Reminders for Humans is a series exploring truths of the natural world, and how we may use them to guide us back to what it means to be human.
Once while walking my dog around the neighborhood, I rounded a corner and saw a brown fluffy thing crouched above the storm drain. I stopped in my tracks. I watched it for a few seconds, confused and trying to understand what I was looking at. I have bad vision to begin with and it was dusk, so I wasn’t confident about whether I was looking at a living creature or a balled-up plastic grocery bag. But upon further reflection it was a bunny. It was tiny, probably still a baby, and it wasn’t moving. I wondered if it was injured. I left my dog a few feet away and walked closer, crouching down to get a better look. Only then did I wonder, what would I even do if it was injured? Call a vet? Get a shoebox?
Too late. I reached my hand out and gingerly touched the tawny fur of its back.
It was still warm and alive, and I was now close enough to see its eyes, which were huge and black and filled with terror. In that moment I realized my mistake. It wasn’t injured. It wasn’t dead. It was frozen in fear.
I abruptly stood up in horror of my ignorance, mumbled a desperate apology and got the fuck out of there so it could make a break for it. Fuck. I had definitely just traumatized that little guy for life.
I thought about that bunny for years. I still think of it and groan.
I think it feels especially repugnant because a rabbit, by nature and metaphor, is the epitome of prey. It’s one step above grass on the food chain, for God’s sake. Squirrels can climb trees. Birds fly away. Deer are bigger than most meat-eaters around them. Rabbits can’t fly, they can’t climb, they have no scary looking markings or bad smells or loud sounds to threaten an opponent. They don’t have a pack of others to run away with. They barely have claws. They’re small, fluffy, soft, and they taste really good.
Rabbits don’t have options when they sense danger. The option they have is freeze. And later, run.
I am physically safe.
I am physically safe. I am physically safe. I am physically safe. Seriously, okay? Relax. You’re safe. There’s no weapon. There’s no fire. There’s no… bear in this house. You’re being dramatic. You’re just anxious. This is anxiety!!! Just feel your feelings, Sarah, and then they’ll go away. Just let the anxiety be here with you. Just hold hands with it! Pretend it’s a scared little kid! Just hold it. This is just the PTSD again. What would my therapist say to me right now? What would all of my self-help books say? Maybe take some deep breaths. Yup - just breathe. Just tell your body it’s safe and that it’s not in danger. Definitely not in danger. Once again, body, I’m safe. You’re safe. I mean, we are safe. Okay? Listen to me – we are safe. Calm down. Breathe. BREATHE.
Pretty convincing argument. Just a really solid, helpful, accurate way to talk oneself down from one’s own panic attack.
The only problem with this logical monologue was that my body was not listening to it. In fact, I don’t think it even heard it. It was holding its hands over its ears and LALALAing in my face. It was like I was very diplomatically requesting through a megaphone that an oncoming hurricane please consider turning it down a notch.
Instead, I continued to lay there with about 14 blaring red alarms going off inside of me. I could feel the drum of my heart clearly and quickly in my chest, and hear its gushes of blood in my throat and ears. I listened intently for every noise, every breath, every movement, every pitch of snoring that punctured the silence. My muscles buzzed and tensed inward completely like a full-body corset. But louder than every sensation was the Formula One racetrack of thoughts I seemed to be standing in the middle of. They droned in concert, following each other around lap after lap.
I need to escape. I can’t do this. I have to leave. I need to escape. I have to leave. I need to escape.
Escape they droned like dieseled motors as I lay paralyzed. The dichotomy was laughable. Every cell in my body said run and yet here I was, frozen. Paralyzed in my best attempt to look casual and asleep, assessing and analyzing how it would be possible to escape this situation cleanly and without a trace at 3 AM. Without a car to drive, the nearest uber an hour away, and an almost-dead cell phone- which was currently playing very loud calming rain sounds into my ears.
I marinated in adrenaline soup and minutes felt like hours. I thoroughly considered running the few hundred miles home. I had the energy for it. My body felt like a two liter bottle of pepsi after someone had shoved mentos into and screwed the lid closed. It was not a matter of if it was going to explode, but a matter of when.
I thought about that storm drain rabbit. I thought about its huge eyes, its sleek fur and muscles, stiff and trembling like mine were now. I thought about how my body was freezing the same way, seemingly preparing me for danger.
Really? Danger? My logical brain stopped her monologue, put her hands on her hips and glared at me. You’re in actual danger?
For every ~ESCAPE~ that rang clearly like a bell inside of me, this logical woman objected; that seems a little dramatic. She pointed to a bulletin board of all of the other times I’d run away when maybe, probably, I didn’t need to. See? Overreacting. Why can’t you enjoy this experience, or at the very least, let it happen without spiraling into a nervous breakdown?
