Run run run

Every time I attempt to sit down and properly write a post about the why's and the what's and the how's of running, I get stumped.

But the other day, following an especially exhilarating nighttime tromp through my neighborhood park, the glow of distant streetlights and the moon's reflection off the lake guiding my way, I swore I could have kept running for miles.

There's something completely freeing about feeling the pavement under my feet, bounding and reconnecting and supporting and pushing as I gain momentum and almost free-fall into the darkness in front of me.

I feel like I'm cutting through the enveloping darkness, a cold wall of obstacle and fear and what if's as I push past the dull pain in my thighs, the gasping breaths in my chest, the blur of the broken lines on the road as I press on.

Beat.

Running is like a kind of therapy for the soul, and sometimes I will myself to run at a high speed so that I might break through the sound barrier into another realm, one of complete stillness and meditation.

It's a kind of mental separation, trying to pull apart the pain of the external from the calm of the internal. The faster I go, the more blindly I hurtle into the darkness, the quieter my mind becomes and the clearer I can think.

I distract my mind with a full awareness of my body, of my joints, of each muscle as I move forward, onward, forward, onward, right foot, left foot, right foot, left.

Breathe. In. Out. In. Out.

Out.

Catch my breath and bob my head to the beat of my own being learning its rhythm for the first time. In the darkness of a night run, there's no such thing as stopping, of stagnation, of rest.

At night, my mind comes alive so the body does also.

Running is not an escape. Running is an embrace. In the undeniably unique boom boom swish boom beat of each runner's pace, breath, pace, there is a release, an embrace, a release.

Pushing off the ground and touching down just to try again so that I might become a part of the night.

Running.

Beat.

Mind over matter, matter over mind

The last two weeks have been a little bit chaotic, to say the least. In the span of less than a month, I've learned so much about myself, what makes me tick and perhaps most importantly, that the sludge that had built up to prevent said ticking was a congealed result of...me. I had let my thoughts, and my perception of how others might interpret my thoughts, take over. Rather than being confident in my abilities and constructive about my shortcomings, I was slowly filling with doubt and unease, two things I have worked so hard to avoid.

But avoid no more. Doubt and unease are two things that make us all human, and by trying to suppress them, I was essentially trying to fill an always-bottomless cup. Denying the existence of the two is, basically, going against nature and really only fooling myself. As such, I've figured out, life is more about embracing those thoughts briefly and letting them go rather than ignoring them altogether.

Two weekends ago, I ran my first half marathon. Thirteen point one miles. I'd been training for it for a month and a half, and lo and behold, it couldn't have come at a better time. Riding the subway deeper into Queens early that Saturday was such a heartening experience, with other racers casting sideway grins at each other with their telltale orange tags flashing from their shoes. It was like a secret sign, a kind of signal we were all giving each other, an acknowledgment that we were all bracing for impact. Thirteen point one miles. I think, had I been in a different mindset, I would have been more doubtful of my ability to pull it off.

But in the end, it was mind over matter. My one goal (aside from finishing, of course) was to never stop running. And this was all fine until mile 10, when everyone around me started to slow down to a jog and then a walk. I felt a fleeting moment of discouragement. Well, if everyone else is giving themselves a break, why push myself so hard?

But as luck would have it, there came a sign. A young-ish guy, maybe around 30, jogged past me, clearly exhausted and panting, but with his feet bounding off the pavement. What energy! I was encouraged. Then I looked down and noticed that he was hitting the ground at an uneven rhythm. He had a prosthetic leg. Really? Really. How was I thinking of slowing down when this guy was just picking up speed? I sped up.

And I finished all 13.1 miles, no stopping, no walking, just pure adrenaline. And it felt so good, to know that my mind had overcome my body's weaknesses, that I had succeeded in my own race, at my own pace.

Then last week, I embarked on a very different personal journey, to upstate New York for a three day silent meditation retreat. No reading, writing, email, phones or talking. And it was glorious. One would think that a retreat like this would be all about the mind, but in fact, it was more about the body. Matter over mind. The focus was on the body, on being aware of breath and footsteps and small subtle movements that we take for granted. And by focusing in on the tangible, the intangible, the mind, started to clear.

In the silence of the retreat, I heard my own thoughts louder than I had ever imagined them to be. There was so much noise, so many stray thoughts, no focus. And no distractions. So I sat and I meditated and I learned about connecting my breath with my mind and stilling my thoughts not with force and suppression but with gentleness and calm. And I was soothed.

These past few weeks have been a little chaotic. But I wouldn't have had it any other way, else I wouldn't have learned to feel so deeply, hurt so openly, or think so freely. The thing about lessons, though, is that they should always be followed by change. So I'm working to change the patterns of my life to make way for an existence that fuses matter and mind, taking care to pay attention to both. It's the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end.

