Flight or flight?

I've started running.

For as long as I have been alive, I have wanted to be a runner, but I utterly lacked the stamina for it. I would start running, and then my body would freeze up, unable to figure out what it was doing. I would stall out, pull up short, walk the rest of the way. I even joined the track team in my small town and ended up doing anything but running, so flummoxed were my coaches by me.

When Libby and I wrote the pilot script that got us our initial attention as potential TV writers, I gave the protagonist of that show two talents I did not possess and wished I did: She could draw, and she could run. It felt like a pipe dream to ever believe I could become a girl who could run. Even when I took care of the "girl" part, the idea that running might follow seemed preposterous.

After about a year on HRT, however, some fundamental link between my brain and body hooked up again, and suddenly, running came as naturally to me as anything else. I have taken it slow, and I'm still far better on a treadmill than I am when I try running outside on unforgiving concrete. But at my best, I can run a 5K now, and I want to run a marathon before the decade is out. (I still can't draw, so my fictional friend has that over me.)

I really love running and exercise more generally. My brain works far better when it's coated in endorphins. I get far more done on the days when I can start by running a quick mile than on the days when I wake up late and can't. The primary reason I keep running is because I love it.

But some part of me is also running because I'm afraid. The world is getting hotter, angrier, scarier, and I want to be in a place where if I can't fight back, I can at least run far, far away. Survivors of childhood trauma like me often fall back on one of four responses that start with the letter F: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. I'm playing my odds and doing my best to corner the market on at least the first two.

I've started learning German.

Mostly, I am doing this for my own edification. I've always wanted to learn another language, and I come by German honestly. My biological grandparents immigrated to the US from Germany. (Well, they immigrated to Canada, then the US, but who's counting.) I only met them a few years before they died, and it was clear my grandmother's English was a pale copy of her German. I feel a lot of fraught feelings about my biological father and his family, for a whole bunch of reasons, but I loved getting to know my grandmother before she died. German lessons feel like a way to be connected to her on some cosmic level.

I also enjoy the process of learning a new language. In school, I so often enjoyed coming to understand how the English language worked the way it did. I was the weird child who loved diagramming sentences because I liked knowing all the component parts of the language I spoke and wrote in. Understanding how sentences fit together made me better able to manipulate them to my own ends. In learning German, I am finding my brain latching on to how a very similar but very different language handles questions of how to manipulate the component parts of sentences. The course I'm taking – via the app Babbel – started out with a bunch of statements one might find useful if they were taking a short trip to Berlin, but as it has gone along and I have learned more vocabulary, the ways these pieces snap together have become apparent to me in ways I find exciting. (Again, I am an enormous nerd.)

Undergirding all of this, too, is a drumbeat of fear. The more anti-trans rhetoric in the US tilts toward full-on bans of the medical care I need to live my life, the more I wonder about where else I might be able to call home. My biological father had his German citizenship, and therefore, I might be able to convince the German government I deserve mine if I do everything right. With every new word I learn, I'm tossing a future version of myself a lifeline, one that gets her and her family on a plane out of here.

I used to love writing.

I mean, I still do. There's nothing in the world I love more, and I feel tremendous satisfaction when something I'm working on starts to come together. There was a time, however, when writing was just a thing I did for fun and not the only way I know how to make money. When I was a kid, I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, writing and writing and writing, trying to turn the fictional worlds in my brain into something that would make sense on paper. It was just something I did for fun until it was suddenly something I did for pay.

Or was it ever "just" fun?

Looking back over my childhood, I have to admit that staying up until 3 in the morning working on writing projects as a 13-year-old was... not particularly typical behavior. Yes, I've talked to lots of people who were similarly bitten by the writing bug early and who devoted their every waking hour to working on one project or another, but I've talked to very few who turned "every waking hour" into an endurance test in quite the way I did. Writing kept me safe because it seemed productive. If I was writing, I could avoid the worst things around me, even if I was only doing so in my head.

I sometimes joke that I don't know if I love writing or if I just realized it was the single talent I possessed that stood the best chance of getting me the hell out of my hometown. Did I want to be a writer, or did I want to leave? Both were true. Does it matter which was more true?

