Root and Rise

The Day of Escape

It was the day of their escape with her children. For some reason, she was experiencing a sort of tunnel vision where she knew exactly what to do. She had not slept a wink the previous day. Her mind kept running through all the possible horrible outcomes that could happen. Her husband was going to work that day after almost five years of working from home, since COVID. She had planned to flee while he was at work.

That morning, she waited for his car to leave and then started packing up things for the kids first: their school supplies, clothes, and their favorite toys and belongings. She had to cut everything down to a minimum because they were moving to an apartment from a big house. They had to leave every unnecessary want behind, and focus only on the needs. Her children were so supportive and so logical about the whole thing. As adults, we do not give much credit to the younger generation for their mature, compassionate, and matter-of-fact attitude towards life. But that is a story for a different day, written from their point of view in a later chapter. For now, what she knows is that her children held her up, even when she did not even know she was falling.

Her body was running on a fuel of cortisol and adrenaline, since her brain was perceiving the threat of impending violence that her now ex-husband had threatened to do if she left. He had said that he would either kill her or commit suicide if she asked for a divorce. He also barred her from seeing a therapist. “Don’t you dare overanalyze things,” he said. Her heart was pounding as she went through the house packing things for the boys and herself. As she moved to the kitchen, she took three plates, three glasses, and three ladles. They were three people, yet she only took one-third of what was there and left two-thirds of the supplies for one man.

At the time, she did not know this, but now she knows that it was her lack of self-worth that believed everything belonged to him and that she only needed to take what she absolutely needed; nothing more. At that time, she believed that the calm she felt that morning was bravery. But no, it was pure chemistry and biology. Her body knew what she needed, and shut down everything that was not necessary. She did not feel hungry. She just went around the house packing and lifting things that she previously could not, all without any sleep the night before. Her body lent her everything it had. It was pure survival instinct, she later realized.

The science: Dissociation is not a sign of weakness. It is an ancient, adaptive response. When the threat is too great to process in real time, the brain temporarily severs the connection between experience and emotion. The insula, which maps internal body sensations, dampens its signal. The result is a sense of watching yourself from outside, of feeling numb, of not being fully present. It is the brain's way of saying, "I will let you feel this later. Right now, you need to move."

They packed everything into their sedan, it took in all two hours to pack up their lives and flee. As she placed the key in the ignition of her fifteen-year-old Honda Accord, the key broke into three pieces. The metal part of the key stayed in the ignition, while the two plastic parts of the fob; the head of the key, broke in her hands. One piece fell to the floor mat as her mouth let out a scared scream. She was stuck in the driveway, a car full of stuff, a broken key jammed in the ignition. She prayed, then she used a tweezer to pull the jammed metal part out of the ignition. She taped the plastic parts around the metal part, tried to push it carefully back into the ignition, and started the car. She looked at the clock. Two hours had passed since she first tried to start the car. She was getting late. She had to hurry.

Once the threat was gone, once they were driving, once they crossed the threshold into her new apartment, her sympathetic nervous system began to stand down. Her cortisol dropped. The parasympathetic system took over, often leading to exhaustion, illness, grief, or a flood of emotions she could not afford to feel during the crisis. Three days after she arrived, she could not get out of bed. Not because she was depressed, though that came later, but because her body had finally cashed the check it wrote on escape day. The adrenaline was gone, and in its place was a bone-deep exhaustion that felt like failure, like she was a loser. If this happened to you, if you were a machine of efficiency during the crisis and later a puddle of tears once you had a safe place to sleep, that is not regression. That is your body trusting the ground enough to finally fall apart on it.

The science: That scream in the car when her key broke in the ignition, was not weakness. It was a release of pent-up sympathetic energy. And then, immediately, her body recalibrated. The tweezer, the tape, the steady hands, that was the prefrontal cortex coming back online just enough to solve a problem. The brain does not function in all-or-nothing terms. Even in crisis, it shifts between survival mode and problem-solving mode, sometimes second by second. The brain can change. New neural pathways form, the scientific term for it is neuroplasticity. Trauma carves deep grooves, but you can build new roads. Every safe choice, every calm breath, every small act of self-trust lays down new circuitry in the brain. Here is the part that mattered the most: the brain that got her out is not the brain she would be stuck with forever. She can change.

Neuroplasticity is a fancy word for a simple, beautiful truth that your brain is a garden. Every time she chose safety after leaving, she was planting something. Every night she slept without interruption, she was watering it. The old pathways, the fear, the flinch, the dread, they were still there, worn deep like rusted bolts. But she would be building paved roads now. And one day, without noticing the exact moment it will happen, she will realize she has started to drive on smooth asphalt, instead of on a difficult terrain. And somewhere along that road, between the broken key and broken dreams, she appeared. Not as a ghost. Not as a wish. She was the hand that packed the three plates. She was the voice that said, “Start the car.”