These days, I like to think I’m a pretty average or above-average driver. The very first time I drove was during driver’s education the summer after my junior year of high school. I had spent so much time criticizing my mom’s driving — she would not maintain a consistent speed and she stopped when she tried to merge on the highway.
I thought I could do a lot better the moment I started, but I was very, very wrong.
I hit the accelerator and was shocked at how sensitive it was — the car jerked forward, and the instructor had to use her brake in the passenger seat to stop us from getting into an accident. I struggled to make left turns and resolved not to during the whole time I drove through residential streets. I came very close to hitting a parked car’s windshield. On a road where the speed limit was 35 miles per hour, I drove 25, struggling to steer clear of the yellow dividing lines with the other side of traffic. Other cars were so infuriated at my slow driving that they illegally passed me on the double yellow lines.
It could not have gone worse. I was incredibly embarrassed, so I resolved to practice and get better. I drove around parking lots with my mom while she sat in the passenger seat, saying nothing and not judging, unlike I did with her driving. I got a lot better very quickly and was recognized for the rapid improvement. Under the pressure of my driving test, I passed on the first try.
Eventually, I drove Uber and Lyft, and although I was not the best driver, I did well enough to do rideshare and now can regularly drive whole days on day-long road trips. I had 4.9 stars on Uber and 5 stars on Lyft. People usually recognize me as a pretty smooth driver when I’m not in a rush to get somewhere.
I am a better driver now than I’ve ever been, and that driving experience has been an allegory for many of my life endeavors: a slow, borderline horrific start, followed by rapid improvement and a strong finish.
In 2021, I ran the Philadelphia Marathon. I ran it alone — both my friends I was going to run with were injured, so our plan to run together was adjusted to the two of them just watching me run. I wasn’t in the best shape, but I was running personal record pace the whole marathon. My personal best was a 2:40:07, which was 6:07 mile pace.
I kept the pace for a good 20 miles or so. I was rolling and feeling great. At mile 22, I ran into a slight hiccup — some college guys from Drexel were handing out cups of a yellow-looking liquid. I thought it was Gatorade. A rational person should have known better, given the situation. It was not Gatorade, and I tasted beer, took one swallow, and then spat the rest of it all over myself. If you have ever been at mile 22 of the marathon, you would know that you’re usually not a rational person who can discern Gatorade from beer to any other nefarious yellow-looking liquid.
I started falling apart at mile 24, not because of the sip of beer I took, but because I was tired. I started clipping off slower miles as I tried to just keep going and not drop out.
I hit mile 26. I saw the clock: 2:38:30. There was about a quarter mile left of the marathon. I would need to run under 90 seconds to break 2:40, which was faster than I had been running up until that point. Every step I took felt like I was going to die. But I saw the time and knew that if I kept it together, if I somehow finished strong, I could run a personal best.
I did not sprint and magically speed up. I just kept the same pace, trying not to drop out, trying not to collapse. I saw the finish line and the clock about 150 meters from the finish. I saw the seconds tick away — 2:39:41, 2:39:42, 2:39:43. As much pain as I was in, something came over my body in that last 100 meters. The pain didn’t go away, but a surge of adrenaline came in to override the pain.
The seconds kept ticking away. 2:39:55, 2:39:56. I was so, so close. I crossed the line in 2:39:59, running a personal best and barely breaking 2:40.
After I finished, I had to be ushered to not just collapse on the ground and keep walking. Someone gave me chicken broth so I could replenish sodium. I was in the most pain I had been in that whole year until that point. But I was grateful that at the end of that marathon, something came over me to move onto the next level, a surge of adrenaline I have felt often, but find impossible to explain.
Now, I am a special education teacher, law student, and marathon runner, but I will soon not be two of those things. The identity that has taken the biggest priority has been teacher, given that it’s been my career for the past six years.
Thus, in teaching, there’s a term called the “honeymoon phase.” The honeymoon phase is what it sounds like in marriage: the part at the very beginning of the school year where everyone is happy and there’s a sense of euphoria. In education, it’s a period of the school year when students are very engaged and on their best behavior. New teachers, especially myself, during my first year of teaching, can get lulled into thinking the honeymoon phase is the engagement and activity level of students for the entire year, and be too nice and relax standards for academics or behavior. After the honeymoon phase, students “show their true colors,” whether in a good or bad way, where some students show their perseverance and their consistency, while others will show less engagement or worse behavior.
While other people love honeymoons and beginnings, I tend to love a different part more than the beginning: endings. I actually don’t like the honeymoon phase because of the lack of consistency, routine, and lack of long-term predictability. In most of my endeavors, I would say I don’t even have a honeymoon phase — it goes a lot more like my first time driving than it does a honeymoon.
Beginnings are very tough for me. I’m not the type of person who shines or stands out on first impression. I know that people portray themselves to be on first impression is not who they are later on, but I’m someone who gains a lot of momentum as a semester or another period goes on. There’s something about the ending that just gives me a big rush and a sense of calmness and resolution. The explanation could just be a physiological rush of adrenaline when it is released into the bloodstream.
At the end of every workout, I am overcome with last rep syndrome (a term I made up myself). I run much faster on the last interval or rep of a workout than on previous reps. The last rep actually feels easier than the ones before — I get an extra rush of energy that comes with knowing the workout is over. This will also come at the end of every race, no matter how bad I feel in the last 200 meters. It might not be the best 200 meters of the race, but it will be much better than the mile or two before. I think that just comes from the end being in sight, and I have a level of focus I didn’t have before, and the euphoria of all of the grind and struggle being over. In my academic life, the same feeling comes the hour before a big paper or assignment is due.
