Learning to stay

On wanting to run versus running

The first time I ran away, I was four years old. The holes in the chain-link on top of the wall between our side yard and the neighbors' back yard provided plenty of space for my naked, tiny sausage toes and grubby-nailed fingers to shove in and scramble over. Then I sneaked across to the gate by the mulberry bush and out to the sidewalk.

I still hadn’t left the block, but I was around the corner from our front door, out of sight of our house, and it felt like another country. I don’t remember exactly why I was so bent on expatriating from my life that particular day but I remember the determination in my gut to do so, the feeling of refusal of all of (waves hand around vaguely) this.

Despite my determination, I never made it off the block, though. Just before my feet left the curb and hit the asphalt of the street, my mother came around the corner, way at the other end of the block, and screamed out all my names, insisting I better not head towards “naughty, old Alaska”, the four-lane street that I could see just another block away, rushing like a river.

The next time I ran was after I graduated from college, but by then I’d learned to exit without ever leaving a room so my determination to go couldn’t be thwarted, even by me. I drank and got high and ate and lied and hid and fucked. Even without the benefit of a chemical vehicle to carry me, sometimes I just climbed right out the top of my own head and drove away from everything.

It’s amazing, the things you can accomplish, the good girl boxes you can tick off, while simultaneously exiting the scene. Not even stopping to rubberneck the crash site. Just going. By all accounts, even my own at the time, I got all the integrity gold stars. But if integrity is related to wholeness, a practice of bringing the entirety of yourself forward to authentically and honestly live your life, how much integrity can there be in a life lived more than half gone?

By the time I moved out West after graduating college, my habitual tendency to exit had become so automatic and unconscious, I didn’t even realize I was running. And, truth be told, my running did look responsible and measured enough that it’s maybe understandable I was fooled. I’d arranged a year-long internship that provided me with housing, a job, and health insurance– an impressive getaway car– but the underlying emotion of my choice, the frantic escape of it all, was evidenced in the way I moved 3,000+ miles away from home without ever looking at a single picture of where I was moving because I didn’t care what was there, ultimately. I only cared that it was as far away from my family and everyone I had ever known as I could manage without leaving the contiguous United States.

That was thirty years ago now, and I’ve been learning to stay ever since.

First, I started with slowly but surely learning not to leave my body during sex. This required slowly but surely stopping having sex with people I needed to run from. Then I started noticing my own exit anytime big emotions swamped me. I was years away from being able to stop myself, or even wanting to half the time, but I started witnessing how four-year-old inside me could just be up, over the fence, and off the block before I’d even noticed she was gone. Damn, she was fast. Meanwhile, current me was anywhere from looking up in the middle of a conversation at a social gathering and realizing I desperately didn’t want to be there, to stumbling home so drunk I couldn’t walk straight and then vomiting on my shoes.

I have never been suicidal, as in, having an actual plan, but I understand the impulse to not want to be here. It can be so excruciating, inexplicable, and lonely, just trying to figure out how to be alive in this world.

I thought that quitting drinking, smoking cigarettes, and getting high finally was the last step in this decades-long journey to lay down my escape artist hat for good. But then my sister-in-law died recently– careened off the road in a pick-up truck with two other people inside, and plunged into San Diego Bay.

I wasn’t a huge fan of my sister-in-law. She and my brother were in the midst of a contentious divorce and had been on the outs for years. So, I was shocked, and felt the kind of sorrow you feel when anyone dies dramatically and horribly, but it wasn’t personal. For me, anyway. For my brother and mom, though, both of whom had consistent and complex relationships with her for years and years, it is personal, and complicated. The whole situation, involving step-children, body repatriation (my sister-in-law was Kenyan and will be buried there), and memorial/burial services on two continents is also complicated. But when the arrangements and negotiations have to be done amidst a history of poor communication, abusive behavior, and resentment, it is the very definition of a shitshow.

I started running at four because I couldn’t process the things that were being done to me, but I kept running because I couldn’t process the chaos around me– the emotional storms, addiction, and violence. A tsunami like that doesn’t confine itself to any one person. It wipes out everyone in the vicinity. Running was the only sane response, and I don’t fault myself for it. But it’s a hard habit to break.

So, when the news about my sister-in-law came through via text from my brother I felt myself reflexively recoil. Run! Young me cried. These people will suck the life out of you! Run! But part of learning to stay is not letting myself be led around emotionally by a frantic four-year-old, and separating now from then. So, I just let my recoil exist without responding to it, even though it felt like being less than a dozen feet from a rattlesnake, and then I noticed something. My mom and brother were managing themselves really well, even in the face of the shitshow. They were being spontaneously self-reflective, boundaried, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent. They were communicating clearly, with care and gratitude.

Together, at 53 and 63 and 84 years old, we were growing and learning and showing up for each other. We were functioning like the family I’d always yearned for, not the family I used to have. There are emotional costs to staying fully present even with the family we are now, but I’ve got the resources to pay them gladly.

I still want to run, though. That tendency is too ingrained in me to maybe ever disappear entirely. But I’m realizing there’s a difference between wanting to run and actually running, and I can hold the wanting. Practicing my integrity actually requires holding it, listening to what four-year-old me needed (protection, attention), and giving it to her myself. Then, not only can I stay, but I want to.

We want to be here, it turns out. Glory, hallelujah.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash