Letter 4: To someone who ran away
Dear C,
Once the helicopter left, I stopped being angry at you. Or just maybe paused…a little of it thought about growing back while I was writing this. When you ran away, you really left me in it!
Let me rewind, and replay the bit you missed when you ran away. When you quite literally left me – on my very first day on the job, no less – with a massive (do you remember HOW massive) highland cow. An escaped highland cow. Who was rampaging through people’s front lawns and eating their flowers. And one more time, for the deserter in the back row…was a full-size, full-f**king-horned, fully-escaped-into-suburbia, highland cow.
What you didn’t see, when you ran away, was Kirsty and I having the bright idea that maybe if we ran full speed (and yelling) right into it’s face, it would be so scared that it would see the error of it’s Houdini ways and jump right back over the fence it escaped over… but…
That didn’t happen. I’m not sure if Kirsty yelled, or I yelled, or it was a telepathic mind-meld yell, but at some crucial point of mutual understanding (understanding that the cow was definitely going to start running towards us) we broke our ranks and ran opposite directions.
Did I mention the kids in the play park? All huddled, screaming, at the top of the climbing frame? No? Well…they were there.
And a guy with an American accent and a lasso came out his house to tell us he grew up on a ranch and he’d lasso it for us. Did I tell him to get the f**k inside his house? I’m like 80% sure that happened, and 20% thinking that was also telepathy, because I don’t recall breathing any of this entire time.
It did get worse though. A police car arrived. And an ambulance. And a fire engine. And a news crew. And a helicopter.
That’s normal, right? For your first day on the job? To require the presence of EVERY emergency service and make the news too? Not if you’re not a prime minister or president…? Ok… good to know.
WHY did you run away?
And why is my turncoat husband making YOUR case right now? His words “I’m sorry, but sometimes running away is the viable and sensible thing to do.”
And now some mansplaining from him… “Sometimes, basically it comes down to asking is the threat something I can beat in a fight? And if the answer is no, run away”
He’s actually now singing (To the tune of the Corrs hit Runaway) “iiiiiiiiiii, iiiiii-eeeee-iiiii-iiii would run away from coo” [Since you’re English, coo = Scots for cow, but I digress]
Well it all came right in the end, the rangers arrived and they found a solution. The cow was soon recaptured. Bizarrely, despite a failure rarely paralleled in my life, I was congratulated on an epic first day. A few more escapees later, that started to make sense. Don’t tell anyone but zoos are really not that good at keeping all their animals in. They don’t want to be kept in.
After some years working with animals and many more with people, I can only conclude we are the ones who are most domesticated. Though our enclosures are invisible, and so form-fitting we don’t even know we’re feeling them, we are more constrained than any caged creature ever could be. Did you run away because your cage told you to? Or were you once in your life, truly wild in that moment, acting as only animals can?
I was wild then. Perhaps I’ve never been more so. Staring down that highland cow, crashing full-pelt towards her, yelling like thunder. Wild for one moment.
Mostly, I’ve been tame. We all have been. We tell ourselves otherwise, but our clothes are cages. Our phones. Our beauty standards and what it takes to maintain them. Our mortgages. Even our lawns, which demand our time, energy and investment in ridiculous quantities just because culture says “lawns are supposed to be like…” Marriages, jobs, even the things we choose to surround ourselves by because culture says we “need” them.
It’s one of the most problematic things about the business coaching industry. In one breath you’re told that if you’re just brave enough, you can create your own path, and in the other you’re told what that path should look like, how to walk it, and even what to want at the end of it! (Generic $10k months, anybody?) Most people I meet in the online business space don’t feel half as free as they thought they would. The attraction of freedom struggles to overcome the omnipresence of the cage.
That’s the lesson I took from C. Acting from fear is invariably running right back into the cage. A place where you don’t get the full story, and don’t get to fly by the seat of your pants (also crap the seat of your pants), and figure things out. Somewhere you don’t get to find out what you can do, when you’re brave.
When you miss out on the adventure, you don’t get to see your life flash before you, reflected in the eyes of a massive (in my case literal) cow, and figure out who you are and what you want.
Don’t run away, lovely. Don’t go back into corporate, or take contracts you don’t love, just to pay the bills. Don’t backtrack on your pivot and price increase because it might not work. Don’t avoid your fears and pains because they’re scary. Doing hard things stokes the fires of greatness in you. Freedom is an inside job.
Come here and believe in you. Stay strong in the reality where you can take on a full-size adventure of your choosing, with nothing but your bare hands and your voice, and figure it out. Learn to stand in your words and wildness, even when your version of a neighbourhood, screaming kids, police, ambulance, fire crew, news crew and helicopter and cow are all watching, waiting to see what you do. Do something big, and bold and beautiful. There’s only one you, and the world needs you 
Read Letter 5: A Letter to Someone Who Diminished Me
