home stretch and milo
Lornie Road. I keep coming back to this analogy to get me through the present moment: When you run the cross-country trail at MacRitchie, the final stretch back to the starting point is a pavement alongside Lornie Road. While in the forest, you are winding along amongst trees, and perhaps if you weren't keen on being mandated to run this trail every year, you might want to stop and walk. But once you emerge from the trail onto the pavement along Lornie Road, that's the final stretch - run straight and you will cross the finish line, which you can see is ahead of you, because it is a straight road. More often than not, you will want to sprint, or start running again if you had stopped, because you know it is coming to an end.
I am using this as an analogy for the gargantuan goal I have to attain right now. I am setting up my new home, for just me and Sayang. After months of unpacking, purchasing, planning storage space for this studio I am currently living in, I just have the Lornie Road stretch left to complete this task that comes under various working titles: home care, A+S Studio Life, avalon recreates. After I have set up a fully functioning home that I can manage, I can focus on proper self-care, Sayang-care, and going back to cat rescue management work. For that last item, I have already started to shift and pivot my thoughts and actions towards it, talking to the volunteer-managers, mentally planning my personal re-training for the role and the sector, working on the vision ahead that I need to return to set, as the course a captain of a vessel ought to direct for their hardworking crew.
Back to MacRitchie and my new home, I use the cross-country analogy, because it does feel like a trail run, something equally if not more physically demanding due to chronic pain, fatigue, and depression. I have lived in this new place for almost four months, and still I have not fully achieved the goal, because my chronic illnesses and disability mean I am slower in everything I do around the house, needing plenty of rest in between, or simply idling while fighting fatigue and depression symptoms that just make it very hard to get up and get things done. Like how it is really hard for someone with depression to even get out of bed to do basic daily activities. I am slightly more functioning than that, but nowhere near able standards.
It often feels like I'm a workaholic trapped in a disabled body. In this case, maybe a cross-country runner that is being trapped. As a result I also have a to deal with guilt that I am unable to do things I have planned out for this trail run. I try to practise self-compassion, but that state of mind is on a pendulum, with the other side being self-blame. "You should be doing Tasks 1, 2, and 3," and "you need to give yourself a break." There will be people who believe I am just non-stop whining about something I am not doing, and should just spend the time and effort actually just doing it and shut up. Whether these haters' voices came from the past or present, it isn't something I can forget, especially when I know there still are people who are saying the same thing in different words, behind closed doors.
The problem with "giving myself a break" and talking about trying to practise self-compassion is that self-blame is my automatic setting, even though I have gotten better at dealing with it now; it is an ongoing process with a lot of obstacles to overcome. Yet I don't recall ever blaming myself as I ran long distances back in my teens. I wasn't the fastest; the highest ranking in my school that I had ever achieved for cross-country was being the fiftieth runner to finish, ranked out of the entire school from secondary one to four. Mandatory sporting event heats in that school, I usually didn't even qualify for the races I had to sign up for. But I didn't beat myself up much after such losses. I could score an A for my 2.4 kilometre runs, so I felt good enough, even if just barely. So if I can now put blinders on and stay focused on this Lornie Road home stretch of my current goal, stop blaming myself for being weak because I was slow or simply walking, I will eventually get there. And there would be lovely ice-cold Milo served free-flow from the Milo truck at the end of this run.