Stop this train

Home stretch

"The fact is, that to do anything in the world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can."

- Robert Cushing

Inspiration for this very last part of the semester - three stories to revise and you can stick a fork in me because I'll be DONE.

...diving right back in...

Beauty in the Breakdown

Things haven’t been the same ever since my car was broken into nearly three weeks ago. It took someone breaking in for me to break down and slowly build myself back up. In the last few weeks, I’ve gone from desperation to reflection to hope to pure bliss. It’s been a roller-coaster of events and emotions, but I’m so grateful for having circumstances be what they have been – in a weird way, losing so much really made me open my eyes to see not only what I already had, but also what I had already been lacking even before my material things were stolen.

And there was so much I hadn’t even noticed.

So much of this semester has been a test – of my patience, of my time-management abilities, of my own solid sense of self in the midst of so many moving, shifting pieces. If the Nike 10K was any indication, I jumped into this semester with all the hope and ambition in the world – I thought myself prepared for the long road ahead of me; stretched, prepped and charged. I had trained vigorously over the summer for what I saw as a warm-up for the main event: the LA Marathon in March (now moved to May!), and approached the night run as just another practice, an extended version of a familiar route.

“Don’t keel over, please,” I remember saying to my friend as we jumped up and down in the crowd prior to the official start of the race. He gave me a look, a silent “Child, please” before continuing to jump to keep warm. We joked about who would finish first, and how, if one of us did end up collapsing, it would selfishly cost the other his or her final time on account of having to step over the fallen runner.

Ominous words.

I was going into the race with hardly any sleep in the last week, having been on deadline for both my newsmagazine publication and my internship, moving out of my brother’s apartment and into my own, and acting as host to a friend from out of state. Looking back, a marathon – even a 6-mile marathon – was probably the last thing I should’ve been doing given my situation.

But still, I fought on.

Even when, during the middle of the race, I felt myself growing tired and my vision beginning to blur, I pushed on because I was convinced my fatigue was just a momentary phase for me to power through. My only real goal for the race was to never stop running – it became clear, though, that if I continued on at the rate I was going, I wouldn’t even get to the finish line.

So I walked.

But the power and the surge of the people around me motivated me to keep on – so after several steps of power walking, I would increase my pace to a trot and then a jog. There was conviction in my gait, or so I’d like to think. Then, as I rounded the corner for the final stretch down Figueroa toward the entrance of the Coliseum, I felt something click within me. I sprinted. The finish line was so close I could see the ribbon stretched taut across the street, the crowds of volunteers leaning from the sidewalk to congratulate runners, the lights from beyond the gate glaring into the faces of exhausted participants. I could feel the beat of the music from the Coliseum, moving in and out of sync with the rapid thumping in my chest. I felt a burst of energy.

And then everything went black.

Waking up sprawled on the ground with paramedics surrounding you is a pretty dang horrifying feeling. I couldn’t wrap my head around the situation for the longest time, and the words that kept spewing from my mouth weren’t mine. I couldn’t control the way my hands kept gesturing, or how I would wince and twist away from human touch. I didn’t know how to get the paramedics to understand that, and I didn’t have any feeling in my legs. Those moments – and I had no real idea how long I had been drifting in and out of consciousness – were some of the most terrifying of my life.

I was convinced I was going to die.

My logic was shot to pieces and I felt what can most closely be described as an out-of-body experience. It was as though I were already drifting away from the physical world and I was helpless to do anything to stop my mind from escaping from the situation completely. I just remember wishing I could wake up from the horrendous dream, and I squeezed my eyes tightly to make sure my wish came true. My mind began to drift.

But then something grounded me.

One of the paramedics began to ask me questions. Who are you? What’s your name? Where are you from? What did you eat today? What are you studying? Anything and everything to keep me awake, to keep my mind functioning as they lifted me onto a gurney and then into the ambulance. I caught blips of his questions and began to respond in half-hearted jest, trying to make light of the situation.

The sirens only registered half the time.

After spending the night at the hospital and seeing my parents wander timidly through the curtains into the room (separately, only one visitor at a time), I felt myself grow impatient. Not with the situation, the fact that I had to be bed-ridden for another 24 hours and constantly drink fluids (they claimed I had collapsed from extreme dehydration and exhaustion), but with myself, at having let myself get into such a situation as to make my parents worry after my health and well-being. In the dark, I lay awake and chided myself for putting myself in a position of helplessness and causing others worry. This isn’t how I had expected to start off my senior year.

