The Scared Kid I Never Stopped Being

On running from places, people, and schools, and finally realizing the thing I was running from was never outside me

Photo by Nathan Bingle on Unsplash

I was a scared kid. Always and forever.

For the longest time, I thought escaping certain people, certain things, would finally set me free. I forced my family to leave the places we lived. I forced us out of school. I walked away from friends, from people, from anything that felt even a little bit unsafe, all in the name of freedom. All because I believed that if I could just remove enough things from my life, I would finally feel okay.

I was wrong. I was always wrong.

None of those things, the places, the schools, the people, were ever what held me. I wasn’t bound by them. I thought I was, so I kept cutting them away, one by one, hoping that somewhere on the other side of all that leaving, I’d find the version of me that finally felt safe. But it was never about the physical world. It was never about who was around me or where I stood.

Photo by Joice Kelly on Unsplash

I was trapped in my own mind. Always and forever.

And that’s why escaping even from so many people, so many places, never actually did anything good. I could leave every room, every school, every friendship, and still wake up as the same scared kid. Still afraid of everything. Afraid of what if it goes wrong. Afraid of what if I can’t make it.

So I gave up before I even tried. I called it a boundary. I called it protecting my peace. But really, I was just leaving again because things felt hard, and hard things terrified the scared kid I still was underneath it all.

I’m not writing this because I’ve figured it all out. I’m writing it because I think I finally understand what I was running from, even if I don’t yet know how to stop running. And maybe that’s the first honest step: not escaping the feeling, but sitting with it long enough to see it clearly.

The scared kid is still in here. But at least now, I know it was never about the doors I walked out of. It was about the one I never learned how to walk through.