Taking stock
And just like that, I have survived the first year of the rest of my life.
The academic year has finished. Just a couple more days, one little Hyrox race, and a few hours on the plane, and I will be delivered straight into the soft embrace of the Summer Holidays; I plan to spend them stuffing my eyesight with Polish greenery and my mouth with Polish pastries, running my legs out in the Tatra mountains and the Baltic seaside, cursing at the rain, marveling at my weird no-longer-children, driving manual, staring at the sky and not caring about anything, not even a little bit. I will miss my cats and my rower, but it’s ok—we’ll be reunited again in September.
It has been such a strange year: new city, new job, new life on my own. It felt at times like I was suspended in a vacuum, floating with nothing to hold on to—space and time both so much harder to comprehend when there are no familiar points of reference. People and things appeared and disappeared, and as they passed me by I would wonder whether they were my new normal or just a random blip—my guesses were rarely correct but I kept moving with the current without protest, not wishing to disrupt the Universe’s chaotic agenda with my longing for structure.
And eventually, after many bumps and blips, the structure did emerge; it spontaneously formed as in always does in any dynamic system, and I can now say that I have a first sketch of a life. I have favourite coffee shops and favourite running routes; I know how to avoid the worst traffic and the worst people; I have a routine that I love and people that I care about—in other words, I have things worth returning to after my holiday, and that makes me happy.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a walk in the park. I cried a lot more than I had in years, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of loneliness, sometimes just to keep Klops company as she was howling at the moon. Despite my best efforst, I gained some unwanted kilograms and some unwanted credit card debt—those pesky pests that always jump on your back the minute you’re even a little bit emotionally unstable. But that’s just the peaks and troughs of life, they come with the territory. All things considered, they are not the worst things that could happen when trying to build an entirely new life from scratch. And there were gains, too! I ran a half marathon PB, did my first Hyrox Pro race, rowed for 24 hours, taught 6 completely new courses, submitted a paper for publication, discovered Alan Watts, and worked through three out of the Twelve Steps—not to mention, kept writing my little weekly reports here, even when it felt really hard and pointless.
Because if you can’t do things that are hard and pointless, you might as well give up on life altogether!
Thank you, strange and difficult and marvelous year—I appreciate everything I have learnt but I’m also exhausted. Building foundations is not easy, there’s so much digging and at the end it looks like almost nothing has been achieved because you’re still at ground level; but that’s not true. I know the energy for construction will return: there will be time in September to buy new notebooks and coloured highliters and get excited about building up towards the sky, eating kale and beating marathon PBs again. But now, I need to rest.
But before I rest, for the final celebration of this academic year, I’ll be racing Hyrox this weekend again. Maybe I’m feeling a little bit less badass and a little bit more tired than last time, maybe I’m a little chonkier and a little more scared than usual, but in the end, racing is not the hard part: it’s the fun part.
This time, I’ll be racing to celebrate the fact that I can, because I’ve built a life where I get to do amazing things like that, with incredible, amazing people, under the bright shining sun, that also rises.
I’ll be racing because I’m alive.
I really liked this post. I really felt it.