Earlier this year, my husband and I sought out to purchase a new treadmill. We waited until the one we wanted was on sale, but by the time we went to buy it, it had sold out. So we got a raincheck and it took a few months for the store to re-stock. It wasn’t until mid-pandemic that we finally brought the treadmill home and set it up in our basement.

Now to preface this, I’ve absolutely never enjoyed running. I was an avid soccer player in high school, which means I had to run, but I approached it like an unfortunate side-effect of training — I ran because I had to in order to get the ball. …

Suffice it to say I’ve had quite an eventful couple of years. Since 2018, I suffered a series of losses, each challenging on their own, but all arduous as a whole. I’ve been dealing with trauma and the chronic physical pain that often accompanies it.

I’ve tried meditating, exercising, stretching, talking, crying, and yelling the pain out of me. I’ve seen a psychotherapist specializing in grief, a psychotherapist specializing in somatic therapy, my medical doctor on multiple occasions, a chiropractor, a physiotherapist specializing in vertigo, a physiotherapist trained in dry needling, and a massage therapist.

And while a lot of the aforementioned therapies and approaches have helped, none of them singlehandedly “cured” me of my pain. And they didn’t erase my grief, either. They simply provided me with better tools for coping with it. …

At twenty-two, I moved into a tiny overpriced apartment in eastern Toronto with my then-boyfriend. It was my first time living with a significant other, and though we’d only been dating a few months, we’d known each other for years, so we took the plunge and signed a one-year lease.

We quickly settled into a routine, becoming regulars at the pub across the street, and visiting friends on the weekend. Our relationship wasn’t great, but it was still relatively new, so we rode that high for the first few months. …

Among friends, I’m often known as someone who gives good advice — the first person you go to for solutions, someone who researches for the fun of it. I both revere and resent this.

Sure, being able to help a friend fix a problem feels good. It implies that I have my life together, or at least significantly so in that particular realm. Procuring good advice also makes me feel useful when someone I care for is going through a crisis. While I can’t take their pain away, I can help them deal with it.

But being a good advice-giver comes with its many pitfalls. …

Striving for control, when boiled down, is no more than a fear-based coping mechanism for the chaos or uncertainty of life. Humans are hardwired to seek safety, and we crave a sense of predictability. Apart from meeting our basic physical needs, Maslow argued in 1943 that humans have a fundamental need to feel safe. We don’t like getting caught off-guard, and we struggle with tolerating ambiguity. We want to live in an environment we can trust and depend on.

The illusion of control is that it allows us to believe we can anticipate, and thus prepare for, what happens next. It also feeds us the notion that we can influence the course of our lives to our own advantage. It’s a false narrative rooted largely in privilege and sheer luck, but it’s one that many of us cling to nonetheless. …

Have you ever been asked how you prefer to learn? I remember my elementary school teachers talking about visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners, with the assumption being that each of us learns differently, and that by tailoring their approach to a student’s individual style, teachers could enhance retention efforts.

Limited to those three options, I identified most as being a visual learner. But truthfully, I’ve always learned best through reading books and consuming other people’s words.

For instance, in university, I hoarded quotes. There was a sticky notes app on my old MacBook that would often crash upon launching as it contained so many entries. I’d also collect pages upon pages of my own writing, artfully scribbled into lyrics or sentences I didn’t want to forget. I longed for pieces of prose that illuminated how I felt, and relied on these phrases to translate my inner self to the outer world. …

It’s always worse in the morning, right before you open your eyes. For a moment, caught between sleep and wakefulness, you forget. It’s a blissful state of ignorance, where all is right in the world — if only for a few seconds. Then, as soon as your eyes open, that drowsy amnesia starts to wane, and you get the sensation that something important was left behind.

Suddenly, everything comes flooding back, clinging to you like a weighted blanket. Your stomach drops as you remember details the night enabled you to escape. How you spent the evening crying yourself to sleep, tears spilling into your ears, sobs muffled by your pillowcase. How you felt physically ill from sadness, as though your heart could shatter into pieces at any moment. …

If I were to describe this point in my life, the exact moment where our paths intersected and momentarily overlapped, I’d tell you that he and I were caustic. We were similar in many ways, most of which unfavorable, yet we easily understood one another, and that was hard to come in our early twenties.

We’d met years earlier in our common hometown, having both attended a party celebrating the end of high school. It didn’t take long to discover we were both going to the same university in the fall — he in health sciences, me in social sciences.

“Actually, I got an entrance scholarship for my grade point average,” he announced, a little too proudly for my tastes. …