FIGHT or FLIGHT

When it comes to fight or flight, I choose flight. Every time. I don’t know if it’s because I’m prone to anxiety, or because I was raised in a home where we avoided angry outbursts and confrontation, or if its just because I am constantly putting myself in situations that I end up needing to run away from. Whatever it is, that flight response is always there, in the back of my mind. The idea that I can just remove myself from the situation completely and that will fix everything. It happens, again and again and again. I didn’t feel like I could be an adequate missionary – so I left the MTC. I couldn’t stand being in Provo after my former fiancé told me, and I quote, “I really don’t want to marry you anymore” – so I bailed and went to work at camp in California for the summer. After two years of living in Phoenix – the first 16 months of which I spent trying to make a relationship work with the college boyfriend I moved there with and the final 8 months of which I spent trying to feel out where I “belonged” – I wake up one morning so anxious and stressed about where my life is heading that I go buy a storage unit and move all of my belongings into it and call my mom and tell her I am moving back to Utah. FLIGHT. I’m anxious, I’m unsettled, I don’t feel like I belong here, I don’t know WHERE I belong – FLY FLY FLY. Even just driving back to Utah, with Ruby riding shotgun, I feel like I can breathe again. This lasts for a time – I am living near my niece and nephews, I am back with my old friends, I know these roads and these mountains and WAIT THERE’S SUCH A SEASON AS AUTUMN?? and I feel like I’m home again. I am going to take my time finding another job, I am going to focus on my masters program and really “find myself.”

It’s 4 ½ months later, and the only responsibilities I’ve had (besides general personal hygiene and making sure my dog doesn’t die) are one online class at a time (and let’s be honest, if I only had to take one class at a time at BYU I wouldn’t have graduated on academic probation YA FEEL ME?) I haven’t worked, besides the occasional babysitting, and all the enlightenment and self-realization and abs of steel I thought I would’ve obtained during this short-term “life break” are non-existent (where ya at six-pack?). This is what I’ve learned instead: I can’t run from something and not expect it to catch up to me. Up and changing careers and moving states and chopping my hippie hair five inches isn’t going to make me automatically feel like I have my shit together. Just like ditching Provo for summer 2012 to heal my broken heart didn’t make coming back after three months any easier, thrown back into a world where I was no longer engaged, I was no longer getting everything I’d ever wanted, it was just me. It was in the following months that I had to deal with it, not in the summer I spent gone at camp. It was in my everyday life, going to class and working my on-campus job and going to church with everyone who knew us, being submerged back in the day-to-day and living, breathing, dealing, FIGHTING. Because the flight just postpones the time until you actually have to fight. Until you actually have to live in your real life and deal.

I don’t know if we ever really “find” ourselves. It doesn’t matter what stage of life we are in – I think we are always learning, always growing. Changing. Figuring it out. I think, if we are lucky enough, we learn to count our blessings and we learn to be comfortable in our own skin and we learn that it’s okay not to have it all “figured out.” At least that’s what I’m banking on.