Wandering Aimlessly in the Bowels of Macy’s
I lost my shopping buddy. She walked off in search of her own clothing article and didn’t tell me where she was going. I had been busy at the cash register having the cashier look up what cargo pants they had in stock. Pretty boring stuff, to be sure.
I had been doing it too, truth be told. Moving away, not saying where I was going.
So maybe, like some days I recall from my youth, there was this learned pattern of tit for tat.
Maybe there was this internal repartee in my head between myself and the elders I ran away from so many times, or attempted to — to run away, by walking out a door when I was three, only to go wait on the street corner, waiting for someone friendly to come and hold my hand and take me across the street I was warned wouldn’t be safe to cross without help.
To run away to my room, and hide, and think about how I could have stopped any of the abuses these parents showed to each other, or to us children. And why then, did they also run away? Run away, move away from us children, leaving us in the care of only one, or the other, with no predictability?
To run away, without telling anyone, to convince my little sisters to come on a hike with me, when we were only ten and eight and seven, and set out to walk what I did not know then was 15 miles, to try to get to the only safe place, which was my grandparents’ house. Until someone found us all walking beside the busy highway and picked us up and gave us a ride the rest of the way.
To run away from the memory of watching my mother run away screaming, to her car parked in the backyard. Running, screaming “I will blow my brains out,” as we three little girls stood watching through the screen door. And my two little sisters crying like this day was the absolute end of the world — the last day of life, and me telling them everything would be okay, to just stop crying.
To run away, through drugs and alcohol and hitchhiking, running away, ‘til I ended up in jail, with parents who said “just leave her there”, until a boyfriend’s parents convinced them it would be okay if they could sign for me and bring me home.
To wait just a little longer, until I could figure out a way to run away by getting pregnant and getting kicked out of the house.
And then after that, to run away by saving up just enough money to physically leave the whole damned town behind, the whole region, hell, the whole state — all of it — all of the judgment and shaming, all of the “you are not good enough”, and “what did you do” to be worth anything at all?
So in that flash of not knowing where my friend had gone, that microsecond of feeling a loss, an abandonment that was so ancient and parts of it invisible — here was the spark of a panic attack — and I walked around in the bowels of Macy’s, aimlessly, with no direction or purpose, and ready to cry any second.
Not ready to run, but almost, and trying hard to face the terror of being brave enough to wait. Brave enough to wait for whatever might come next. And fighting an invisible demon that has lurked there in the dark for decades. At the same time fighting off the angel of responsibility telling me to do the “right” thing, the “good” thing. And me between the two of them, negotiating.
And then I got a text. “In a dressing room deep into the store.”
When is the best time to let someone know you are moving away from them?
That’s how my surprise panic attacks work. Like a stealthy headless invisible creature that sneaks up behind me and paralyzes me with venom. And the only way out is to run.
©2019 Susan Brearley
Thank you to Brené Brown for her wonderful books, that came into my life at precisely the right moment, and helped me find a deeper kind of courage to face and battle the demons. The battle continues.
Thanks too for this article by Estacious(Charles White) that inspired me and prompted me to write about my experience today. It could have gotten even worse for me. The pain when an adult lets down a child leaves long-lasting invisible scars.
“ We put up doors to protect ourselves from further harm. We don’t trust anyone because, in the past, we were let down by another human being. In my line of work, the majority of the time it’s an adult who let the child down.”
— Charles White
