A trip to a place I've never been before

When I don't write for a long time it usually means that I feel like shit and I want to die; or that I'm too busy having a great time!
This time it was a case of a really bad week. I found myself doing things with the same look of pointlessness that I had during my major depression months. 

In the meantime I kept following my schedule towards the 10K. Yesterday, for the first time, I ran for a whole 40 minutes. For the first time I did something I've never done before, I went to a place I've never been before. Next week it will be 50 minutes, then 60. It's extraordinary that you just keep going for 5 more minutes and you're at a new place. When I'm tired while I run I think "running really is putting one foot in front of the other"; and then I take another step, and another, and another...

My friend Papi C. is suffering from depression and I don't know how to help him.
Yesterday, I managed to tell him "you know, if you don't feel well, you can call me anytime. I'm here for you". It was so difficult because I meant every word, and I know that the most important thing for me when I could not do anything else but lay in bed feeling guilty because I was so helpless was that there where some loving people around me who persuaded me that they would be there for me no matter how shitty I look, even if I was just sitting there doing nothing and some of my few words where "there is not point...". These people told me "we are here for you" and they meant every single word.
What my schizoid personality and his panic of real relationships made me choke down was the simple words: "I love you, man...". I cannot help him get better, but these words, I owe to him.

This is a photo of me while I was in major depression:

I was sitting in the balcony under the sun doing nothing. And then I would try to go for a walk but I couldn't walk more that 10 minutes or so. I would go back home and do a little more of nothing. They would feed me and water me. My boyfriend at the time would come pick me up and take me for ice-cream. Sex was out of the question.
I started getting educated on the best ways to kill myself. I don't want to kill myself anymore, but when I hear people joking about killing themselves saying:  "I'm going to fall on the metro rails", I'm thinking:
"Amateurs... that's just a 5% success rate..."

The idea

There's a thought that's been going through my mind for a long time.
I want to leave, I want to travel and see more of the world. I think I'm going to run while I'm doing that. I have no money and just a vague idea of a plan. This is my way of -hopefully- running away from depression. I have little faith in the future and I don't know what else to do.

Running is my small victory, something I'm doing with my two legs, my lungs and my heart. I started because it's something you can do even if you have no-one in the world, and that's how I felt. I keep going because my great support group of friends and family will pat me on the back and ask me "How far did you go today?". A friend that has never been involved in any kind of physical exercise in his life asked me once: "Did we make it to the 10 minutes, yet?" and then I felt that I had to run. My sister will comment on every entry inspiring me to keep going. My coach from the Other Side of the World told me that I'm inspiring him; I run 6Ks and he's running Marathons. My brother will tell me that men suck and that I should keep going no matter what. My 34-year old single friend will recommend my blog to all the single 30+ year old friends who will mention anything about depression/running/biological clocks and kids. Papi C. will tell me "Let me know if you post anything new on your stupid blog", meaning he can't wait to read the new entry :)

The plan
Maybe I'll run with a "run-cuckoo-run" T-shirt on.
I don't want to "raise awareness". I want people who are depressed to tell their friends about it. I've made tons of excuses when I had to cancel meeting a friend because a few hours before I would start panicking about not feeling great when I'd meet him/her. Your family might be more understanding than you think. Your parents might feel you are blaming them in the beginning, but there's also a good chance they will support you, emotionally and even financially. Ask for help, because the more you're delaying it the harder it will be for you to recover. It took me 3 years to realize that I should do it.


The run
My first 10K race will be on Chios island, on September 2nd.
After that I'll take a boat to Turkey and according to my budget and time restrictions I will visit Cesme, Ayvalik and Izmir.

1st Chios run video and website:


1st Chios half-marathon





Wish me luck!

I cheated

I had some guests visiting me in Paradise, so I didn't follow my program as I should.
I did my 25' workout and I crossed a small gorge that leads to the beach.
After a three-day rest I was surprised how smoothly the 25' went.
Cheating is not so bad, sometimes. :)

 The entrance of the gorge

My new friend.

10K running schedule and some deep thinking.

This is the new schedule for the 10K.
It's already on my fridge, and today I'm running the 3x5 minutes.

Some of the thoughts that cross my mind when running:

It kind of hurts there/ the horror! /I just ate my hair/ ONLY 10'? it seemed like a decade.../ damn, I'm sweating like a pig... goodbye cellulite!/  I can see the sea!/ I'm going to be alone forever/ did I just ran 4K?/ this shepherd's looking at me, pretend you're looking at your phone/ are all pop songs about casual sex these days?/  kalashnikov!kalashnikov! / are all these gold-buyer shops that pop out everywhere in Europe a new attempt of primitive accumulation of capital? Am I the only one who sees that? / I hope these dogs are tied up/ I'm hungry/ I'm thirsty/ I hate carrying stuff around/ I don't want to run uphill/ will I ever run the Athens classic Marathon? there's a big part that's uphill, I hate hills...

