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I’ve been working out at the local YMCA for several years now. I take virtually all the classes, except Zumba (takes too much coordination), TRX (hurts my shoulder), ­Yoga (actually kinda boring), Pilates (grossed out by the heavy breathing), Kickboxing (see Zumba), Spinning (no way! I actually like being able to sit down). Okay, maybe I don’t take all the classes, but I have my favorites and I show up faithfully.

In the beginning, it was hard to get myself to go there – mentally and physically. It seemed to take so long to see any progress at all and I was left with a constant stream of aches and pains, discouragement and self-doubt. But ultimately, I wanted to move through the world with more confidence and grace, so I put my head down and kept going back for more.

Lately, I’ve been experiencing déjà vu when it comes to the aches and pains of working out a new muscle and it’s funny, because I haven’t changed my workout routine at all, except for one small thing.  As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve begun walking slowly around my block and it shouldn’t hurt a bit.

But it does.

It hurts terribly and sometimes it takes everything I’ve got to get back out there and walk the next day. I’m strengthening a muscle that I’ve neglected to use properly, despite all my exercise and hard work. The muscle I’m talking about is, of course, my heart. It turns out I’ve been relying on another body part to do the heavy lifting of day-to-day operations.

Modern psychology tells us that we operate out of one of our three centers: our Head, our Heart or our Gut. In my own, very simplified language, this is how they work.

Head people think first, before they decide how to act.

Heart people feel things deeply and allow their emotions to guide them.

Gut people seem to live by the adage that it is far easier to seek forgiveness than ask permission. They trust their instincts to jump right in to any and every situation.

Can you identify with one of those centers? In a new situation, what do you listen to first? Your head, your heart or your gut?

For a long time, due to my incorrigible optimism, I assumed I was a heart person, because I felt happy so much of the time. But alas, I’ve discovered I am not a heart person. I’m sure that’s no surprise to anyone who truly is a heart person. No one in touch with their actual feelings is happy all the time. Heart-centered people experience real emotions, like joy and sadness, agony and ecstasy, not just bland hopefulness.

I am also not a gut person. Given the advice to “trust my instincts,” I break out in a cold sweat. The “Act first. Think later” philosophy of gut-centered people makes me cringe. How do you know if what you are doing is right or wrong? It seems to me you don’t and that you must be wrong almost as often as you’re right. However, it sure does save a lot of time on front-end decision making.

Through the process of elimination, you’ve probably figured out that I am a head person, but perhaps you knew that all along. I suspect that my previous blogs have revealed that I spend a lot of time thinking about things. My cranium is my comfort zone. To me, only the brain can be trusted. A heart will betray you; emotions change far too often to be relied upon and following your gut will get you into trouble; your tag line might as well be “frequently wrong, but never in doubt.”

But a brain? Well, a brain is a beautiful thing – it’s rational, logical, dependable, except when it’s not. It can also be paranoid, delusional and let’s face it, the epicenter of mental illness. I haven’t gone down that path, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the limitations of my control center. Basically, I’m a brain walking around on two feet and that is not what we were meant to look like.

So I recently sought the advice of a wise woman I know about how to find more balance in my life. I wanted to know how to get what I know in my head to move into my heart, how to make my gut instincts feel like something more than morning sickness. She laughed, and thought I was joking, but when she saw my face (and the notepad and pen in my hand), she got serious. She gently removed the pen from my grip and said in essence that my heart and gut probably don’t speak anymore, because my brain just shouts them down. I could just imagine my overzealous mind berating the centers “beneath” her, “Quiet down, you two! I’m in charge here, so don’t try to confuse the issue with your mucked up feelings and half-cocked instincts. Who do you think you are? Me?”

This wise woman challenged me to step away from everything my mind loves for at least an hour a day: the computer, books, work, writing, plans. For one hour a day, I’m just supposed to feel things. My instinct that this would be difficult was right on, but after I threw up, I was able to accept the challenge.

