Finish Line

Almada Label top (similar)
Zara trousers (similar)
Dune London mules
Mango belt
Vintage Birks handbag (similar)
Celine sunglasses
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Modu Atelier earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Saint Luke’s Church – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I’ve been running, both literally and figuratively, for a very long time, without a finish line in sight. This isn’t a race. I’m running away. When I started, I knew what I was running from. But I couldn’t articulate where I wanted to go or how I defined escape, which meant that once I started running, I’ve never been able to figure out how and when I can stop.

On the surface, I was running from Winnipeg, a city where I felt constrained and unable to grow into the person I wanted to be. (There’s more to it than that, of course, but that isn’t the point today.) I’d been bucking against the conservative provincial capital and its narrow views on who young women should be since I started junior high. Back then, platitudes like bloom where you are planted weren’t yet in vogue. It wouldn’t have mattered. Those words wouldn’t have given me solace. There was only one moment in my adolescence, about three months after I met Ian, when I thought maybe I could stay in the city and be reasonably happy. Unwilling to settle for reasonably, I dismissed the thought as quickly as it came. I got away as soon as could, went as far as I could, and I’ve been running ever since.

The reasons we decided to come home five years ago are nuanced and complex. But at least part of the decision was influenced by the fact that I finally recognized that I couldn’t run forever. I needed to find the finish line so I could cross it… and finally move on to the next, hopefully slower and less fraught, phase of my life.

This isn’t a race. If it were, I would be the last runner, limping along but refusing to concede. I’m trying to get somewhere, but that destination, long undefined, is just starting to crystallize in my mind. Sometimes, you know where you’re going. Sometimes, you figure it out when you get there. In this case, it’s a little bit of both.

So what is the finish line? It isn’t a place. It’s a state of being where I’ve made peace with myself and my whole life, even the parts of it I wish I could erase or do over. When I started running, it made sense to try to physically get away because I placed a lot of blame on my birth city. If I’d grown up somewhere different, I told myself, the story wouldn’t have gone this way. I would have been stronger, felt more capable of standing up for myself, less obligated to be nice and polite and keep the peace at the expense of my own happiness. I’ll never know if any of that was true, because I’ll never grow up anywhere different. But I doubt it. Perfectionist tendencies, a desire to please others to prove my own worth, are a cross I would have borne anywhere.

“No one can make you feel inferior with our your consent.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt

So I ran away to discover a sense of self-worth in a place where I’d never felt worth less. And I managed that. But it was only the first step. Winnipeg was just a scapegoat, a fact that became clear as years passed. I needed to come back, to prove to myself that self-worth wasn’t conditional or dependent on geography. Which meant, and continues to mean, confronting some very uncomfortable past events in order to be able to move forward.

The finish line, I’ve realised, is a place where I understand, not just intellectually but in my heart (which is often slow to catch up) that no one dictates my past, present or future worth. A place where just being, exactly as I am in this moment, exactly as I was before and however I will become, is enough. I still don’t know exactly where it is, but I think I can see a glimmer of it in the distance now.

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