A message for all my followers:
Just that you know, there are so many days that I want to give up. Every one of your kind words of support make me go out the door and run and make me go on in life. I am too shy to tell each one of you.
Thank you all :)

I promised

Yesterday, the fifth week of my 0-5K schedule was completed.
The last run was 25'. After it's been only 5 minutes I was already tired, so I was running at a really slow pace for the rest of my workout. I hope it was just one of the "bad days" because I'm feeling so shitty lately and so not motivated... My plan is not to think about the big picture, just wear my running shoes and get out of the house. Then, it's too late to go back and then you start running and theeen you wonder why the hell you're doing this to yourself. And THEN you feel like you went through another run and another day alive, and that's something, isn't it?

Tomorrow, I'm starting training for the 10K. I guess I'll be taking one day at a time (duh!).

These are the photos I promised I'd take, from the place I'm running this week. This purple color of the dirt road is all over my running shoes now :)

25

According to my running schedule I’m almost at the end of the 5^th week. I ran for 25’ today, and the absence of my running partner and my 3 day break made my training much harder than I expected.

I was running on a dirt road at some village and I could see the sea and smell sage and raw figs in the air. I thought I should take some pictures next time.

After the first 6 minutes I started thinking, why am I doing this, what’s the point? I feel like shit, I’m not solving anything, I might get injured and not run anyway half a marathon, anyway... Some craws were flying above me as if they were waiting for me to fall.

After 20’ I think I got what they call “runner’s high” and I started running for the next five minutes as if my life depended on it, listening to “Kalashnikov” by Goran Bregovic.

and the sun beat down on my head while

a dragonfly admonished my flippancy

but a blue and yellow butterfly sat on my knee

 

 

The clock is ticking.

They say there is a biological clock ticking inside every woman.
The one that makes us look at children and go "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw...", the one that drives women crazy when they pass the age of 30 and makes them want to find the "right guy" to get married and have children.
I have a friend who has organized every little detail of her wedding, except for the groom. My friend is single.

Is there really a clock ticking inside of us?
It is true that there is a biological age limit for women when it comes to having children.

To me, though, it seems like there's a clock ticking inside of us not because we were born like that.  It is more like Hook's clock ticking inside the crocodile; we swallowed it by mistake.
Society makes us swallow this ticking clock of the "birth instinct" ever since we're little girls.

Historical records show that the idea of the "mother instinct" was introduced, and forced upon women, only after the western society was organized on a capitalistic basis. Women had to be turned into reproduction machines in order to produce working force, in a Europe that was in great need of working hands. Along came the ideas on "femininity", that are still so deep in our society's collective mentality that are taken for granted. Women had to be kind, weak, not talk much, be the silent mothers and wives that would take care of theirs husband and feel this unconventional motherly love the moment they set eyes on their new-born babies.
How many women suffer from guilt and postpartum depression just because they realize that this is not the case? A new mother that I know confessed that she started really loving her child after it became a few months old, when it had formed some kind of "personality" and a more real bond started developing.


At my previous job I would sometimes overhear conversations in the kitchen of colleagues talking about their children and husbands. One of them said that she would rather live alone and not with her husband, because although he is a really nice guy and a great dad, he is boring.

- Then, why did you get married?- asked her friend- I thought you wanted to have children.
- I wanted the children, I didn't want the husband!

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A ticking clock is setting the pace in our lives, both for men and women. The way our whole life is organized around the clock, although many times a useful social convention, is so unnatural that it took two centuries and a lot of violence to convert the peasant into the punctual worker.


Am I the Peter Pan that doesn't want to grow up? If so, why do so many people call in sick for work so that they can just spend a day at home, children don't like school and adults suffer from insomnia and stress? Do we all have issues or is it just not normal to live like that?

I was working at a call center where I had be at work, having turned on my computer and logged in the system and receiving my first call at 9:00am sharp. We had a total of a one hour break (bathroom breaks included) and sometimes we had to book them in advance for the whole week. A stopwatch would count our bathroom break, our lunch break, our cigarette break.

"Unlike Milton’s Adam, who, upon being expelled from the Garden of Eden, cheerfully set forth at the prospect of a life dedicated to work, the expropriated peasants and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage. More often they became beggars, vagabonds or criminals. A long process would be required to produce a new work-discipline. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the hatred for wage labor was so intense that many proletarians preferred to risk the gallows, rather than submitting to the new conditions of work."
Silvia Federici- The Caliban and the Witch



Tomorrow I'm setting my stopwatch at 20' and I'm running. This is the only clock that instead of stressing me it pushes me to move forward, to keep going. Maybe it's because I set it myself and every time the alarm goes off I feel like I won another battle; a battle against time, against fear and the things we're expected to do, and the things that people don't think we can do.



I was having a beer with a girlfriend.
"If you had to choose between having children and raising them alone (provided that you had the ability to do so) and having a partner for life, what would it be?"

I chose the partner, and so did she.