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A Sense of Belonging

Once again I am ruminating about the sense of belonging. It seems to me that I've spent a great deal of my life trying to really feel convinced that I belong. But what does that mean, really? As far as I can recall, it had to do with identifying with a group of people, and interacting with those people in a recognizable place. As someone who moved a lot, and as someone whose biological father was not present for the first 17 years, a sense of belonging was not something I had a firm grasp on. That's not to say I didn't ever feel that I belonged; it's just that it was enough of an issue to cause me some definite pain. Did I belong in Toronto with my mother's side of the family? Or out west, near my uncle and cousins and, eventually, my father and sisters? What about my friends? How did I carve out the substance of my identity? All of these questions (and more) generally went unanswered with any lasting measure of satisfaction. I thought I could find that sens

A rather futile entry, but there you go.

Fragile moments of temporary vulnerability, parting like curtains in a dark room. On the bus ride home after work today, packed in tight with other droopy bodies, a gangly, pale, red-eyed man got on with his companion, a woman so thin and pale that she was not much more than a whisper. "We don't have any bus fare; she just got out of the hospital and we had to get medication" he said to the driver in a plain-spoken but steady voice. No entitlement or arrogance, but definitely a tone that expressed that he was dealing with troubles far greater than regular conventions could even touch. The bus driver had him pass through quietly, and the pair unsteadily made their way together and sat right across from me. She was thin like a bird, and I could see on her wrist that she still had her hospital identification and a Medic Alert bracelet. She was so thin that I have no idea how she was even standing, let alone out in public on a crowded bus. The woman leaned against the gangl

I get knocked down, but I get up again

I went back to the gym this morning after about a 9 week slump. I've already been through the entire self-hatred cycle about that so I'm not going to even bother picking that apart in this entry. Need to look forward, only forward. I will say, however, that I see a fine line between finding momentum and getting frantic about exercise, and I was getting a bit frantic, methinks. Whatever the reasons (over-ambition, self-defeating patterns, perfectionism, simple laziness), I stopped exercising, and man , did I feel it. Anxiety and inertia crept in like mold and I started to feel immobilized and raw. Sometimes it takes my anxiety and depression to grow intrusive enough to make my skin actually hurt before I listen to it. When it gets like that, my thoughts ring loudly in my head like bad electric guitar feedback, distorting my perceptions and taking up way too much bandwidth. I can't concentrate. I feel  hollow. It takes me to darker places, and with the summer just around

Not really sure what this blog post is about, but it felt like it needed to be written.

In the last two months (since December 7) I've been going to the local YMCA and working on the Couch to 5K program. I fell off the exercise wagon for two and a half weeks in January shortly after my father died because I fell into a slump, but about a week ago I felt really compelled to get back to my program again. The rush of endorphins after a good thirty minutes is the medicine I need to keep from going into a depressive episode or get overtaken by anxiety. Even at the best of times, I need to fight hard to stave those chemicals off. Earlier this week I was rather unfocused on the treadmill. Either my music was all wrong, or it just felt so boring to run on the machine .  This morning I realized that it's getting light enough in time for me to run outdoors, so I ended up running (slowly, of course, it's still pretty new for me) down to Dallas Road from Quadra and Fort. I felt like I really needed to see the ocean today. It was still frosty and a bit dewy in the ear