Of course I was already thinking about what a piece of shit I was. How could I not? She was right. I had wanted this to happen, didn’t I? Mostly, anyway. I’d wanted to be here. I said yes at each step. And now here I was, paralyzed with fear, for no reason at all.
Okay, maybe not for no reason at all. Sure, there were some concerns, some orange flags that had popped up in the last twenty-four hours. And there were the concerns before, too, but still.. regular. Nothing like the true crime podcasts I listened to. Nothing that raised my hackles. Those moments I had noticed were so small, I thought, so minuscule in the grand scheme of things. They probably wouldn’t bother any of your friends if this was them here, instead of you she said coldly, picking at her cuticles. And they certainly don’t constitute leaving on day 2 of 5. She had a point. This was a nice person, I thought over and over. This is a ridiculous reaction to spending time with a nice person. A person who would probably never do anything to physically hurt me.
She leveled with me. There is a reason for this panic she said. And it’s older than this moment.
But did that mean it was wrong?
Rabbits are well-suited to pick up on cues and changes and scents that other animals might tune out- they don’t have a choice. A threat to a rabbit may not be a threat to anyone else, but that doesn’t change a thing for the rabbit. A bird’s opinion about how everything is probably gonna be completely fine might lead the rabbit to tell that bird to, respectfully, fuck off.
The rabbit senses a threat – a fox, a falcon, a coyote, some lady walking her dog - and its body says in a thousand ways DANGER. It freezes exactly where it is. It assesses what it’s dealing with. To run when it doesn’t need to is, evolutionarily-speaking, just bad business. A body will conserve its energy until it has no other option but to expend it. It sinks down closer to the ground to avoid detection. It stills. It watches, it listens, to everything.
And while the rabbit is unmoving, its body has instinctively switched modes. It kicks its heartbeat and breathing up in speed; its pupils dilate for better vision; it stops all nonessential work like digestion and libido and hunger. The body slows bloodflow to other organs and redirects it to the brain, to the heart, to muscles; it speeds up the movement of oxygen to red blood cells; releases glucose to the bloodstream; and the muscles constrict themselves like a coil, ready to spring. The brain is alert and thoughts no longer wander. Cortisol acts like a lead foot that floors the gas pedal of the body’s stress response down.
The thump, thump, thump of its heartbeat drums in its ears, loud enough that it wonders whether the fox hears it, too. Wonders if this might be the last time it gets to hear its own heart beating.
When the rabbit freezes to avoid detection, its body is preparing it as efficiently as possible for the next step: to run. And just as soon as the rabbit has a way to escape, the levee breaks. Its paralyzing straightjacket becomes wild and hot effort. Prickly potential energy is exchanged for clean bolts of kinetic; it converts paralysis into movement; it uses the rush of hormones and chorus of runs to move as fast as it can. Towards escape. Towards safety. Towards the familiarity of its own distinct energy.
And after it does, it’s safe again.
This is the Stress Response Cycle. And despite logic, the cycle doesn’t end just because the stressor is gone, or because we’d like it to- but this is not part of our vernacular. The stress response ends when we end it, when we do what we are programmed to do - which is run away. Living in a soup of hormones that say you might die is not a healthy state of being- our bodies know this. Even if the fox walks away, completely ignorant to the rabbit, the rabbit has still entered a sequence of events it cannot stop through thoughts alone. Maybe this is why we see rabbits frantically sprinting all over the place when nothing is chasing them. Their bodies know they need to release the paralysis inside of them somehow. They also understand pepsi and mentos physics.
After a deeply stressful event, we release a tsunami of energy in the same way - we flee, we laugh, we cry. Expending your insides communicates back to the body "I’m escaping,” and there is a reason why we feel so much better after we have. When we have run to safety; after heaving sobs or belly laughs; and when we stop to catch our breath, this new expended state of being tells our body “We are safe now." The gas pedal can let up. The cycle slows to a stop.
This cycle is programmed into animals to keep us alive, and importantly - written in the rooms inside of us that are older than language. For rabbits, that’s all of them. For humans, these are the chunks of us that are most ancient. Our chunks that kept us alive before words existed.
Can you imagine a part of you more ancient than language? Can you imagine how inherently intelligent it would have to be to survive?
Dawn was a few hours away. At some point it occurred to me that I was out of options. I was not going to be able to pretend this panic wasn’t happening, or emerge from my insomnia fresh and new as Cool Girl, who was ready for another day of Just Being Cool. I snuck out of bed and onto the couch. I watched the neon numbers of the microwave clock tick along minute by minute. I googled bus routes with 5% battery. I felt like a failure. I felt like a coward. I felt like the worst piece of shit in the universe, and also, a dumb broke idiot for leaving a trip early after paying and planning for it. I told myself to just add this to the list of ridiculous things I’d done in relationships, a list that someday I could maybe make a joke out of. But mostly, a list I could evolve away from. A list I could someday finally bury.
