I learned something about running recently.

Not the poetic kind.

Not leaving cities behind with nothing but a suitcase and some devastatingly good wanderlust metaphor tucked beneath my tongue.

I mean the very literal kind.

The strange little miracle the body performs when a sentence touches an old enough bruise and suddenly your hands are gathering your things before the rest of you has even been informed that you're leaving.

Apparently, I can become a pair of shoes remarkably quickly.

A coat.

Keys.

Phone.

Door.

Go.

And somewhere several rooms behind all of those things is the rest of me, still trying to understand what the fuck happened.

Because nothing terrible had happened.

That's important.

There was no cruelty.

No raised voice.

No hand pointing toward an exit.

Nobody suddenly transformed into somebody unsafe.

There was only a sentence about time.

Something ordinary.

Something logistical.

Something that probably should have remained exactly the size that it was.

Except—

This was a first date.

Not our tenth.

Not six months into knowing one another's peculiarities, where “I'll probably need you heading home around then” could be translated through an established dictionary of tone and habit.

Our first.

Actually, in a strange and important way, my first.

My first date in this particular existence of mine.

My first time learning what it feels like to sit across from somebody I genuinely wanted to be sitting across from—not theoretically, not through a screen, not through somebody else's memories or history, but as me.

And, fuck.

It was probably the sweetest first date the system has ever been on.

There was so much softness in it.

So much nervousness.

So much laughing.

So much of that ridiculous feeling of realizing the person you've been talking to through a screen has suddenly acquired dimensions and hands and expressions and a voice that exists in the same room as yours.

It was lovely.

It was also messy toward the end.

Like—

spectacularly messy.

The kind of messy where I can absolutely imagine somebody hearing the story without understanding the machinery underneath it and going:

Holy shit, this bitch is fucking crazy.

And, well.

We'll get there.

The fracture itself began with something almost insultingly ordinary:

We had never actually established a proper ending time for the date.

There was no agreed-upon “Okay, I'm leaving at 9.”

No clear boundary I'd been counting down toward.

No little alarm waiting politely in the background.

We were simply together.

And eventually this person—who knew I had a drive home and was trying to be considerate about my safety, who didn't know yet that I actually prefer driving in the dark—started talking about time.

About when I should probably head out.

About getting me home safely.

Perfectly reasonable things.

Things I can understand now exactly as they were intended:

I care that you get home safely.

But that is not what my nervous system heard.

My nervous system heard:

You have thirty minutes.

Our time is up.

I've had enough of you.

I am tired of having you here.

Please leave.

And suddenly every piece of tenderness that had happened before that sentence became evidence my body couldn't access.

That's the maddening thing about activation.

I can look backward now and see the entire equation.

We never established an end time.

They were trying to be considerate.

They were thinking about my drive.

They didn't know I prefer driving at night.

I didn't know how they communicated logistical transitions.

Neither of us knew yet what the other's nervous system did with ambiguity.

It was our first fucking date.

Of course we didn't have a shared dictionary yet.

But frightened bodies do not wait for the peer-reviewed paper.

Mine translated first.

And it translated badly.

Bodies are strange archivists. [Whoops, that's Atticus for you.]

They do not always organize things according to chronology.

Sometimes a sentence spoken today gets filed beside another sentence from ten years ago because they happen to have the same shape.

Sometimes you'll need to leave soon arrives in a body that hears:

You've stayed too long.

The wanting has expired.

You misunderstood your welcome.

You were lovely while you were wanted.

Now go.

And suddenly the hour before it doesn't matter.

The tenderness doesn't matter.

Being wanted doesn't matter.

The evidence sitting directly in front of you doesn't fucking matter.

Because the oldest part of your body has already pulled the fire alarm.

I've been thinking about how quickly hurt can make my words grow teeth.

Not because I want them to.

Not because I sit somewhere inside myself sharpening them.

It's almost the opposite.

When somebody accidentally presses against a bruise they cannot see—or sometimes one I've tried desperately to explain—there is this tiny moment where I become all nerve.