And so I began to walk – with mixed results. When I demoted my mind, my heart began to speak up. I hear whispers of things long forgotten, pangs of real emotion, vague sensations in my gut. I try to go home and act on them, before my mind has a chance to talk me out of it. Some days, it just doesn’t work out and my head remains firmly in control.

I have no doubt that this process of “re-centering” myself will make me healthier in the long run, but in the meantime, I ache. These new sensations are frequently uncomfortable, and I long to ‘quit the gym’ so to speak. But then I remember my early workouts at the YMCA and why I kept going – to move through this world with more confidence and grace.

So on these walks, I keep my head up and my heart open, because I know we will always be our most graceful when we are balanced – head, heart and gut.

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I recently read Alan Brennert’s novel Moloka’i and enjoyed it thoroughly. It is set around the turn of the century in the leper colony of Kalaupapa on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. To control the leprosy epidemic, everyone found infected with the bacteria, was sent to live in isolation there. For many patients, that isolation lasted their whole lives.  Historical fiction like this is my favorite genre, because it appeals to me on two levels. The reader in me gets lost in the story, while the scholar in me absorbs all sorts of new historical facts and trivia to bore my friends and family with later. In my nerdy opinion, historical fiction is the perfect combination of fact and fiction, research and escapism, a fabulous two-for-one deal.

However, reading the novel reminded me of an experience I had a couple months back. It made me think about historical fiction in a more personal way, because it wasn’t in a book anymore. At a cocktail party in my neighborhood, I saw all too clearly how our own personal historical fictions influence the stories we tell ourselves each and every day. While the fiction is probably harmless most of the time, it may actually cost us something valuable in the long run: our ability to see ourselves as we are today.

As Tim and I walked up to our hosts’ front door, he reminded me that I was his wingman. I wasn’t allowed to go mingle, if he didn’t find a buddy to talk to. He doesn’t usually worry about that happening, but this wasn’t our normal social circle, so I acquiesced. For my part, I straightened my skirt and checked my make up one more time. I was as ready as I would ever be. I knew we were both responding to some personal insecurities, but figured our secrets were safe with each other.

So imagine my surprise when our hostess asked us to put on a nametag, complete with three adjectives that described us in high school. It was, after all, a fundraiser for a youth organization. Oh boy, I thought, but honesty was probably the best policy here as anywhere else. Tim jotted down Lone Wolf, figuring that pretty much said it all, while I scrawled geek, klutz and swimmer under my name. We looked at what the other had written and shrugged. We’ve been together for so long and shared so many stories from our childhoods that we knew exactly where the adjectives had come from and accepted them as some approximation of the truth. I knew that after several moves, Tim had only a few friends at any given time growing up. He frequently ate alone in the cafeteria, and spent many of his afternoons, kicking a soccer ball at the backyard fence, scoring goal after game-winning goal for an audience of one. He knew how awkward I had felt as a child, skinny and freckle-faced, more at home in water than on land. He’d counted the scars I still have on my body that testify to the face-first, flat out falls I took on the black top, off bikes and into thorn bushes. He has also tried to heal the scars on my psyche from years of feeling inferior to so many of my peers.

So we stuck on the wounded egos of our teenage selves and started to mingle. I couldn’t believe all the casual friends and acquaintances we met, who were apparently all popular, smart, beautiful and athletic. Honestly, the ratio of class presidents, cheerleaders and homecoming queens to the rest of us was a little ridiculous. But what was even funnier was how they responded to our nametags. They thought we were kidding, or at least really exaggerating who we used to be. I assured them we were not. They thought we were “one of them,” and until that night, I had thought so too.

Not a single person at that party would have pegged Tim for a lone wolf. At this point in his life, my husband is known as “Coach Tim” to a large swathe of the under-15 population in our community and their parents. He’s spent years coaching our kids’ sports teams, from softball to soccer. He is sarcastic and funny, hangs out with the guys, but prefers to chat with the ladies. And as for me, I haven’t tripped over my own feet (much) since my second child was born, and I have become a fairly self-confident and capable woman, athletic even, since discovering Pilates.