I am someone who picks up and puts down hobbies. I've been a piano player, a wannabe baker, a trivia maven, and even a stand-up comedian (two times only). Most of the hobbies that stuck – writing, podcasting, even tabletop gaming – I managed to turn into "gigs" in one way or another, either making money off of them or using them to create a path to a world in which I might make money off of them.

To some extent, this is true of a lot of my fellow Millennials. The financial precarity that has greeted most of our adult lives and the rise of the internet has led to many of us jumping from thing to thing to thing, looking for something that might sustain us a little while longer. I have been lucky enough to find that through writing, but more than a few of my friends have simply kept jumping through hoops, exhausting themselves.

Yet I think in my case, at least, there's also an element of being a survivor at play. When you go through trauma as a child, anything you're at all good at or enjoy can start to look like a doorway, an opening in the walls that hold you back. I loved writing, but I loved a lot of things as a kid. Writing was the thing I was good enough at to ride all the way to an entirely new life. Nobody can love any one thing enough to make it their savior without coming to resent it just a little.

I'm fortunate in that the thing I turned into my door was something I did, at the end of the day, love doing. I love telling stories, and I love talking about them with other people, and I love getting to force you to read my many thoughts. Now that I am an adult, however, with hobbies and interests outside of my own survival, it's worth it to see if I can just learn German because I'm having fun doing it, not because I'm so scared of the future that I need a million escape routes planned out at all times.

A thing that has happened in the social media era is that we have created a world where my anxieties necessarily become your anxieties if I vomit them up in a platform where they will be sensationalized and stripped of all context. (For instance: Twitter.) I cannot tell you how many times I have read a despairing Twitter thread from someone convinced that the US and/or trans people are doomed (often both) and had to pull myself out of a spiral. In that sense, knowing that I have options if the worst happens helps, but it also means that when I read about, say, the far right gaining a foothold in Germany, my anxieties double back on me. The problem with treating everything you remotely enjoy as a possible doorway to a better future is that every door eventually shuts, some right in your face.

Instead, I've had to learn a new way to think about myself and my life. Our anxieties and our traumas pretend that they can tell us the future. They comfort us in this fashion, even if that comfort feels like barbed wire drawing tighter and tighter around the skin. After all, who doesn't want to know the future, even if learning what happens next hurts like hell? Yet the truth is that pessimism is just as naive as optimism, that fear and hope never offer the full picture, that reality will always find ways to surprise us.

The future is unknowable, even as we insist we know what's coming. The things we enjoy are meant to be enjoyed, on some level, right here in the present. To look at the world through the lens of trauma is to imagine every problem must be solved via a handful of very rigid responses. Yet there is plenty in life that resists my attempts to catastrophize. Now, when I run, I try to focus less on where I'm going or how quickly I'm getting there. Instead, I try to pay attention to the sound of my breath, the beat of my heart, the feel of my feet on the ground. The finish line is already there, waiting for me. I will get there eventually.

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Three things: I'm embracing the New Urbanism this week! If we're going to flee the state, let's make sure we do so in walkable urban environments!

• I love the City Nerd, a subdued nerdy white man who sits in a room and talks about urban design and why American cities so often stink. When I'm just trying to relax, I often pull up a bunch of his videos and bliss out. His recent video on the death of US passenger rail in the 20th century is a must, but I also liked when he visited my beloved Los Angeles and looked for remnants of our old streetcar system, a system that is slowly (too slowly!) being replicated by LA Metro. City Nerd! Let's hang out!
• What's the opposite of urban life? No, it's not rural life; it's prehistory. It's hard to have human settlements if there aren't any humans, right? To that end, I'm really loving Thomas Halliday's book Otherlands, which offers an evocative tour guide to past Earths, where long extinct animals roam and the landscapes look very different from our own. It's a vivid reminder that life on this planet is ever-changing, and we would do well to remember that we can make it change for the worse, rather than the better. Also, he shares a lot of cool facts about mammoths. (The last mammoths only died 4,500 years ago!)
• The Instagram algorithm has been insisting I try these Momofuku noodle packs for months now, and I finally bought some on a whim right before LA was to be hit by a hurricane. While they are overpriced, they are, alas, pretty great. I eat them so often for lunch now that they take me back to college dorm room ramen but, y'know, fancy for an adult working mother person.

This week's reading music: "Level Up" by Vienna Teng

Next time: Adults

The free edition of Episodes is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James, who covers whatever she feels like writing about, but if you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).