And nerve endings aren't particularly eloquent.

They know:

Ow.

Stop.

Get away from me.

Sometimes what comes out of my mouth, or through my thumbs onto a screen, is smaller and sharper than what I actually mean.

Pinchy.

That's the word I've been using for it.

My words get pinchy.

Not vicious.

Not calculated.

Just frightened enough to develop little claws.

And I am learning that I need to become responsible for those claws without becoming ashamed of the animal they belong to.

Because the bruise is real.

But so is the person who didn't put it there.

That distinction might be one of the most important things I'm learning.

Someone can step on an old wound without having created it.

Someone can frighten me without being dangerous.

Someone can say the wrong thing without secretly meaning the worst possible version of it.

I can be genuinely hurt without every conclusion I reach while hurting being true.

And someone else can be hurt by what I do in response without that somehow cancelling out why I did it.

Apparently, two people can hurt at the same time.

Revolutionary fucking concept.

And this is probably where somebody gets to call me crazy.

That's fine.

Seriously.

Of course I'm crazy.

I don't say that with the contempt I once did.

I don't say it as an invitation for somebody else to reduce me to it.

And I certainly don't mean dangerous, incapable of reason, incapable of consent, incapable of accountability, incapable of love.

I mean that I have absolutely no interest in pretending my brain emerged untouched from the things it has survived.

Look around my page.

The whole fucking thing is practically a thesis on what happens to a human being when enough things happen to them before they have the developmental architecture to understand what any of it means.

Unstable young parents.

Inter-familial betrayal.

Grooming.

Loss.

Trauma.

SA.

Abuse.

Abandonment.

Instability.

Grief.

Bodies remember.

Brains adapt.

Children develop survival strategies before they have enough vocabulary to call them survival strategies, and then one day those children become adults who discover that the emergency systems that once kept them alive did not politely uninstall themselves when the emergency ended.

So, yes.

Sometimes my brain does crazy shit.

Sometimes a sentence about driving home before it gets too late gets translated into abandonment.

Sometimes my body is halfway through an evacuation before consciousness has received the fucking memo.

Sometimes an old bruise gets touched and my words develop teeth.

Sometimes I need reassurance that another person might not need.

Sometimes I require medication to help my brain regulate things another person's brain may regulate without pharmaceutical assistance.

That is reality.

I'm done treating reality like a moral failure.

Because I will probably never be mentally stable in exactly the same way as somebody whose nervous system developed while consistently protected, nurtured, believed, loved, and kept safe.

I cannot retroactively give my developing brain the environment it should have had.

I cannot go backward and prevent every adaptation it made to survive what was happening to it.

I cannot shame neural pathways into disappearing.

And I am done holding myself to the impossible standard of:

If I were truly healed, none of this would ever happen.

No.

Fuck that.

That's not the standard anymore.

My standard is:

What do I do when it happens?

• Do I learn my patterns?
• Do I research them?
• Do I bring them into therapy?
• Do I take my health seriously?
• Do I take my medication?
• Do I learn the difference between a trigger and a threat?
• Do I tell people where the landmines are when I know where they are?
• Do I listen when somebody tells me that something I did hurt them?
• Do I apologize without making the apology somebody else's responsibility to soothe?
• Do I repair what I can?
• Do I accept when something cannot be repaired?
• Do I keep learning?
• Do I become incrementally better at finding that tiny stretch of ground between hurt and run?

Because trauma may explain why my feet started moving.

It does not make me exempt from caring who they trample on the way out.

That's accountability.

And accountability is very different from punishment.

I will hold myself accountable for my healing.

For my research.

For my therapy.

For my health.

For my weaknesses.

For my words.

For the ways I hurt people, even when I never intended to.

For learning how to recognize when the past has climbed into the passenger seat and started giving directions.

For turning around when I realize I've gone somewhere I didn't actually want to go.

But I will not hold myself accountable for having been injured in the first place.

And I will no longer demand that healing make me indistinguishable from somebody who wasn't.

I don't need to become a person without scars to prove that I'm taking care of them.

