walk mostly at night, partly because it’s hot here a lot of the time, partly because I work now and can’t just go for a 1.5 hour walk in the middle of the day (not YET at least, and your supporting this newsletter with a paid subscription helps me get closer to that goal of owning my own time more fully so please know my eternal gratitude for all of you readers of any level for even reading).

Partly because I have a big awesome doofus dog who I haven’t trained to not be hella psyched anytime someone comes near (he’s just saturated in joy, it’s cute but he’s a big guy), and partly because I just love being out in the night with my dog walking, talking to the moon and seeing the stars and the world lit up in a different way and processing my day.

Walking built my brain back up. It helped me catalog and organize and sift through and tone my body and my feelings and had helped literally every single thing in my life, without exception, in massive ways.

I’ve processed parenting issues while walking, dealt with difficult emotions regarding my extended and very close family, I’ve prepared for my custody issues with walking, dealt with preparing for interviews and professional development on walks, I’ve cried a lot during walks, I’ve sorted out feelings of love, disregard, damage, intense gratitude, and literally everything.

I mean literally, literally. Not figuratively.

Rejoicing now, by moving through the world when I used to want nothing more than to evaporate, it is not an exaggeration to say walking saved and changed my life.

It’s absolutely essential for me to walk.

Walk until you see something gorgeous. Walk until you see a certain color. Walk until you see five dogs. Walk until your body says ok that’s enough.

I’d urge you, if there’s stuff flying around in your brain, if there’s dust in the corridors of feelings you need to look at - take a walk about it. Look around, get in a groove of the movement (walking someplace relatively flat and where you can do like a straight line for a long time helps here so your body can auto pilot and give your brain the attention).

You don’t have to start doing this at all - but walking does have incredible benefits beyond the soul improving ones I’ve felt and detailed here.

Worth a shot.

See ya tomorrow,

xoxo - Marian