Why you running?

Waking up early in the morning, I jump out of bed, put on my running shoes, and start warming up for my morning run. It’s around 5 a.m., and Debrezeit is still asleep. In that cold, dark morning, I start running through the slim roads. As I run, my intrusive thoughts begin popping up like annoying notifications.

The fear of being followed starts ringing in my ears, and as I indulge this idea, I begin hearing footsteps behind me. So I turn around, but there’s no one. I assume it was my own, so I continue, still feeling like I’m being followed.

Finally, I reach the midpoint of the jog: this bridge, where the shallow river gives life to a forest of bamboo, or as I call it, Hyena Forest. Although I have never come across a hyena, it is customary to hear their howl or bark or whatever they do. So I increase my speed and sprint through the bridge to avoid being someone else’s breakfast.

After the bridge, the streets are dark, with no streetlights. That’s when I start hearing the footsteps again, but now I am dead sure it isn’t my imagination, and I can’t take the time to turn around.

I push myself to the limit, trying to save myself from whatever is behind me. Whatever it is, it’s gaining ground, and I’m not sure if I’m going to make it. My lungs are giving up, and my legs are going numb. Breathing heavily, I remind myself of the strong, strong man I am. Shortly after, I stop running to meet my fate.

As a dark big shadow approached me, my body starts melting; as it appeared, I recognized the hoody it was wearing…

Before I finish the story, though, I want to share a few concepts I gathered from the 2025 final MentalWeg assembly. If you are new to MentalWeg, it is a safe space at the C. Johnson American Center where a group picks a topic in psychology and discusses it in the presence of a professional. This particular meet-up was part of the series “Navigating Through Emotions: Fear.”

During the discussion, multiple ideas were raised. It began by asking what emotions are to us and how we saw our emotions.

“Emotion is a state of a person that could be triggered by the environment or an idea.”

“ከኛ ለኛ ሚላክ መልእክት”

“It is an immediate response to an unexpected trigger.”

The idea triggers the emotion.

Environment → idea → emotion → action → behavior.

If emotion is that, then what’s the difference between anxiety and fear? How would you know you are anxious, or is it just fear? And how is anxiety any different from stress?

Yes, they are all different, and the attending psychologist, Dina S., helped us navigate them.

According to what was discussed:

Fear is a reaction to an unexpected change in our environment. It happens the instant we become aware of a consequence because of that change. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a continuous or prolonged ideation of something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s like an alarm you are waiting for to go off. Finally, stress can be seen as productive or unproductive. Focusing on productive stress, it becomes about what I can control and what I can’t, and doing the best I can today so hardship doesn’t swallow me whole.

In the story above, when do you think I started experiencing fear? When do you think I started experiencing anxiety? And when was I stressed? I want you to ask yourself the same so you could distinguish among these. And yea, the person who was behind me ended up being my younger brother.

But he was a zombie, and as soon as he reached the writer, he said, “wake up bro, you are late for breakfast.” Ouch, turnout I was sleeping and didn’t even wake up for a jog, and I didn’t even run.