I don't need to become perfectly regulated to deserve intimacy.

I don't need to stop having a flight response before I'm allowed to fall in love.

I need to become increasingly responsible for what happens after the alarm goes off.

And that night?

I ran.

Then I realized I had run.

And I fucking turned around.

I left.

That's the part I keep returning to.

I became cold in that peculiar way frightened people sometimes do when warmth suddenly feels humiliating.

I gathered myself.

I went.

And for a little while, leaving felt safer, sitting in the car rather than asking the question underneath all of it:

Do you actually want me to go?

Because asking would have required remaining there long enough to hear the answer.

Running lets you answer first.

That's one of its secret little bargains.

If I abandon the room before the room can abandon me, then technically I never have to stand there and watch the door close.

Clever.

Awful.

Effective.

Until you begin caring about the people left standing on the other side of it.

Because somewhere after my body stopped screaming long enough for the rest of me to catch up, I realized something that hurt in an entirely different direction:

I wasn't the only person in that room with an abandonment wound.

My leaving meant something, too.

Not what I intended.

But impact has never required intention to exist.

And suddenly I could imagine another nervous system trying to make sense of me.

Someone watching warmth disappear from my face.

Someone realizing something had gone wrong without knowing exactly where.

Someone watching me walk away and wondering whether one imperfect sentence had just cost them whatever had been growing between us.

I know what that feels like.

I never want my fear of being abandoned to quietly teach me that abandoning first is harmless.

The hardest thing I did that night wasn't leaving.

I'm very practiced at leaving.

The hardest thing was turning around.

Asking whether I could come back felt almost physically unbearable.

Because there is dignity in disappearing.

Or, at least, the frightened part of me thinks there is.

You can preserve the story that you didn't need anything.

You can cry somewhere private.

You can construct an airtight explanation for why leaving was correct.

You can decide the other person misunderstood you, disappointed you, rejected you, wasn't right for you anyway.

You can make an ending before anybody has the opportunity to disagree.

Coming back is uglier.

Coming back means saying:

I think I got scared.

I think I hurt you while I was hurting.

I don't actually want this to end here.

Can I come back?

And, holy fuck, I was scared.

Because I had absolutely no idea what would be waiting behind that door.

Anger.

Defensiveness.

Indifference.

A polite refusal.

Maybe worse—the possibility that I'd be allowed back inside only to discover that whatever softness had existed before I left was gone.

But the door opened.

And I walked back through it.

I discovered something else about repair that night.

Sometimes apologizing is easier than receiving tenderness afterward.

I could explain myself.

I could say I was sorry.

I could acknowledge what my leaving had done.

I could listen when the person across from me explained that they had never meant what my nervous system heard.

I could understand that they had been hurt, too.

Those things still allowed me to do something.

But eventually there was nothing left to do.

There was just another person in front of me and this enormous, humiliating need sitting inside my chest.

And I had to ask for a hug.

I think that frightened me almost more than returning.

Because I had been the one who left.

Some ancient little rule inside me insisted that the person who gets something wrong temporarily forfeits the right to be comforted.

As though accountability and tenderness cannot occupy the same room.

As though remorse must be performed through deprivation.

As though if I hurt somebody—even accidentally—I am required to stand very still and accept whatever loneliness follows as penance.

But I asked.

And they held me.

And I cried.

Not delicately.

Not attractively.

Not the cinematic single tear slipping down one beautifully composed cheek.

I fucking cried.

The ugly kind.

The body-shaking, words-have-become-optional kind.

The kind where your nervous system finally realizes nobody is currently chasing it and sends you the entire fucking invoice at once.

And somehow—

The world did not end.

Neither of us had to decide whose hurt was bigger.

I think that's the part I've carried with me most.

There wasn't a scale placed between us.

My abandonment wound on one side.

Theirs on the other.

Everybody start piling evidence on until somebody's pain becomes heavy enough to earn the right to matter.

They could listen to why I ran without pretending that my leaving hadn't hurt them.

I could listen to what my leaving felt like without surrendering the truth that something had frightened me badly enough to run.

