When Every Instinct Says Run

A dove sits quietly in her nest, tucked beneath this century-old porch.

She watches me as I write.

Bird calls of every kind fill the air.

It's a painfully beautiful spring morning.

The kind that is so full of color and oversaturated in life,

that it almost hurts to take it all in. 

Chickadees hop from branch to branch, quick and careless.

A small woodpecker works patiently at the moss-covered

pink dogwood tree that’s in full bloom out front.

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The dull rhythm pulls me from my thoughts. 

We can do everything within our control-

through mindfulness,

through self-awareness,

through practice.

All in an attempt to make sense of all that goes on inside and outside our minds, 

and still— 

we are, in many ways, passengers. 

For these past forty days, I’ve tried.

Applied.

Practiced.

Showed up.

I put my best foot forward and continued doing the damn thing. 

To be patient. 

To be understanding. 

To stay grounded.

And above all else… 

To just be kind. 

To myself. 

To him. 

To others.

But in all transparency and honesty... 

That can only take you so far. 

Even the most practiced among us would have struggled here.

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The woodpecker continues his patient work. 

A pleasant, cool morning breeze stirs the wind chimes dangling from the porch.

This threshold, this place of neither fully leaving nor fully staying, has forced us to sit with what we spent years trying to avoid.

The skeletons.

The exiled parts of ourselves. 

The things we never said out loud. 

Clarity came in waves. 

These aha moments that came faster than we could hold onto them.  

Overwhelming.

Painful but necessary. 

Old wounds reopening. 

Those unhealed inner children in us reacting. 

But not just the child within us.

But the preteen,

the rebellious teenager,

the highschool version of ourselves,

the uncertain young adult somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one. 

All of them speaking at once. 

All of them asking to finally be heard. 

To be seen... 

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The realization arrives slowly, like the morning light spreading across the front yard. 

Healing, it turns out, happens right in the middle of it all. 

In the moment you first feel yourself begin to pull away. 

In the tension.

In the discomfort.

In the chaos. 

In that almost imperceptible choice we make to stay present even when our very instinct in our bodies are screaming at us to run. 

Because when we are triggered,

we are rarely reacting from who we are in the now. 

We are reacting from who we once were. 

From the age we were when we first felt this similar emotional experience.

When we didn’t have the tools,

the language to put it into words, 

nor the safety to even understand it. 

And those reactions follow us. 

They repeat. 

They echo.

They become activated.

Until we can somehow find a way to meet, to see, and to comfort them differently.

Until we are able to sit with them long enough to recognize what they are asking for.

Exposure. 

Release. 

The light. 

Not in a clinical sense or even a metaphorical one alone, but in the willingness to remain present. 

Present with what feels excruciatingly unbearable for just long enough to teach the body that it no longer has to survive it the same way. 

So many of us end up existing inside this silent dance—

between anxious reaching

and avoidant retreat.  

Not just in relationships with others,

but in the relationships we have with ourselves

With our work.

With our environments.

With the lives we are trying to build. 

We expand.

We contract. 

We move closer.

We pull away. 

And sometimes, without even realizing it, we make our worlds so much smaller.

Not because we want to,

but because it feels safer, and easier that way. 

These past forty days have made something painfully clear to me:

The world is always shifting.

Always evolving.

Always rearranging itself beneath our feet. 

Which means we are continuously being asking to relearn something very simple:

How to stand.

How to take up space in a life that no longer looks the way it once did. 

A life that somehow feels familiar and entirely different at the same time.

And sometimes that’s okay. 

Even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

Because not every instinct to run is wisdom.

Sometimes, we are not escaping danger. 

We are running straight back into what we just left.

Into the same patterns.

The same old wounds.

The same familiar ache.

We are drawn to what feels like home…

Even when that home has teeth.

And for the first time in a long while,

we are not trying to escape it. 

We are choosing to sit with it. 

To understand it. 

To gently begin asking what belongs to us,

what no longer does,

and what never did. 

To learn, slowly, imperfectly, and sometimes painfully—

what it means to meet each other again,

to meet yourself again. 

Not as who we were, 

Not as who we thought we were, 

Not as who they said we were,

but as who we are becoming.