Today, the lake is a beautiful eggshell blue. At least, it was earlier this morning, viewed in passing while commuting to my boxing class.
Boxing is a newer ‘hobby’ of mine that I’ve been trying to implement more frequently in my routine life, especially as the aggressive physical activity is effective to quell my anxiety, and in general has been an easier form of cardio to complete than my usual runs. With running, I go through bouts of loving it, needing it, and hating it. Right now, I am in a place between hating and needing it. Yesterday I went on a run – 4 miles, the first run over a mile that I’ve gone on since October of 2024 – and it was an incredibly difficult experience for me both physically and mentally. Physically, because I had been stupid and not hydrated or ate beforehand and in recent months am not used to running longer distances. Mentally, because I knew I was out of shape, and the farther I ran away from my apartment, the more I wanted to give up and spend double the time walking back. Evidently, I do not have a winner’s mindset. It was introduced into my life back in late elementary school, when I was competitively swimming and was required to run for dryland and endurance exercises. This fed into middle and high school, when I switched sports to field hockey (mildly regrettably, though this is a whole other conversation) and that is obviously a sport that revolves around running. For the next 5 years of my life, running became both a daily yet dreaded obligation.
This changed during COVID, when suddenly school switched online and I was stuck at home like everyone else. Also around this time, I experienced by first (pseudo) breakup with someone who I was exceptionally emotionally dependent on as an insecure, validation-seeking teenager. These two events coinciding resulted in the feelings of restlessness of a young athlete suddenly being restricted from an active lifestyle, and those of a young girl craving an outlet for the horrible emotions carving up her insides. From then on out, I began to run as a religion: every day, awake at 5:30a.m. on the dot, out the door at 5:45, the following 60+ minutes running laps around an empty riverbed near my neighborhood. I treated this sacred routine as if I were its most devout disciple, yet I simultaneously offered myself zero grace. For the next year, running became both a lifeline and self harm.
Running is not the only activity in which I have developed a hyperfixation for over the course of my life thus far. I am, after all, an irrefutably selfish, obsessive, and volatile person. At my younger ages I loved video games, but developed some parasocial tendencies that reflect my obsessive side. I had my dad (who spoiled his only daughter) purchase every single Pokémon game from Gen IV on and would play them under my blankets in secret until I finished the game in one go, resulting in a current-day prescription of over -6 in both eyes. I also loved reading and drawing to the point of developing strong feelings about certain series and characters, and spending late into the night (unhealthily, for someone at that age) drawing and drawing and drawing. My mom thought this was the result of a creative mind and enrolled me in art classes that met for three hours a week. Frequently, I would elect to “double” my classes and spend 6 hours straight sketching or painting, forgetting to take breaks to stretch or eat. My mom also started me on piano lessons since around age 4. Whenever I would feel particularly sad, or frustrated, or anything extreme at all, I would play for hours on end. Most of the time, I would only play the same 5 or so measures of one piece for the whole duration of this time. My parents would get frustrated with the repeated soundtrack and make me stop. As I got a little older, whenever I read a book or watched a TV show I had to finish it all in one sitting (or two, if the TV show was long enough).
As if my obsessive mannerism towards my “hobbies” already didn’t sound unhealthy enough, it became worse one day when I began attending the middle-high school that I would eventually graduate from. Around this time, I promptly dropped almost all of the aforementioned activities and classes, and began devoting myself instead to schoolwork. In seventh grade, no less, as if there was much work to put in back then to begin with. I didn’t let myself read recreationally, or watch TV, or play video games; I quit both my piano and art lessons, I never arranged to hang out with friends outside of school, I had a teacher set the time limit password on my phone for certain apps. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why this radical switch happened; maybe it’s because my school environment was toxic, maybe it’s because I’m inherently hard on myself, maybe it’s because I’m a perfectionist. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above. Regardless of the cause, the effect was profound and, honestly, quite disastrous. For someone who was barely 13 to be hating themself that much – it’s not something that anyone should go through, at that age or (really) any other.
It’s also not something I’m fond of elaborating on, or quite frankly am capable of (I think bits of those 6 years have been blocked from my memory, so accurate recall is difficult). It is, however, an experience in time that has largely shaped who I am now; all the good, and all the bad. It’s also interesting for me to reflect on the stages of my life up until now, and especially right now, since.. recently, I actually have no desire to do anything. For someone who has spent 95% of her life being compulsive and addicted to whatever it was she could get her hands on, this current me is like an alien inhabiting my body. And once again, it’s due to reasons I can’t pinpoint or explain. Maybe academic burnout, maybe an existential crisis, maybe mental weakness, maybe self-pitying, maybe option D: all of the above. I tried reading The Bell Jar the other day, since it’s such a Plath classic and I thought internalising the famous fig quote in context might help me out of my slump. I could only get through around 70% of it before I had to stop. Not because it was bad or a hard read – it was beautiful, and insightful, and everything I could want in a book – but because it ended up nearly setting off a massive anxiety attack. So I stopped reading it.
All I can hope for is that this time is transient. That when I move to the UK in 5 months, the new life and novelty of it all will be enough to jumpstart my nervous system. That by reminding myself you can’t have it all every day, the pressure placed on me by me will lessen, and my lungs will once again have room to inflate and my chest to expand. For now, all that’s left is to keep sketching that easy movement seen in others instead, to keep getting lost in fictional worlds and in translation, and to keep chasing the sky to where it meets the water.
iris garden 