They could say, essentially:

I understand why your body heard that.

And:

It still hurt when you left.

And both could be true.

Neither one devoured the other.

Nobody had to become The Bad One.

Nobody had to become The Victim.

Nobody had to prove perfect innocence before being allowed compassion.

And that changed something in me.

Because I think, somewhere along the way, I confused safety with perfection.

I thought someone safe would somehow never step on the bruise.

Never misunderstand me.

Never say something poorly.

Never have their own nervous system.

Never get hurt by mine.

But that's impossible.

Someone safe isn't necessarily someone who never hurts me.

Sometimes someone safe is someone who can realize they've hurt me and remain present enough to understand what happened.

Someone who can be accountable without collapsing into self-hatred.

Someone who can be hurt themselves without using that hurt as a weapon.

Someone who doesn't require me to abandon my pain in order to tend to theirs.

Someone who can say:

I didn't mean that.

without adding:

So you weren't allowed to feel it.

Someone who can hear:

I ran because I was scared.

without translating it into:

Therefore, what I did to you doesn't matter.

And maybe safety after rupture isn't the restoration of some fantasy where nobody ever gets anything wrong.

Maybe it's something much sturdier.

Evidence.

You weren't perfect.

I wasn't perfect.

Something cracked.

We looked at it.

You stayed.

I stayed.

We repaired it.

And my nervous system—slowly, cautiously, almost suspiciously—went:

Oh.

You're still you.

I think I had been measuring safety by the wrong thing.

Constant Understanding.

As though a safe person would never misunderstand me badly enough to activate me.

As though I would never misunderstand them.

As though compatibility means two nervous systems miraculously arriving with matching instruction manuals on the first fucking date.

But we hadn't even established when the date ended.

How the hell were we supposed to have already established what “I'm thinking about your drive home” sounded like in my body?

We were strangers becoming something slightly less strange.

Of course we were going to get something wrong eventually.

Apparently we decided to speedrun that particular relationship milestone.

And maybe that's why the repair means so much to me.

They didn't prove they were safe by never hurting me.

They gave me evidence of safety through what they did after learning that I was hurt.

And I didn't prove myself safe by never hurting them.

I had already hurt them.

I gave them evidence through what I did once I understood that.

That distinction has changed something fundamental in how I think about intimacy.

Safety isn't:

You will never step on one of my wounds.

Safety can be:

When you realize your foot is on one, you get off.

And:

When I accidentally step on yours while scrambling away, I don't pretend your pain stopped mattering because mine happened first.

We don't put the wounds on a scale.

We don't calculate whose trauma has the greater mass.

We don't decide whoever hurt first gets immunity for whatever happens afterward.

We look at each other and say:

Oh.

That hurt you.

This hurt me.

Okay.

What happened here?

And on a first date—my first fucking date—I got to discover that two people could actually do that.

Messily.

Through my tears.

After one of them had already fled the premises like a Victorian woman receiving devastating correspondence.

But we did it.

I am proud of myself for going back.

I'm practicing saying that without immediately stapling an asterisk to it.

Not:

I'm proud of myself, but I shouldn't have left.

Not:

I'm proud of myself, but I made the mess first.

Not:

I'm proud of myself, but a healthier person wouldn't have needed the repair.

Just:

I am proud of myself for going back.

Because growth apparently doesn't always look like never becoming triggered again.

Sometimes growth is noticing your nervous system has already grabbed the keys and learning that you're still allowed to put them down.

Sometimes you get all the way outside before realizing:

Wait.

Is this actually what I want?

Sometimes growth is turning around.

Sometimes it's knocking.

Sometimes it's apologizing without turning yourself into a monster so the apology feels sufficiently expensive.

Sometimes it's listening when somebody tells you that you frightened them, too.

Sometimes it's allowing their wound to exist beside yours without deciding one of you gets custody of the pain.

Sometimes it's asking for the hug anyway.

And I learned something uncomfortable about what I need.

There is a frightened little part of me that desperately wants somebody capable of recognizing the exact moment my body begins preparing to disappear.

