For the past few years, for the first time in her life, Merissa Wright isn’t running away from something.
Instead, she’s running toward it.
Wright, 29, of West Hartford is an early childhood therapist and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Hartford, where she is also an adjunct professor. She is a spin instructor. She was a star runner in high school and college.
She’s also a sexual abuse survivor.
Wright will compete in her first marathon Saturday at the Eversource Hartford Marathon, a race, she said, that mirrors her personal journey of learning to cope with past trauma in her life.
“For me, the marathon is such a representation of what the healing journey is,” Wright said. “The physical feat of a marathon is what it feels like – at least in my experience – to go through this (healing) process. It’s painful but also rewarding. It’s physically and mentally taxing.
“There is the beginning, where you get on the starting line, you decide to talk about your story or get help in some way, and that’s the hardest part, but once you’re there, you got to keep going.”
Wright didn’t open up about her past until a few years ago and now she thinks it’s important to share her story.
“My parents have always been supportive,” she said. “I have great friends. I have a supportive husband. I’m in a career field where I can do the things I want to do and use the knowledge I have as a platform to support others. I’m very privileged.
“But I think it’s important to share parts of my journey that are appropriate to share with others. I’m hoping by showing you’re not alone, someone else who has had these experiences, too, they can hear and see what you’ve been through. That can be empowering.”
Wright grew up in Massachusetts. She said she was first sexually abused when she was 4 or 5 years old and that it continued until she was about 12.
“It was primarily youth-on-youth sexual abuse,” she said. “It was continuous, and it happened over multiple years. It was someone I really trusted.
“This is something I’m still working on – I don’t have angry feelings toward this person, I’m not mad at my family members – no one knows what they don’t know and I didn’t even know – I didn’t understand. I just knew something didn’t feel right.”
Wright said she was considered a “problem child” when she was growing up. “I was the one that took up a lot of space,” she said.
As she grew older, she became interested in music. She played the guitar and wrote poetry. She joined all the clubs in school and performed in musicals.
Her sophomore year of high school, she started to run track, mostly the 400- and 800 meters and by the time she graduated, she had helped set school records in four relay events. She got a scholarship to run track and cross country at Fordham University, where she went with the intention of studying pre-med.
Merissa Wright, now of West Hartford, was a star track runner at Fordham University. (Photo courtesy of Fordham University Athletics)
She and her teammates set records. She excelled academically.
On the outside, everything looked great. But Wright was suffering from anxiety, depression and said she had an eating disorder that was undiagnosed.
“College was a really difficult time for me where I was realizing a lot of unfortunate things that had happened throughout my childhood that I didn’t have the words to understand and no one knew except for me,” Wright said. “All those memories were activated. But also I was winning awards and was the MVP, so no one knew. It was a really hard time.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, she’s amazing.’ I’m like, ‘I’m doing great.’ But it was tough.”
It was only after she graduated college, with a degree in music therapy, that she began to see a therapist. She had moved to Connecticut and was going to UConn for a graduate degree in educational psychology.
She had stopped running. It was too much.
But two years ago, she got back into it. She ran the Hartford Marathon relay with some of her colleagues and enjoyed it. Last fall, she got married, so this fall, she decided she would finally tackle the full marathon.
“I kind of rejected it for a while but running is such a big part of who I am,” she said. “When I run, kind of nothing else matters. My brain goes quiet.
“I had historically struggled with my body image – I still do – but I had been in therapy for two years, I was starting to talk about my story on social media and public platforms. I talked to my family members; I told them first. I thought, ‘It’s time for me to get my power back and start being who I am again,’ because I lost who I was for so long.”
Merissa Wright of West Hartford will run her first marathon in Hartford Saturday (Photo courtesy of Merissa Wright)
Her husband Ryan has helped support her. Her family will be at the marathon, cheering for her. Her professors have also been supportive.
“Once this professor said to our class, in reference to therapy, said that you have to go towards the thing that scares you the most,” she said. “ ‘We have to talk about the uncomfortable things.’ That stuck with me.
“I was like, ‘Wow, I spent so long running from everything and making myself so busy that no one could see. I couldn’t even see what I was going through.’
“Now I’m going to run towards the scariest things, the things that make us feel uncomfortable, the things that no one wants to talk about. I’m going full speed ahead. But I also need to find time to slow down – that’s where the marathon helps me because I had that long training time to, in a way, think, but also not to think. My brain gets clear when I’m running and I can take in the beauty of how far I’ve come.”