I cannot explain it. But time and time again, this feeling when things end has motivated me towards the next step.
Right now, I am encountering several endings that bring me a similar sense of peace and resolution. As a teacher, this is the last week for many of the seniors I work with. So many parents have told me, “thank you for everything you did for my [son or daughter].” They’re happy that their kids made it through the finish line, and it was their child’s work that got them there. But that gratitude was not always there during the years prior, when the child may have been struggling, or the two years prior, when I called saying “your child is missing too much school” or “your child is failing X class because of Y.”
Also, whenever I leave a job or a school for another, bigger opportunity, I get showered again with recognition and gratitude for all the hard work I put in and the commitment I gave to my students as people say goodbye. I’m in that stage right now, as I leave the field of education to become an attorney.
Again, that recognition, of course, wasn’t always there — in fact, there were times I struggled and severely doubted whether I was making a difference at all. There were times a colleague and I had severe philosophical disagreements over the right strategic decision to make and how to approach the work, but that colleague will express their gratitude once it’s over. I have even found the same for students who told me frequently how much they didn’t like me, only for old colleagues to tell me that a student who I was sure couldn’t stand me as a teacher is all of a sudden telling everyone I was their favorite teacher.
I am also graduating from law school this week, and it’s my favorite part of law school because it’s all over now. I remember in college, too, that perspective and clarity during a tough senior year came at the very end, but law school is a time when the ending is much better than the beginning. My first year of law school was terrible — I was an average student with average grades who had no clue what I was doing. I did law school at night while working in special education during the day.
I tried but struggled to balance both commitments, and I actually did not find law school that difficult, but I did find the balance between the two and time management very difficult. Since that first year when I took half the core classes I needed, I have averaged above a 4.0 for the remaining several semesters. I did this with typical tough first-year classes, like Torts, Constitutional Law, and Contracts, but just stumbled through the beginning. I am confident going into my new career as an attorney not because of how I started law school, but because of how I finished.
Endings being the best for me not only apply to running. It applies in many domains, where everything feels effortless and smooth at the very end. I wish I can extrapolate the feeling of the ending all the time. I cannot, as some parts of the journey are just meant to be hard. And there is only one ending to everything — one ending to every workout, one ending to every run, one ending to every academic journey, and one end to every school year. There is one end to every job.
I don’t mean to belabor the point. But the ending is a lot more than a mindset — it’s more of an internal locus, where something comes out of us we didn’t think we were capable of. I have trouble starting, but not finishing things, and my instinctual, gut level reaction during endings probably has something to do with that.
Science shows that completing tasks leads to a release of dopamine, leading to happiness and motivation, and the completion process itself becomes self-reinforcing. Finishing, for me, does always give a sense of control and positive reinforcement and a positive feedback loop as a result, so I like the feeling and closure. The ending gives a sense that I have finally finished the race and finished what I started. But it never really seems like a good idea to really blast the last rep that much. Last rep syndrome can take away from recovery and lead to not giving your best on the day of the actual race. But been if I underperform, I need to trust myself. My effort has never been in question. The issue is that I sometimes work too hard, and I’ll exert effort I don’t need to exert, because last rep syndrome is not a feeling that can be replicated in every run or every race.
I do want to express the big downside to being someone who loves endings and looks forward all the time. Time in the past several years has passed by incredibly fast. I remember being 21 like it was just yesterday, and especially since college, the time has sped by while I have been so focused on the next thing, that I fail to sometimes appreciate what I have.
However, to analogize to the marathon or any major long distance race, the ending being the most enjoyable part makes sense. Unlike a lot of things in my life, the beginning is always easy — the first several miles of the marathon, it’s really easy to have the adrenaline kick in and go out too fast. It’s the middle that gets difficult — mile 20 will hit like a train in most marathons. In 5ks, every runner knows that mile 3 tends to be the most challenging, as is the last mile of the 10k. This is the part where you question whether you should drop out, when you start catastrophizing about every single step being incredible pain.
And then comes the proximity to the finish line, where that pain and suffering doesn’t go away, but the adrenaline and anticipation of the pain being over overcomes the suffering.
The same is true in many areas of my life. It comes in law school, endings are easy, but the middle is hard and a grind.
I think loving endings and finishing things is why I loved video games as much as I did, when I played when I was younger. I could be at level 1 one hour and level 10 another. There were constant level ups. Everything done blended itself to a greater purpose of ending, finishing. Video games always make you feel a sense of accomplishment that is hard to see in real life, because the progress in video games can be so linear, where the work and time put in is directly correlated with results and reward. As such, it was easy to play 12 or more hours of video games when all I was doing was leveling up.
Unfortunately, real life doesn’t always have that effort-to-reward ratio, and that kind of clarity just isn’t always so clear in real life. Endings make me feel like I’m not wasting my life away.
I realize that sometimes, endings are full of sadness, too. I think in each phase of life, there is a cognizance that the people I spent a significant amount of time with and came to know quite well may be people I might never see again. As much as I want to keep in touch, we don’t. I think back to those endings to think why I was so naive, why I perceived a certain friendship or relationship to be closer than it was or why I didn’t foresee that real life would get in the way.
Sometimes, late at night, I think about times past I will never get back, alternate scenarios. I can’t look back anymore. I wonder why I didn’t appreciate those moments more at the time — the endings come, and they come with perspective and euphoria. But I need to work on appreciating the moments that aren’t so easy and when life doesn’t always make sense at the beginning or in the middle, because those are moments I will never get back either
—
This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 Escape the Act Like a Man Box |
 |
 |
 |
—
Photo credit: iStock.com
