What I Wish I Could Tell the Version of Me Who’s Desperate to Run Away

A few quiet truths for the part of you that wants to disappear when it all feels too big.

Sometimes my first instinct is to run—to buy a plane ticket, start over, and completely vanish from my current reality.

I thought that made me avoidant, or afraid of doing the work.

But my therapist told me something I didn’t expect: “Every time you run, you come back to yourself a little more.”

It stopped me in my tracks. I’d always framed my desire to run as failure — proof that I couldn’t hold the weight of my life when it got too heavy.

But what if the running isn’t just escape? What if it’s a reset? A chance to remember who you are outside the noise, the expectations, the versions of you that other people hold onto when you’re trying to let them go?

I’m not saying you should disappear forever. I’m not saying you won’t have to face what you’re avoiding when you get back. But maybe the leaving is its own kind of reckoning. Maybe it’s how you come home to yourself—in a new city, on a long drive, in a quiet moment where no one knows your name.

Some of my fondest—and honestly, proudest—moments didn’t happen in a relationship, or a big career win, or at some milestone party. They happened in a car.

Just me and a road that went on for hours. Winding through Norway, tracing the edge of fjords so still they looked like mirrors. Or in Patagonia, cutting through empty stretches of land where the sky felt impossibly big.

There was nowhere to run inside that car. Nowhere to go except deeper into whatever thoughts showed up—the grief, the fear, the quiet hope that maybe I was more okay than I gave myself credit for.

I didn’t have anyone beside me to tell me how to feel or what to do next. I just had my own breath and the sound of music coming from the stereo. And somehow, sitting with myself in that intimate way, far from everything familiar, made me feel more like myself than I had in months.

I wish I could tell the version of me who’s desperate to run away: It’s okay if you do.

Just promise you’ll return—softer, clearer, closer to the truth of who you are. And if you can’t promise that yet, that’s okay, too.

Sometimes the running is the promise. Sometimes the leaving is the only way you remember there’s a you worth coming back to.

Wherever you go, may you find the quiet corners that remind you: you’re never really lost—you’re just on your way home.