Flash forward to three weeks ago, when I first opened my drivers’ side door to discover what I first assumed to be hail strewn across my seat, and it makes more sense why that break-in led to a mental breakdown later on that week. My first reaction when I glanced up to see my entire passenger-side window smashed in wasn’t panic, but a slowly creeping feeling of déjà vu. It was around 5 p.m., just after the awards ceremony for the dragon boat tournament at Lake Merced up in San Francisco. I had put the speeding ticket I got on the drive up out of my mind, and this just minimized the incident that much more.

In the moment, I felt helpless. It was as though a string of rather unpleasant (to put it lightly) events were following me. Throughout the course of the semester, I felt as though I had been working hard but had lost sight of the reasons why.

I had been focusing so much on establishing something with Bamboo Offshoot, but felt as though I were the only one putting in any effort. Apathy was eating away at my staff, and production had been going poorly despite my efforts to save it.

I hadn’t been able to maintain relationships and keep up with those near and dear to me because I’d been so busy with extracurriculars and school.

I was stuck in the middle of family drama that involved a close cousin being disowned from the family.

I hadn’t been starting up the blogs or freelancing I had aimed to do at the beginning of the semester.

I didn’t have a job secured.

I was behind in all of my class work, and was literally failing a course.

I’d let my parents down by getting myself into this situation and would have to find a way to pay them back for these damages. They would worry.

I had been lacking the purpose I initially began the semester with, and as much as I wanted to trivialize the fact that my window had been smashed and my things stolen, I just couldn’t. It was the last straw in a string of unfortunate events, and I wanted to just curl up in a ball and give up. All I saw were the negatives and the lack-ofs. It was hard to see the situation any other way.

But then I saw how everyone else was responding to the situation, and I knew I could only let myself be down and out for those few brief minutes. A friend’s wallet, phone, purse, ID, credit cards – had all been stolen from my backseat. I felt guilty, whether or not I had reason to feel that way, and I shifted my attention to that rather than focus on my own issues. What I had stolen was replaceable. Take a step back. No one was hurt, no reason to stress. Everything would work itself out. It might not seem like it in the moment, but the situation really wasn’t as bad as it seemed, in the grand scheme of things. I decided not to let myself get to emotionally invested. Everything would be okay.

Everything will be okay.

And everything was fine for those first few days after driving back from San Francisco. I was overwhelmed with the outpouring of concern from my teammates, friends and family, and I truly felt like I had needed something like this to happen to help ground me and put me back on the right track. I had been looking too much at the negatives to see their counterpart positives. The only problem was, I hadn’t let myself get all those emotions out of my head. There hadn’t been any catharsis, and my frustrations had simply been compartmentalized.

The Tuesday night following the Sunday break-in marked my first real emotional breakdown in a long time. In talking to a friend about the incident, I began to tear up, and my emotions and fears began to pour forth. I don’t think I ever expelled all those pent-up feelings, a whole semester’s worth, and it felt like such a huge relief to say everything that had been on my mind for far too long. I’ve always credited myself as being capable of taking on situations and being the comforter in times of distress – I shy away from being vulnerable, and that has translated into a lack of outward emotional reaction to anything big that had happened in the past semester, good or bad. It took a lot for me to admit that I wasn’t okay.

Everything’s a big deal, he said. Everything is a huge freaking deal.

Someone breaking into your car? Huge deal. React to it.

Getting accepted into Teach For America? Huge deal. React to it.

People not meeting deadlines and not respecting the publication? Huge deal. React to it.

Worried about how you’re failing one of your classes? Huge deal. React to it.

Having your parents tell you that your actions are selfish? Huge deal. React to it.

Too much of the semester had been spent convincing myself that things were fine, when really they probably could have been better. I had been running on empty for so long but had had too much pride or had been too buried under layers of denial to see it. I don’t cry enough. Or get angry enough. I downplay successes and gloss over disappointments. It’s not a healthy way to live.

But now, post-reflection and post-breakdown, things have started looking up in a very big way. I’ve taken on the editor-in-chief position for the Daily Trojan next semester, and I’m at once terrified and excited about the opportunity. It took a lot of thinking and reassessing to finally conclude that this was and is the right choice, but now that I’ve committed, there’s no turning back.

I heard back from Teach For America. My final interview is in just two weeks’ time and I’m anxiously preparing for the day-long process.

I met and spoke with Jeannie Kim, the executive editor over at Time Inc. just last Friday. I think I may have an internship for the summer.

So many things, so many circumstances. It’s been quite a trip and this is just the tip of the iceberg, really. I’ve never felt so blessed to have so many amazing people in my life – were it not for them, I doubt these past three weeks would have turned out quite the way they have.

Sometimes, you need to see the pieces of your life for what they are before you can fit a new window in their place. Break in, break down. Fill out, fill up.

