Last week, I had the privilege of leading one of the new Girls on the Run for Grownups prototype lessons — this one on Emotional Regulation.

Katie had led the previous sessions, but after the life challenges I spoke about in Running on Empty,  I told her,“I need this one.”   She graciously let me lead it.

It was a small group of women who had come straight from work or from putting kids to bed. They quickly split themselves into two tables — one of younger moms in their 30s, and another of women 45 and up. What happened next was fascinating.

We talked about emotions — the comfortable ones, the uncomfortable ones, and the ones that blur somewhere in between.

When we talked about joy, our younger group smiled easily. They described it as energizing, motivating, and contagious.

Our older group fell silent. Then one woman said, “Joy makes me nervous. I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Heads nodded.
Joy felt dangerous.

As I pondered that, we talked about boredom. Almost everyone said it felt uncomfortable — everyone except one woman, a brilliant retired mathematician who proudly said she’s never owned a cell phone.
She smiled and said, “I love being bored. That’s where my creativity begins.”

And I haven’t stopped thinking about that.

Because she’s right. Somewhere along the way, we lost our comfort with quiet. We’ve filled every still moment with scrolling, messaging, and noise.

I realized I get anxious when I can’t find my phone — that tiny square has become my lifeline to the world. But what if that lifeline is quietly strangling my ability to feel?

It made me think of the book The Anxious Generation— and how today’s kids are growing up in a world where they’ve never known boredom. They’ve never known privacy, either.  Every moment is recorded, shared, and remembered forever.

When we were kids, we could make mistakes, learn, and move on.
Today’s girls don’t get that luxury. Their missteps — their emotions, their mistakes, their growing pains — live online, forever.

So how do we save them?
How do we teach them to name and regulate emotions when they’re always on stage?
Do they know what they’re actually feeling — or are they performing what they think they should feel?

We talked about that too — how girls still feel pressure to be “good,” to hug relatives even when they don’t want to,  to smile when they’d rather not.  To please, to be polite, to perform.

At Girls on the Run, we teach our girls that every emotion has something to tell us.
And maybe that’s where we start — by relearning it ourselves.
By sitting quietly. By welcoming boredom. By letting joy feel safe again.

Because if we can do that, maybe our girls will learn that they can too.

We can’t change the world our girls are growing up in overnight — but we can change what we model for them.
We can teach them that joy isn’t dangerous.
That boredom can be beautiful.
That every finish line is another beginning.

On November 2, we’ll gather for our Girls on the Run Piedmont Fall 5K (aka The Diamond Dash) — a day that radiates all of this: color, courage, laughter, and movement.

If you’ve ever needed a reminder that joy can be safe,  that community heals the soul — come join us.
Walk, run, cheer, or just stand at the finish line and breathe and...

watch joy run free.

Come find me at the finish line — I’ll be the goofy one soaking up every ounce of joy I can.
Maybe this is what living dangerously really looks like: choosing joy anyway.