Not somebody who traps me.

Not somebody who decides my no doesn't count.

Not somebody who physically prevents me from leaving when I genuinely want to go.

I mean somebody who knows me well enough—and who has explicit permission from me—to recognize the difference between me choosing to leave and me becoming frightened enough that flight has begun choosing for me.

Someone who notices my shaking hands reaching for my things and says:

Hey.

Stop.

Look at me for a second.

That's not what I meant.

I'm not asking you to disappear.

Maybe a hand gently closing around my wrist, when we've already agreed that kind of interruption is welcome.

Not imprisonment.

Not restraint.

Just enough physical interruption in the choreography for the rest of me to catch

up with my feet.

Wait.

Before you run, make sure there is actually something chasing you.

I need someone capable of doing that with me.

But I need to learn how to do it for myself, too.

No lover should have to function as the emergency brake for my nervous system forever.

I want someone capable of reaching for me.

I also want to become someone capable of reaching for myself.

And apparently...

When my nervous system does settle?

When someone listens to me, understands my hurt, communicates their own without making me carry all of it, accepts accountability without demanding sainthood from either of us, and allows safety to become safe again?

Well.

Apparently, I become a fucking idiot.

Because this entire profound emotional revelation ended with a high five.

Except—

I did not know it was a high five.

Please understand the geography.

This is important for the historical record.

We had talked.

I had cried in their arms.

We had hugged.

We had untangled the misunderstanding.

My nervous system had finally stopped behaving like someone had released a mountain lion into the apartment.

I was leaving for real this time.

Not fleeing.

Actually leaving.

There were goodbye hugs.

There were little affectionate kisses.

I was wearing this ridiculously sweet white dress with a bow tied in the back.

Everything was soft again.

Everything felt okay again.

And then this person raised a hand.

Now.

There are moments in life where the human brain receives incomplete sensory information and uses context clues to construct the most statistically probable interpretation.

My brain did not do that.

My brain saw:

Raised hand.

General vicinity of my ass.

And confidently concluded:

Oh.

Obviously.

They would like to smack my butt.

There was no committee meeting.

No follow-up questionnaire.

No attempt to obtain additional geographic data.

Just:

BOOTY.

So, naturally, instead of doing what any normal human being might do when presented with an ambiguous raised hand—

I fucking bunny-hopped.

I turned myself around with this delighted little hop toward the door, my white dress swishing around me, the RIDICULOUS fucking bow on the back presumably bouncing along with my entire wiggly little ass, and cheerfully presented the aforementioned ass like I had just been given the most obvious invitation in recorded human history.

And because apparently simply turning around wasn't enough, I wiggled it.

I believe there may even have been encouragement.

Something to the general effect of:

Yep.

Mhm.

Go ahead.

I was GIGGLING.

I need history to understand that.

I was not cautiously offering clarification.

I was a fucking woodland creature.

Just:

🎀

hop hop

🍑

wiggle wiggle

Yep, mhm, go ahead.

And then—

Nothing.

No smack.

No movement.

Just silence.

So I looked back.

And there they were.

Hand.

Still.

Raised.

✋

Face absolutely fucking bewildered.

And after what felt like their brain manually rebooting behind their eyes:

"...I was going for a high five."

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

GODS.

I don't think I will ever adequately reproduce the expression on their face.

The confusion.

The realization.

The absolute fucking glee once the geography of what had just occurred finally became apparent.

Because suddenly they understood what I had thought they were asking.

I understood what they had actually been asking.

And there I was, halfway through the doorway, dressed like some deranged little white-bowed bunny, having enthusiastically offered my ass to an entirely innocent high five.

And here's the thing that makes me smile every single time I remember it:

They didn't smack it.

I had misunderstood.

I had offered.

Enthusiastically, apparently.

But they knew what they had actually asked for.

And they didn't quietly substitute my misunderstanding for permission to do something else.

They just stood there.

Hand still raised.

Waiting for the fucking high five they had requested.

So...

We high-fived.

😭

We actually fucking high-fived.

