running home.

I decided to run home.

Perhaps it was naive of me to think that the three weeks I stretched out of 2024 for a reset was enough for me to relieve myself from the feelings and unresolved tension of the past 18 months with work at the city that I have come to grow a bittersweet affliction towards. Toronto will always be the city that I fought the worst of my fears, and poured out the worst of my traumas. It was the city that cracked open the space of suffering that I had neglected myself to feel for the years that preceded my arrival.

I have come to realize, that I have perhaps accumulated enough battle scars in the city for me to make it a viable home. I work in an office that overlooks the building that I have shed tears over as an undergraduate student. The same building sits across from the space that I grew into my big feelings and wrestled with feelings of doubt and self-harm. The past 18 months at work has inflamed past traumas that I did not know existed, or I had once thought extinguished.

In the space I have been off, I am reminded of the big heart that the Father has granted me, and how much work I need to tame it. I love my job, and the people that surround it. I love my community and what it represents, my friends and safe network of people I have learnt to call home in the past decade spent in this city. Yet I realize I have grown tired, exhausted of the things that I carry. This isn’t the first time this has happened. In fact if I were to count, this would probably be the third. The lesson learnt this time, is the courage required for self-care and to put myself first. You sometimes have to put your oxygen mask first before you go and assist others.

This space is me putting my oxygen mask on first.

My time home has been a lot, and a lot more stimulating than I imagined it to be. The spaces of love that I was once familiar with feel like strange spaces that I no longer belong to. The estrangement has been haunting, but I am beyond grateful to be able to rekindle joy and love in a space that will always be a part of me. Coming home for Lunar New Year, for the first time in just under a decade has been the greatest blessing I could ever hope or imagine. I will continue to unpack all my feelings and thoughts in the coming weeks and months. My next trip home cannot come soon enough.