Groundless
Navigating the liminal space.
I’ve been described as “avoidant” by exes.
A person that leaves, especially when things get too intense.
I’ve put thousands of miles on my truck leaving. My life in various types of containers depending on my age: liquor boxes without lids in my early twenties, amazon boxes in my late twenties, the black totes with yellow lids in my mid-thirties.
I left home at 19 and have been looking for it ever since.
Many times over the years I’ve made home out of other people.
I thought the right person would help make me into who I wanted to be. It’s a thing culture says to do: find your better half.
Find your better half.
I can tell you that what I’ve been looking for all these years is myself. A missing piece I most certainly can’t find in someone else.
I’ve built entire lives around men, but ended up in contraptions that pretended to be home because no one could fill the void of what I was missing.
At this point in my life, as a mid-thirties woman, I feel the sense that I should have a home. A community, a partner, a group of people to spend weekends with, my roots growing into a place.
A home to care for, walls to paint and a garden to tend. Some source of stability in a world that feels topsy-turvy at best.
Last spring, in March 2023, I once again found myself with two-weeks left in a lease and my long term plans changed. Instead of traveling with a partner, which was the original plan, I ended things and was on my own with no place to go.
I left in a blizzard, driving away from Salt Lake City towards Gunnison, CO, where I had spent 14 years of my life. If I had a home at this point, the Gunnison valley was it.
I had a month in Colorado to figure my shit out. But I was mostly just trying to settle my nervous system, something I learned I needed to do after getting a PTSD diagnosis in 2021.
I’ve been living in a chronic state of fight, flight, or fawn for most of my adult life, made more complex by traumatic domestic events that unfolded in the last 4 years. Flight and fawn being my preferred methods of coping with “intensity.”
I always have an exit plan. I always feel like I’m being watched.
And,
It means I will make up for their bad behavior. I will placate until I can find a way out. Because if people aren’t safe, if my no hasn’t meant anything or my wellbeing is compromised because what I need isn’t what he wants, then I will spin the plates of pretend until I can slip away.
I will listen to the footsteps outside my bedroom door at 2am for a month and wonder if the worst thing is about to happen and white-knuckle it until I can make a break for it.
Or, I will stay and stay and stay even after I have a stack of reasons to leave.
As I went through my month in Colorado, I was being haunted by familiar panic, nightmares, and hyper vigilance. Facing the instability of not having a home, nothing felt safe.
But I was in a place I know well, with trails and rivers I had spent years of my life exploring. And so I went outside in the single digit spring temps and that glorious Colorado sun and attempted to acclimate. I tried to convince my body to stop running.
On one outing, the trill of familiar birds called overhead, the sound of rolling R’s high above.
I stopped in the slushy spring snow, searching the sky for the birds. Something in my brain alighted in hearing the sound, like an evolutionary alarm clock announcing the arrival of warmer days.
The trill sounded again, and again, and again as the birds called back and forth, and eventually I found the black specks of the flock in the sharp spring sky.
Sandhill cranes migrating to their stopover in the San Luis Valley.
These leggy, graceful birds travel upwards of 400 miles in one flight if the tailwind is right.1 They migrate between breeding grounds in the northern reaches of Canada and winter in Texas and Mexico, with stopovers in areas like the San Luis Valley in Colorado.2
All those miles between places and yet they were flying right over my head, right at that moment. Little me, flicked out into the world with no place to go. I sat on a bench half buried in snow and poked the bruise of my current life. All the decisions I made that lead to being so unmoored, once again.
In May I arrived in New York, never having set foot in the state until I was hauling all my earthly belongings in a 12’ Uhaul and my dog June in the backseat. I had found a thread leading east and pulled it gingerly until I landed in the Catskills.
I left the west and those sandhill cranes behind in search of home. I came out here looking for an external thing, a house with walls and a good foundation, a garden, and maybe quick access to a river.
What I got was many months of putting out the fire in my mind.
I would wake up in a panic at night and not know where I was. Three months of moving caught up with me in that liminal space between sleeping and awake. I’d lay there for a few blinks trying to orient myself to the room, a fuzzy recentering like spinning the focus ring on a camera.
Two clicks and I’d remember I was in New York. Two more clicks and I’d remember the town.
But for a few moments I would be floating groundlessly, thinking I was somewhere else.
Now that I’ve been in the same place for half a year, this feeling has eased into the normalcy of the same four walls everyday.
And yet,
I still feel stuck in a liminal space.
I set out last spring to finally (finally!) build a home for myself. To provide the sense of stability I lost years ago when leaving hard things became my normal.
But what I got was groundless. I know myself the least right now. A result of changing plans for the last few years.
As I was considering this time of my life it brought me back to those sandhill cranes. The way the rippling call way up in the sky anchored me on that spring day back in Colorado.
Those ancient birds spend a huge part of their lives in the sky, navigating thousands of miles between breeding and wintering grounds. Thousands of miles with nothing more than an internal compass guiding them through.
In order to get to where they’re going they have to remain in a state of groundlessness for a few hundred miles at a time, over and over.
I can’t help but feel buoyed by this. The idea that you have to let go of what you know in order to find where you’re going. To lose sight of the ground and be caught in a liminal space for a time.
And if you can trust that your internal compass is pointing in the right direction, that the thread you’re pulling on is leading to something better, then you can lose sight of the ground, of yourself, and be ok.
Here's to hoping anyways.