staying gone

Why do we continually return to what feels safe and comfortable, even when it hurts?

“The hardest part of leaving isn’t actually the leaving,” My friend told me once, “It’s the staying gone.” Her words ring true now more than ever, as I stand on the precipice of something big, having jumped but terrified my wings won’t appear to catch me on the way down.

I think of the first time I heard that people fleeing intimate partner violence don’t leave once. They leave again, and again, and again.

So I wonder, then, if the fear isn’t as much in the leaving as it is in the staying gone. The nights not knowing how you’ll make ends meet, the laundry list of things that need to get done when you’re only one person, the agonizing hours of wondering if you made a mistake.

How do you stay gone?

I was listening to a podcast this morning specifically talking about the nervous system, and how nervous systems in female bodies are more attuned to assuming the role of prey. It’s generational, ancestral, a body memory from years gone by. It's our default position, our inclination towards fawn or freeze, and I know it well. I see it every time I look in the mirror. I have a lifetimes worth of experience being the prey.

I’ve spent the past few days, weeks really, in a heightened nervous system state. To the point where I can’t bring myself down, where I feel like I’m losing my grasp on reality.

This is the reason the ones who leave don’t stay gone. This feeling right here could kill you.

When I was a teenager, I remember folding myself up small, sitting in the back of my closet. I’d listen to poetry, and breathe. It’s a practice I’d long since forgotten, a ritual of days gone by, but I was reminded of it recently and moved aside my wedding dress to curl up behind the rows. Knees to chest, doors closed enveloping me in darkness.

When it gets really quiet, and dark, there I am

I am reminded of the practice I once learned from Andrea Gibson, who texts themselves things they want to remember from the day, little phrases and notes of encouragement and reminders to just keep going.

It is there I take a snapshot, my frame obscured by draping fabrics and under door lighting. And I write the words “Here is your reminder of what its like when it was hard. Because I promise its going to get better.”

I’m leaving breadcrumbs for myself, a trail out into the wilderness, visual reminders that I can and have held myself through the darkness before. Shaky breaths, one day at a time, begin again. This space that feels so new and wildly uncomfortable, its just because my nervous system doesn’t know yet. It doesn’t mean we’re unsafe.

Breathe in. Breathe out. See, you can do this part too.

I sit in closets, take photos of my own tear stained face just to hold eye contact with myself in the camera, witness the strength it took for me to leave and the courage it takes for me to stay gone.

I’ve been in liminal spaces before. I’ve done hard things before. And every time I thought it would kill me, it metamorphosized into new life. I’m starting to think I’m one of those creatures that has to be cracked in some way to stay alive. I breathe through my scars, synthesize light through my wounds.

It takes courage to leave. It takes courage to stay gone. It takes courage to dismantle the old thing and start over. And I am a woman of courage and grit