When You Hide the Burned Bits

When it's brown, it's cooked, when it's black it's "fooked." -- Gordon Ramsay

It's been quite warm here recently. When it's warm like this, we usually spend our weekends either swimming at Lake Cowichan or kayaking in the nearby harbour. Today, I didn't really feel like either. Instead, we went for a walk along the trail that I normally like to go for a run on. I hadn't been on the trail much this summer, so it was lovely to be there today, under the cool shade of the trees, listening to the creek trickling past:

It's amazing how many more things you notice when you're not concentrating on your breathing or on your footing. It's the first time I noticed these dome-shaped spider webs:

I have no idea what kind of spider spins them, but they were fascinating:

I've been cleared by my physiotherapist to start running again... and when I say "running," I mean jogging for one minute intervals, interspersed by one minute of walking, and only for a maximum of three times. Three whole minutes of running.

I'm ecstatic at the prospect.

It's not that I'm one of these people that gets the "runner's high." Running is hard for me... always has been. It's never, ever been what I would call "fun." It makes me tired, hungry, and sore. I curse it while I'm doing it.

But, the thing is: I've been feeling like an utter failure without it.

See, the thing is: I lost a bunch of weight. During that time, I became really physically active. People started calling me an athlete: me, the life-long chubby girl, the one with the "pretty face and great personality." Being an athlete was never a possibility, ever. And then, suddenly: I was.

But what I also found out was that people were expecting me to fail. People went up to my parents and said things like, "Oh, she'll probably gain it back. Most people do." My parents balked at them (because they are better human beings), but knowing that it had been said stunned me.

People were expecting me to gain it all back.

So, when I broke my foot, I got really, really depressed. I went through the cycle of comfort eating, and then getting more depressed about eating, gaining weight, and getting depressed about gaining weight, and then really, really hating myself. My trousers are really tight at the moment. How could I let it happen? Why can't I just control myself? I'm going to fail... just like everyone said I would.

I haven't talked about it here... but today, I feel compelled to spill my guts... to prove that life is not rosy for anyone, no matter what face they put on for people.

Everyone's hiding their imperfections.

Case in point: I decided I'd take some apples that I got in my veggie box this week and make something with them. I don't know what kind of apples they were, but they looked like cooking apples to me:

So I made some apple pie filling (I used only a 1/4 cup sugar, by the way - I hate overly sweet filling):

I took some thawed phyllo pastry and folded them into samosas (which was really easy, by the way. I've watched enough tv chefs make them that folding them felt somehow instinctual). I brushed them with some butter and put them on a tray and put them on low on the barbecue, because it's so hot outside that I didn't want to turn the oven on:

And, bim bam boom, I had apple samosas:

But here's the thing: they're burned underneath. I had one of those moments while standing by the barbecue when I said, "Hmm, they're doing alright, but I'll just turn it up a touch..."

Famous last words.

They still taste great (they're nearly black, but not charred), but I had visions of some lovely, brown, crispy, perfect things, and I would take the photos, put them up on the blog, and make people drool.

My ambitions are a bit low, I know. But I'm still not showing the burned sides. I bet even Nigella Lawson has burned bits. I should email her and ask her.

Meanwhile, the spinning project from my last post is well... gone. It was just not working out: it was overspun in places, snapping every time I tried to straighten it out, while some places were falling apart where I had tried to join the roving sloppily. It was just awful.

So yeah, I'm hiding that, too. (Actually, I threw it out. Not showing that either).

In the meantime, I have picked up the Silk Handmaiden I had started knitting a few months ago. I was not at all happy with the pattern I had chosen, so I gritted my teeth and ripped it all out. I think I'm happy with this choice. It's called the Going Places Shawl, and I think it's suiting the yarn much better. I think this might be the fifth pattern I've tried with this yarn, but this one doesn't work out, that's it. It's going in the naughty corner:

Also: I cropped the heck out  of this photo, hiding all the stains and crap lying around on the deck... just like everyone else's deck.

Ain't nobody perfect. No-bah-dee.

So yeah, this is the post where I showed my burned bits... the shame and the insecurity that has come along with a summer of being injured. But, as Brené Brown says, "Shame cannot survive being spoken." So it's out there, and maybe somehow it'll start to wither and not have so much power over me. And maybe it'll be a way to combat the perfect Facebook lives we all see around us.

First run day tomorrow. Wish me luck.