The night was fun, but I didn’t love reliving my past. I put those words down, thinking they were harmless, that I had moved beyond those labels and memories, that they were “history” and I know Tim did the same. But when we reflected on the last things we had done before we walked into that party, we saw the evidence that our past is hardly history at all. He was making sure that he wouldn’t be the lone wolf, and by adding another layer of lipstick, I was re-arming myself against the superficial judgments of other girls. Despite twenty years of love and success, our historical fiction is still a palpable presence in our lives.

Does anyone ever get over who they once were, and thought they might always be? Is it worse for the class presidents, valedictorians, or homecoming queens, who perhaps never lived up to the promise of those early days? I don’t know the answer to that. My story runs the other way and they aren’t exactly the kind of questions you’d ask a casual acquaintance over a glass of wine at a cocktail party.

By the end of the novel Moloka’i, a cure for leprosy is found and the patients are free to move back into society, leaving their “shameful” past behind them. But virtually no matter where they go, they face prejudice, scorn and outright discrimination. There are no jobs for them, no places to live, and frequently no family willing to love them. They are technically “free,” but they are bound by their past and the evidence is written all over their bodies and souls. A few of them find the freedom they seek, but many of them return to the leper colony, Kalaupapa, where they are known and loved for who and what they are.

As I read this book, I was taken back to that cocktail party and the way our histories can continue to haunt us. Thankfully, for the most part, I am free. I laughed with everyone at what my nametag said. I am no longer that geeky girl, who lacks the self-confidence, courage and grace to be fully herself. However, when I went home that night, done socializing with the world at large, I was glad to be alone with Tim, my own personal Kalaupapa, where I am known and loved for who I was and who I try to be today.

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Have you ever gotten a name completely wrong, and no matter how many times you hear it said the right way, you can’t help but say it the wrong way? When my kids were small, I was thrilled by these little misnomers. I would encourage them in their mispronunciations, knowing that too soon, the correct words would come. Some family favorites still include bezras, the black and white striped animals found on the African plains, and Jophus, the husband of Mary, and the father of Baby Jesus. My least favorite example is my own father’s insistence on calling my daughter Kara, (rhymes with hair-a) instead of the correct Keara (rhymes with deer-a) for the first several years of her life. I went with simpler names for child #2 and #3.

My son recently introduced me to a show that he and his friends watch (and I am going to do everything in my power to get the name right this first time) called Destroy, Build, Destroy. No matter how many times he corrects me, I keep referring to it as Build, Destroy, Build. I am sure it’s because I am a mother, but it goes against my intuition to end a show with a Destroy instead of a Build. Why would you do that? And also, how can you destroy something before you’ve built it? It just doesn’t make sense to me. And here’s the kicker in my opinion. The winning team gets to destroy the machine, built with great care and effort by the losing team. Let me repeat that: The winner is the destroyer. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t allow 12-year-old males to vote. That is Lord of the Flies for the millennial generation.  Left to their own devices, or given a chance to create their own TV show, “kill or be killed” is their mentality.

And as I watch our current election races heat up, I am saddened by how little we’ve grown up, or asked our candidates to do so. At least on the TV show, each team is given a chance to build something before their opponents are allowed to destroy it. In our political climate, no candidate is allowed to create a healthy idea, image, or campaign before it is attacked and brought low. I don’t know what a healthier, feasible alternative would look like, but I get so tired of watching the 12-year-old, male mentality of politics that I mostly tune out, or turn it off, just like I do with Destroy Build Destroy. I want to stay engaged. I want to do better, but I just can’t get past the feeling that I am watching bad, reality TV and that the winner, no matter who it is, can’t help but be a destroyer. It’s the way we’ve created the game.