Escape in Escaping: An Unintended Fresh Start

"Excellent fun 'til you get to know her - and they nicknamed her, 'The Bolter.'"

If you know me, you know I am well-acquainted with not breathing. I think I am ready, however, to try on the kind of freedom that comes from shedding what's harmful and toxic, instead of pushing through it in the name of mislabeled strength.

“By all accounts, she almost drowned

When she was six in frigid water

And I can confirm she made

A curious child, ever reviled

By everyone except her own father

With a quite bewitching face

Splendidly selfish, charmingly helpless

Excellent fun 'til you get to know her

Then she runs like it's a race

Behind her back, her best mates laughed

And they nicknamed her The Bolter”

“But as she was leaving

It felt like breathing

All her fuckin' lives

Flashed before her eyes

It feels like the time

She fell through the ice

Then came out alive”

The excerpts above come from a Taylor Swift song called, “The Bolter.” It’s one of those songs that the more I listen, the more I fall in love because it feels like some of my deepest parts written into a lyrical story. For me, it’s not about an ex-partner or romantic relationships. It’s a nomadic life of never settling down or fulling trusting the ground I walk on won’t give way like the ice that I have fallen through over and over.

I need at least two hands to list out the times my entire world got shaken and left me with nowhere to land. Which is hard to do when one of my hands is currently healing from a knife wound. But the most recent earthquake-inducing catastrophe is still unfolding in front of my eyes. The worst of the storm has passed – knock on wood – yet I will be cleaning up the aftermath for the next month physically, and surely much longer emotionally.

For as long as I can remember, I have loathed bugs – I mean greatest, most visceral fear possible. And the worst kind of irony is how much they love me. I am a magnet for their presence and bites. So, when my apartment became infested with small, barely visible creatures eating me alive, especially in my sleep, I think I was truly driven crazy. Not as in an insensitive turn-of-phrase, but in a very literal sense. I could barely sleep, I awoke each day with bites as well as scratches on my face from my own anxiety, and I started hallucinating bugs just as often as I found real ones on my skin.

When you add the prequel in too, where I stumbled into this apartment after escaping a different one in the same complex two years earlier after months of bees, centipedes, and a window falling into my kitchen. Well, it convinced me living on my own would only ever bring chaos and calamity. Plus, the more you find the walls closing in and crumbling around you, the more you wonder if you are the problem. The best books have maps in the front. The atlas to my trauma has a country of sketchy authority figures, a land of betrayal and lost friendships, a sea of medical procedures and ailments, and a mountain range of unsafe living conditions. But no matter how much anyone reassures me that each individual event was not my fault, it’s hard to not hold onto a little blame at each occurrence. And let me tell you – that weight piles up.

At one point in the midst of it, a friend asked if I felt safe. I started crying when I realized the only honest answer was that I don’t know what safe feels like. Even when I’m not in real, imminent danger, my mind sees a thousand pitfalls ready to open and swallow me whole.

When I was five years old, I did half-day kindergarten, so I would get home sooner than my siblings. Some days, my mom would take a nap on the couch next to me. I was perfectly safe by all measurable standards. But as she slept, I would sit perfectly still facing forward toward the TV not moving for any reason until she awoke. I cannot explain to you why small little Christina was already so filled to the brim with anxiety and paranoia. As the past two months have dragged along, though, the image of mini me has stuck in my brain as I became afraid to travel around my own space lest more bugs appear.

Even as I stayed with friends and family while searching for a new apartment, I would move with great caution out of concern for being an imposition. My least favorite thing to be is the girl with all the problems. I wallowed in Debbie Downerville for years as a teenager. When I finally emigrated, I vowed to never return. Additionally, I am known for always being fine. Steady, chill, drama-free, go-with-the-flow, pick your favorite adjective to describe the person who keeps her shit close to the vest.

Because when I had needs or showed my messy colors, people left. They ignored my texts or disappeared from my life entirely. Flowery words of friendship meant very little when I did not fit a mold or check a box. When the pathological accommodator known for burning herself out with everyone else’s needs asked for something in return, the butterfly effect must have caused a tsunami on the other side of the globe based on how people reacted.

It's not simply that I made myself smaller, it’s that I learned to become the exact balance between visible and wallflower. I made my presence necessary but never the most noticeable element in the room. I excelled in the background as someone people depend on to show up yet leave the limelight available for everyone else.

It’s a role that has left me privy to a lot of private conversations because others trust me to absorb everything around me without consequence. It also helped develop my keen intuition and empathy. I can sense what those around me need before they do. I understand hidden meanings, ulterior motives, and underlying reasons for the words and actions orbiting my sphere.

I also am extra sensitive to movement in the ground. Shifts in the floor below my feet. Literally and figuratively. If I stand too close to certain elevators, I feel them like a pulse through my body. And when something in my life is about to fall apart, I notice it’s off-kilter before it happens.

The problem? The misfortune of my existence seems like a forgone conclusion at this point. Especially after a year of ER visits, blood tests, stitches, space invaders, and the reopening of doors I thought I slammed shut. So, my mind and body do not know how to relax when the other shoe could drop from the raincloud above my head at any moment.

This blog is not all doom and gloom, though. Because a light emerged at the end of the tunnel two weeks ago when I signed a new lease for a place that finally feels like an intentional choice, not just an escape route. It meets all my core criteria for an ideal apartment. In fact, dare I say, it is already more of a home than I have known in the past three years.

Despite that, I am still intimately aware of how I once again had to run away from the flood threatening to drown me. At the first sign of trouble, every instinct in me says to bolt. I tried to fight that urge back in May when I decided to re-sign my previous lease. And again, in August when the bugs first emerged. But finally, at the beginning of October, I accepted that sometimes the only way to breathe is to leave.

If you know me, you know I am well-acquainted with not breathing adequately. In fact, for nearly two decades I did not do it properly, and it took two surgeries (one on my nose, one on my jaw) to fix it. I think I am ready, however, to try on the kind of freedom that comes from shedding what’s harmful and toxic, instead of pushing through it in the name of mislabeled strength.

I have yet another example to add to my growing list of coming out the other side alive – a little worse for the wear with a pretty new scar – but still standing, nonetheless. And I’m ready to make the most of what might be my ninth life by now.

“Ended with the slam of a door

But she's got the best stories

You can be sure

That as she was leaving

It felt like freedom”