I thought I’d done my work. I thought I’d healed the parts of me that kept me from getting too close to someone. I thought I’d already had enough distance from that old version of myself who runs, enough distance to look back with pity and grace, to chuckle at that silly little goose from my evolved castle. My evolved cool girl castle filled with cool girls and cool rabbits who are never scared. That was the dream.
But no matter the insults and shame I hurled at myself, what I couldn’t shake while watching the neon minutes pass was how sickeningly familiar this all felt. How many other hours of my life I’d spent completely terrified, trapped, and unable to run.
This very feeling of being, unmistakably, prey.
I resigned to running in the morning. Somehow. I would figure it out. This gave me the first taste of relief I’d felt all day. My muscles shivered, and I managed to nod off for a few hours before the sunrise.
I don’t want to be someone who runs. That statement stands in opposition of another truth: I did run. I do run. I have run, over and over again, from situations of varying levels of danger and discomfort. Running was part of my life for years - consistent, predictable, dependable.
The short story is that I did run that morning. The longer story is more confusing, complex, bizarre, exhausting, heavy. I’ve spun myself in mental circles trying to untangle it. I didn’t end up in physical harm or danger. I will never know if I was just being dramatic after all. And I still want to make this a better story: a story that doesn’t, quite frankly, suck.
But I was still right to run. I only know that for sure now; now that it’s in all in hindsight. Now that I know what I couldn’t have known in words and sentences and logic during those moments. I wish I could have trusted my instincts faster. I wish I hadn’t fought with them for eight sleepless hours.
What lesson do I learn from this? When do I know when I’m supposed to run, and how do I know I’m right? Do we ever know if we’re right? I’ve asked myself this over and over. I keep coming back to rabbits. And that is mostly because it’s easier to have some compassion for a small, fuzzy thing on a storm drain than it is for myself- a grown woman with logic and agency and a college degree.
I wonder if a rabbit has ever wondered why it was being such a piece of shit for running away all the time. If can’t you just relax? ever once crossed a rabbit’s mind. Couldn’t it just be normal? Couldn’t it be a cool rabbit? It’s just a fox.
It’s easy to have a theoretical conversation about whether or not running is right. Theory is a stone - smooth and uncomplicated and easy to hold. But in those moments of heightened panic, a rabbit doesn’t have the cool and preferable option of theory. Of logic. Of waiting around to see what happens, on the off chance it’s overreacting. It doesn’t have that kind of privilege. And theory is what I was imposing onto my nervous system as it was preparing for takeoff that night: of all of the control I believe to have over my life, that night I had none. I felt like prey because I was prey, or I could have been. My body knew there was no time to sit and wonder about it, even though that’s exactly what I did. There were the facts, there was the feeling in my body, and there was the truth that I refused to acknowledge.
Being the rabbit might not be so bad after all- it gets to know what some of us only feel for a few moments in our lives. Maybe that’s the takeaway. And maybe I like running because it was my only option for so long, just like those bunnies. If the alternative is safety, why run? If you have the tools and ability to protect yourself, why escape? You wouldn’t. That seems like a good takeaway, too.
But here is what I think. Running isn’t always bad. It isn’t always good. It’s both. It’s neither. It depends.
And running is the only medicine I’ve known for the poison of paralysis. It’s water when I’m parched. It’s survival.
I have to believe that there is an instinct in all of us that knows when danger may be close, whether we recognize it or not. And maybe it’s not always our very lives at stake, but also our aliveness.
And sometimes the force of fleeing is so distinct and specific that it’s mistakable for the very feeling of being alive. That insane hot deep sweet punching effort, the really truly honest labor inside of your lungs and heart- what happens when you finally allow yourself to run from something harmful: a partner, a hometown, a job, an idea of yourself. Even when you’re not positive that it is really harmful. There is still nothing like that feeling. To run towards something uncertain and new, but safer than where you came from, is singular- it’s impossible to fake, it’s impossible to replicate. To run back to yourself for safety is holy. It’s special. Running back and back into my own arms has soothed me more than anything else. My own arms are what I always want.
And here is what I wish I could go back and whisper into my panicked ear that night.
When you hear run like loud diesel engines in your cells, clearer than anything else and louder than logic, trust that something inside of you might know more than you can put into words. Trust that even if it doesn’t get it perfect, it might still be right.
Trust that whatever mess you make by running is still worth it.
Trust that the smooth stones of logic could never be as fluid and vulnerable as something alive.
Trust that running might just remind you of your right as a living creature to strain towards something different and better and safer.
Of feeling alive again in the shadow of nearly being extinguished.
So run, rabbit.
Run.
Thanks for reading Reminders for Humans during your one limited, beautiful life. I’m super glad you’re here.
xoxo
Sarah
A stunning read 💕