It’s looking a lot clearer today.

The Perfect Time of Day

I write best when I really shouldn't be. At present, I'm mulling over what to write about for the light feature I have due in my journalism feature writing class tomorrow afternoon. With all the things that have been going on in life, you'd think that I'd be able to pull something together to write a semi-decent piece, but I can't focus because of the nagging deadlines inching toward the forefront of my thoughts.

There's the Bamboo Offshoot issue that needs to go to print within the next few hours, but which likely won't be put to bed until later on this week. Procrastination is a bizzle and I find myself really frustrated at my own inability to finish the task at hand. The problem was a breakdown in communication, the failure on my part to keep my writers, photographers and editors in check. I have a problem with delegating work, this much I admit, but this is ridiculous - our first issue of the school year, late to print. The quality of the product might be better, but at the cost of timeliness - eeps.

It's frustrating because I know that the publication has so much potential - the momentum of getting the ball rolling just keeps getting stopped with one road block after another and it worries me that the same issues keep coming up for each...issue. I told myself at the beginning of the year that this would be one of my priorities for the upcoming school year, but as it stands, I think I've put so much effort into this venture that it's affected everything else.

We're in a transitioning phase wherein we're moving out from under the protection of the Asian Pacific American Student Services and into becoming our own student organization. As a result, we need to fund ourselves through ad sales and grants and USG funding. Our funding proposal was rejected about a month ago on the grounds that the board didn't see how Bamboo would "contribute to the betterment of the USC campus."

They didn't see how USC's ONLY Asian Pacific American publication would benefit the campus.

They didn't understand that, with 25% of the campus being APA, it might be necessary to have a sounding board and resource for students who have no voice otherwise.

They didn't feel that issues unique to APAs are worth funding, but parties and concerts that have little real benefit to the campus are.

Seriously?

One of my friends told me to write about passion. What it means to be truly passionate about something and sacrifice sleep, time and money for something that might not initially seem worth it. This just might be it, because - not gonna lie - at this time of day, with deadline encroaching upon my other schoolwork and job applications, it's hard to be focused on that end goal of spreading APA awareness.

Right now, all I want to do is sleep. Is that so much to ask?

...sooooo emo. haha.

Greedy Much?

I think I'm being greedy. It's only the third day of class and already I can feel that I just might burn out this semester with all the activities and commitments and jobs I'm trying to juggle. The horrible part of the whole situation isn't the being busy, though. In actuality, the real harsh realization is that I might be overly busy for all the wrong reasons.

My friend brought up a really good point the other day. When I was trying to justify to him my taking on so many different responsibilities, he looked me straight in the eye and asked me if it might just be that I'm being selfish.

I was taken aback and it must have shown on my face because he quickly explained that he didn't mean it in a good or bad way, just as a statement of fact. Greediness is tied to "want" and "need," and in my case, I "want" to do too much and I "need" to stay busy, two facts that will probably lead to much unavoidable stress later on down the line. I think maybe I'm too caught up in the idea that I need to cram all of these things into my senior year, when really, I need to take a step back (maybe two) and drop a few commitments.

The only thing is, all of the things I decided to get involved in this year are so important to me...so is that being selfish? I'm grabbing for too much and maybe that's just wrong because I'll turn up with nothing. If these first three days have been any indication, I'm not going to have much time for myself - and is that in itself being selfish?

At this year's APASS student welcome, a lot of the incoming freshmen were asking for advice about time management and I almost wanted to laugh. I told them it was okay to say "no" to organizations and "no" to commitments and to make sure that their own sanity came first. To take care of themselves before helping others, just so that they would be able to contribute themselves 100% to the project at hand. I told them to prioritize and eliminate unnecessary stressors.

I need to take my own advice. Badly.

It's such a strange line to walk upon, balancing my needs with what I perceive to be other people's needs. When you know your loved ones and friends are depending on you, it's hard to turn your back just because you need to take care of YOU.

Ridiculous, self-inflicted busyness

Have you ever been so busy that you literally didn't even know where to begin to tackle your enormous pile of THINGS TO DO?

I'm at that point right now, and am obviously not helping myself by posting instead of working. But I'll consider this stress relief of sorts, har har.

Am in the midst of packing up to move-in for my senior year, and I just can't seem to finish. Am thinking about everything I'll need to do within the next 24 hours - start and finish the layout for an entire issue of a student publication, finish a story for my internship, show my friend around LA, interview several people, and settle into a new apartment.

Haven't had time to breathe in a while, but this busyness IS self induced, so don't feel as though I can really complain. Oy soy.

...this is so ridiculous that all I can do is sit here and eat mochi ice cream by the box. This can't be healthy.