Safety

I have always paid close attention to people and situations that feel safe. It’s my superpower. I am drawn to them. Safety, to me, is not always a person or a situation. Sometimes it’s a place. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling. I have spent a long time learning to tell the difference between what is safe and what is a band-aid for insecurity.

Imagine that you are lost at sea. The waves are powerful, and a storm is rolling in. You are freezing and exhausted. You see the light from a nearby lighthouse. Inside this lighthouse, a fire is roaring and someone is standing at the door waiting for you with blankets, new clothes, and a warm meal. When I picture myself in this setting, the sea is my emotions. I am lost in them and they are crashing into me, I can’t see a way out. For me, the lighthouse is my apartment. The person offering food and blankets varies. Most of the time it isn’t a person for me, it’s a feeling. My mom makes me feel safe. My grandpa made me feel safe. But those people aren’t here with me. So I have to find my own way, I have to get my own blankets. I have to cook my own food.

Sometimes this is scary. Sometimes this seems impossible. Sometimes I search for my hero in the lighthouse because it just doesn’t feel the same having to do it all by myself. Sometimes, I sit alone in my apartment, and the silence pierces my ears, and the feeling of being completely and utterly alone panics me. The more time I spend by myself the more I fall in love with my space. There are still days where the silence feels like it’s going to consume me and I wonder how much more of this I can take, but there are other days where I am laying on the floor in my bedroom and observing the space around me, acknowledging thoughts and emotions as they come, allowing myself to listen to what these thoughts and feelings are telling me, and letting them pass without judgments of myself, these moments help build a solid foundation for the life I am creating.

As a kid, your parents are the ones who keep you safe. Without getting into all the gory details, let’s just say mine did not. I have always paid close attention to people and situations that feel safe because the people who were supposed to keep me safe did not. I pay attention to people’s hands. I’m not sure what exactly it is about them. I feel like you can tell a lot about a person by their hands, it’s less about what they look like and more about the feelings they evoke as I study them. Call it a trauma response, witchcraft, intuition, another superpower, or whatever, but if your hands make me uneasy, you’re probably a garbage human. I have yet to be wrong about this.

The first time I really paid attention to what safety feels like was when I was twenty-one years old. It was the first time I tried going to therapy. I was feeling every emotion so intensely it was nearly crippling. It was like my whole body had been burned and the slightest touch was excruciating. This, I later learned, is also a superpower, one that I have since learned to wield. Back then, my therapist recommended EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Basically, we were going to go into my brain and figure out what memory was being triggered when I felt these things and reprocess it so that it wasn’t so crippling to feel. The first step in EMDR therapy is to create a place in your brain that is safe. Lots of triggers and unwanted memories come up in EMDR, and it can get very ugly, so it’s important to have a place you can call up in your mind to make you feel safe again.

My safe place was in the woods with a small waterfall. I could hear the water trickling. Moss-covered boulders created a nook where I kept my books and journals and handwritten letters from loved ones. The temperature was cool, the mist from the waterfall tickling my nose. It smelled like rain and freshly mowed grass. I would reach between the boulders for a book and open it to my favorite part. It didn’t matter which book, just the feeling of opening up a book and smelling the dusty pages, the feeling of reading my favorite chapter. In my mind, it is nighttime. When I look up to the sky I see the trees branching out, and above the trees the moon is full, illuminating the water and space around me. The stars are bright and clear. Even now, years later, I remember the feeling of this place. The sounds, the smell, the warm feeling in my arms, and the settling calm in my chest and stomach.

Today, my safe place has changed. It is no longer my oasis in the woods, though I still think of it often. I have been working hard to create a place in reality that feels safe, and I have chosen that place to be my apartment. This is the place I learned how to be alone again, to love myself, and trust myself to keep myself safe, fed, and alive. The place I learned the importance of securing my oxygen mask first. I had the freedom to pick this home on my own, I got to decorate it with all of my material things. This apartment is a representation of me. I know that I will move away one day. Maybe to an apartment across town or maybe to a new city altogether. The future is filled with unknown twists, so it is impossible to say what safety will look like for me later on, but I hope I always remember the safety I built here, the nights I spent crying and the days I spent longing for someone to rescue me from myself, how I pulled myself out of that dark and twisty place, and how I surprised myself with a resilience I didn’t know I had. I sit here now, memorizing the smell and the sounds, the way the light shines through the curtains, a beacon of hope.

I am safe. I am loved. I am more than enough. You are too.