I’ve always liked to run away. If there’s one thing that had plagued my existence for the longest time is my flight tendencs when things seemed to be slipping away from the normalcy or comfort I was used to. When kitchen duty was handed over to me for the first time at the age of eight and then on my very first day, I went kind of missing, that’s when I knew that not all was right. Dad found me at the back of the house crying. He asked what’s wrong and I told him.
“I saw the plates, Dad. It was just so much. I decided to run away.”
My Dad didn’t think there was too much to it and at the end of the day, despite him being the cooler one, he’s still an African parent, so he attributed it to laziness and how I was expected to run a home someday and shouldn’t be shying away from doing the dishes. I still felt that it was not right, any of that. But I got up and did the dishes and it became my sole duty for another eight years.
But yeah, there were more occurrences. How I actively needed to breathe and count to ten when I faced a tough assignment or was in the test hall facing a question I don’t know. And that urge to just run away and leave everything, would plague me to no ends. I didn’t want to stay. I was pretty good at ignoring things till it faded to some form of nonexistence. So, I would just do that. Run away. Ignore it. And it will go away.
I can’t begin to enumerate the number of things that happened in my life that could have been handled better if I wasn’t such a flighty. If I instead chose to fight(not literally) what was causing me discomfort. Talk it out perhaps. But why fight, when you can just run. Reminds me of the first time a guy said he liked me or rather “loved” me and wanted us to go out. The thing is I was 12. He wrote it in a letter and the guy in question was my best friend of seven years. Flight mode was activated immediately. Lol.
I couldn’t breathe. I remember hyperventilating so hard as I clutched the letter in my hand and stared out the window of my classroom where I could still see him waiting for my reply. My skin prickled with heat and hurt, irritation and fear. And then I just heard it clearly in my head. You know what to do, girl. You better run. And I did run, literally and figuratively. I didn’t talk to my best friend for nearly an entire year afterwards because of course, I ran, stopped talking to him, and then when I realized that this was absurd and I could have talked things out, too much time had passed and it felt embarrassing running like that. So, I didn’t reach out at all. Took an intervention from both our elder sisters who were also best friends before we talked again.
I could tell you a hundred more instances where I chose to run instead of fighting and I’d still have more to spear. But I guess that ability to fight came as I matured. Not totally, but in a good amount. So when I saw this question by the Minimalist Community through the #transformationthursday initiative on what part of my human existence is in dire need of transformation and whether or not my minimalist practices were helping me with that, I just knew I had to talk about my flight tendencies.
Because a core principle of minimalism that I try to walk in as much as I can is mental decluttering. And what I realized from being a flighty too many times is the amount of loose ends I had in my personal life, academics and so on, as well as my social life with others. Too many unfinished businesses. Too many knots left untied. Too much clutter within myself and with people all over the place where I could just talk things out, get them smooth, seek closure, if there’s need for that, and then close that chapter. Or not.
It’s amazing how that part of my life has transformed within the years. And I see this as a constant work in progress for me because in all honesty, even with just how much I’ve grown and made the conscious decision to talk it out, (because let’s be real, why am I running? That opposition I face can’t beat me up, can it?) I still have that niggling feeling a few times to run if it gets too overwhelming. But then I love for me that every day, I’m transforming to be better. A work in progress, like I said. Not towards flight, but to fight.
Images are mine.