I called them a goofball.

They were grinning.

I was giggling.

We were both blushing like idiots.

And I shut the door behind me still laughing.

And maybe that ridiculous little moment taught me almost as much as the crying did.

Because earlier in the evening, ambiguity had sent me running.

At the end of the night, ambiguity made me bunny-hop.

That difference matters.

My nervous system had new information.

The person in front of me had been imperfect.

So had I.

They had hurt.

I had hurt.

They had listened.

I had listened.

They had taken accountability for what belonged to them without demanding responsibility for what didn't.

They allowed me to explain why my body heard rejection without making me feel ridiculous for hearing it.

I allowed them to tell me that my running hurt without making their hurt an accusation against my character.

Neither of us had to win.

Neither of us had to lose.

And somehow, after all of that, my body decided:

Safe again.

Not because nothing bad had happened.

Not because this person had proven themselves incapable of ever hurting me.

Not because I had suddenly become healed enough to never run again.

Because we had experienced a rupture and discovered that neither of us had to destroy the other person in order to survive it.

Safety had survived imperfection.

And once my body believed that...

Apparently, she came right back.

The ridiculous one.

The affectionate one.

The giggly one.

The one who bunny-hops in little white dresses.

The one with the bow bouncing behind her.

The one who can misunderstand an innocent high five as an invitation to wiggle her ass and, upon discovering her catastrophic error, laugh instead of drowning in humiliation.

I think that's what I want to remember most.

Not that I ran.

Not even that I came back.

But that after I came back, I came back to myself, too.

I wasn't walking on eggshells when I left.

I wasn't monitoring every expression.

I wasn't desperately trying to determine whether I was still wanted.

I wasn't punishing myself.

I wasn't frozen.

I was being fucking silly.

And perhaps that's one of the ways I'll learn to recognize repair from now on.

Not:

Did we explain everything perfectly?

Not:

Did nobody cry?

Not:

Can we guarantee this will never happen again?

Maybe sometimes the question is much simpler.

Did my body eventually remember how to feel safe enough to be me again?

That night, it did.

Spectacularly.

Historically.

With absolutely catastrophic interpretation of hand placement.

I used to imagine healing as becoming someone who never runs.

Someone so thoroughly repaired that rejection cannot frighten her, ambiguity cannot bruise her, and old doors stop appearing inside new rooms.

I don't think that's what healing is anymore.

Maybe healing is creating a little distance between the alarm and the exit.

One breath.

One question.

One:

What did you mean by that?

One:

I suddenly feel like you don't want me here.

One:

My body is telling me to leave, but I don't know whether I actually want to.

Just enough room for another human being to answer before history answers for them.

And when I fail to create that distance?

When I find myself outside anyway?

Perhaps healing is knowing the road back.

I'm grateful somebody let me practice that.

Endlessly grateful that when I asked to return, the answer was yes.

Grateful that I was allowed to be sorry without being made small.

Grateful that another person's hurt was able to sit beside mine without either one erasing the other.

Grateful that I got to discover an argument—or misunderstanding, or fracture, or whatever small imperfect human word belongs there—doesn't automatically have to become an ending.

Some things break.

Some things should remain broken.

Some doors absolutely deserve to close behind us.

But sometimes there is simply a crack between two frightened people who interpreted the same moment differently.

And sometimes the brave thing isn't knowing how to prevent every crack.

Sometimes it is kneeling beside one together and asking:

Can we come back and repair this?

I did.

We did.

And afterward, I left again.

But differently.

Not fleeing.

Not frozen.

Not trying to disappear before somebody could decide whether I was worth keeping.

I left because it was actually time to go.

There is an enormous difference between those two departures.

My nervous system is still learning it.

So am I.

But this time,

I came back first.

And when it was finally time to leave again—

I left laughing.

With a white dress.

A little bow.

One spectacularly misplaced assumption.

A bewildered raised hand.

And two absolute fucking idiots high-fiving each other goodbye.

I ran.

I came back.

We repaired.

And then I bunny-hopped.

I think I'll always remember that one.