Guest Blog By DTO.

November Project is always there. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in Boston, Buffalo, and Baltimore, through thicker and thinner and through sicker and healthier than any spouse could hope to be. And whether it’s your first day running steps or you’re entrenched in the inner sanctum of the movement, your presence is celebrated and your absence mourned.

Although my first NP workout was in Boston in March 2013, under the B&B leadership, an early morning job and a move to South Africa meant that I would not become a consistent member of the mothership until my return to the city in October 2015. A quiet, reserved guy by nature, I averaged about 2.5 workouts per week and left it at that – you would never catch me at socials, Swissbakers, or summit. This consistency would be subverted by a number of events in my family life through the spring and summer of 2016, which found me setting my alarm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as usual, only to remain laying in bed beyond the time the I would normally leave for the workout, beyond the 6:29 bounce, indeed beyond the time that I would normally leave for work, and for several months I was chronically late, as I laid in bed for hours in the morning after a sleepless night wondering how things had gotten so bad. This happened once, then twice, then three times, and before I knew it inertia had sunk in and for most of the summer of 2016 my involvement in NP was a distant memory. At first I felt bad about my absence, and then, suddenly, I didn’t. “Eh screw it, they don’t even realize I’m gone.”

One Monday, in September 2016, the destination deck was between my apartment in Mission Hill and my work in Chinatown, and I couldn’t justify my usual excuses for ditching this one. I decided to pack a light bag and run to the small park off Columbus, in the South End, before continuing on to work. As Emily explained the morning’s workout, she glanced my way and double-taked (took?), yelling “Oliver!!” when she saw me. Assuming that she saw somebody in my general vicinity named Oliver, I turned around to see nobody behind me. “ehhh, no?” was my response, and although the name was wrong, the message was clear – my prolonged absence had been noted, and my presence had been dearly missed, by these inimitable leaders who couldn’t possibly remember the quiet introverts at the back of the bounce, like myself, right?

Several weeks later, after Emily’s notice inspired me/guilted me to attend more regularly than I had over the summer, there was a deck in South Boston, where we warmed up with a game of tag. In the process of naming the proverbial *its*, C Payne pointed straight at me and yelled “Tim!!” Assuming that he saw somebody in my general vicinity named Tim, to whom he wished to bestow such an enviable position, I turned around to find nobody responding. “Shit,” I thought, before turning back around, “not again.” I returned to meet Payne’s gaze slowly, dreading a repeat of this awkward encounter, with a brand-new moniker, and lo and behold, he thought my name was Tim. “This has never happened before!” Payne stupidly bemoaned. I consoled him as best as I could for his indiscretion in the only way that I know how, with passive aggressive sarcasm – “It’s okay, you were probably thinking of my brother, Tim, who’s never been here before” and “don’t worry, I’ve only been coming for 15 months.”

Despite the horrible failure in memory and attention, both Emily and Chris earned a resounding A for their effort, which earned them a consistent member in the newly-christened TDO.

This attention would prove to be borderline sanity-saving for me, as crisis after crisis befell the TDO family in the fall of 2016, crises which, compounded with residual and continued pain from the previous year, found me ugly-crying inconsolably at a medical school interview in November, answering the question, “have you ever felt overwhelmed and how did you respond?”, sobs which screamed “yeah, right fucking now, and clearly I’m responding pretty poorly, and sorry for saying *fuck* in an interview.” Needless to say, I was waitlisted.

Through this, I found solace in the fact that the next workout was at a maximum like 70 hours away. And although I was still late for work pretty much every day of the week until my last day this past April, at least on MWF it was no longer because I was wallowing in my bed in warm and tempur-pedic-y self-pity, instead it was because I was too busy hugging and fuck-yeah-ing this group of extraordinary individuals whose idiosyncrasies and eccentricities I came to love and on whose constance I came to depend.

Although it pains me to my core to leave Boston this August to pursue my equally important dreams of becoming a doctor and of upsetting Emily by moving to the #mothershift, it kicks serious ass that I have an NPDC to tap into, for intense workouts, for potential roommates, for friends outside of the Foggy Bottom bubble, and for the inadvertent yet essential support system that has helped me through what continues to be easily the toughest couple of years of this TDO’s life.

Am I good? Fuck yeah.