Outrunning Storms

A story of survival, loss, and the slow unlearning of running away.

By: Shannon D.S.

I’ve been in therapy for three years this month. For most of that time, it’s felt like survival work. I’d show up with whatever fire I was putting out that week, and my therapist would ask how I was staying afloat. There was always another wave. Always another storm to ride out.

We never seemed to get underneath it all—because when you are constantly playing defense, strategy becomes a luxury.

Recently, my anxiety hit a tipping point. I once heard a comedian say depression is what happens when your anxiety needs a break, and I felt that in my core. The weight of constant crisis management pushed my nervous system into overdrive. And here’s the thing about the nervous system—when your brain senses a threat, fight-or-flight floods your system with stress hormones so you can react. But when the stress never lets up, your body can’t stay in high alert forever. Eventually, the nervous system pulls the emergency brake. This is the body saying: If I can’t fight it and I can’t outrun it, I’ll shut down to survive it.

That’s not a weakness. That’s biology. After years of crashing against the rocks of fight-or-flight, my body just… quit. The storm died down, but so did I. What was left was a heaviness that felt like concrete poured into my veins.

We tried medication. The first attempt made the water choppier, so choppy that we turned to hypnosis for relief. It worked for a while, letting my body release what it had been holding, like catching my breath after being dragged under. But the calm never lasted.

Then came a new prescription, and suddenly the fog I’d been lost in for years began to lift. I know many people say antidepressants put them in a fog, but for me it’s been the opposite. I’ve been in a fog for years. The medication lifted it. For the first time in what feels like forever, I can see clearly.

I realized I’ve been floating through life with my head down, noticing very little around me. Two straight years of fight-or-flight finally gave way to apathy. I was just going through the motions — one foot in front of the other, doing the bare minimum, yet still feeling like I was failing at even that. For the first time in a long time, I could see the horizon and what I saw was this: I have been living my life as if loss was an inevitable outcome, as if I’d always be left standing alone on the shoreline.

Like many, I have been rejected and hurt in my life, though I didn’t recognize it fully until therapy forced me to look at the pattern. I am constantly waiting for people to leave, to quietly slip out the back door of my life, to mentally check out, and when they do, it almost feels like a win: proof that I was right not to trust them in the first place. See? I knew you couldn’t handle this. I knew you wouldn’t stay.

It started in childhood, when something happened that left me desperate to escape. I couldn’t wait to get away from the people and the place that carried too much pain. High school was a fresh start. College, another. Rhode Island, five hours away. Later, Pittsburgh. Always chasing a new coastline, another storm to outrun. But if you never stay long enough to plant roots, eventually you have to ask yourself: What am I really running from?

Therapy gave me the language: preemptive abandonment. If I sense rejection or pain coming, I leave first or speed up the pending storm. Shut down first. Burn the bridge with lightning before someone else has the chance to drift away. There’s a strange comfort in being right. But the prize for being right isn’t really a prize. And eventually, you start to wonder if maybe you are the problem.

This pattern showed up in motherhood, too. I lived through four miscarriages, and each time I didn’t SIT with the loss. I left the hospital clutching a new plan, a new strategy, a way to keep it from happening again. Planning the redemption became my raft. If I could stay busy building the next pregnancy, I wouldn’t have to let the waves of grief pull me under.

Then came what I thought would be the ultimate redemption: the baby who stayed. Sienna. My miracle after the storm. But the joy I expected left the room with the words, “I’m sorry… your daughter has Down syndrome.” Instead of letting myself grieve the life I thought I was getting, I did what I always do — I built a boat and rowed straight into fixing, controlling, managing.

Running from pain, just like I always had.

But when you run from pain instead of facing it, it doesn’t disappear. It just builds like weather offshore, waiting.

With my kids, I repeat like a prayer: There is nothing you could do that would ever make me stop loving you. I want them to hear it until it’s written on their bones. Because deep down, I never believed it for myself.

Even in my marriage, the shields have been there. Sixteen years is a long time to stand beside someone, but being physically present isn’t the same as being emotionally present. I even married someone whose work takes him away week after week. Sometimes I wonder if, on some level, I chose that—if the rhythm of leaving and returning felt safer to me than the terrifying stillness of calm seas.

And then, I lost my dad. The biggest loss of my life. Suddenly all of it—the walls, the exits, the fresh starts, the frantic paddling—clicked into place. They were rehearsals for grief. But grief came anyway, and it broke me open.

And then there’s this blog. I told myself I started it as a way to process my pain, to help others, to help myself handle emotions and work through challenges. And it has done that. Some people tell me it’s my vulnerability and rawness that keep them coming back. Others have judged my words, my social media, my politics, and my openness. Even if they aren’t judging, I assume they are.Sometimes I wonder: do I overshare so that people will see the good, the bad, and the ugly upfront—so they’ll have no choice but to accept me? Or do I use it to push people away?

Sharing my deepest fears and pain sometimes feels like tossing bottles into the ocean, not knowing if they’ll reach someone or sink without a trace. And when I work hard on a piece and the likes don’t come? It’s my own way of confirming the story I’ve been telling myself all along: I am unworthy.

Maybe it’s the same pattern I’ve been talking about all along. My writing is both my lifeline and my shield. A way to connect, but also a way to control the terms of connection. If I show you everything—my darkest fears, my sharpest anger, my softest places—then at least when you leave, I’ll know it was the whole of me you rejected.

Three years later, I am finally ready to stop running from the tide. Therapy has helped me see the strategies I once called survival for what they really were: ways to keep myself from feeling the unbearable. But naming them gave me something else—a choice. I don’t have to keep leaving before I’m left. I don’t have to live as though everyone is one wave away from drifting off.

So where do I go from here? I don’t get to snap my fingers and fix it. Healing isn’t about erasing the past—it’s more like learning the ocean’s rhythm — messy, unpredictable, sometimes calm, sometimes crashing. It’s learning to ride the waves instead of fearing them. The best advice I have been given so far? Learn to sit in the in-between. The hardest part is the waiting—that uncertain space where you don’t yet know if someone will stay or leave. Preemptive abandonment protects you from that uncertainty.

The work now is learning to tolerate it. To let my body feel the discomfort without making a move. That’s where the nervous system learns a new story. Some days that means staying in the discomfort a little longer, asking myself: Is this fear talking, or reality? Other days it’s simply noticing when I’ve gone numb and whispering: this, too, is survival, but it doesn’t have to be forever.

I’m trying to plant roots where my instinct is to drift. To open the door to connection, even when every bone in me wants to scan the horizon. To believe—just maybe—that not everyone will leave, and that even if they do, I’ll still be okay. Because I am enough. I am worthy.

Most of all, I’m practicing turning the words I tell my kids back on myself: There is nothing you could do that would ever make me stop loving you. Because if I can offer them unconditional love, surely I can begin to offer a little to myself, too.

It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me. But maybe naming the problem is how I finally start to heal.

I’ve spent years outrunning storms, planning fresh starts, building boats to avoid being swallowed whole. But storms always come. Grief always finds its way to shore. The difference now is that I’m learning I don’t have to keep running. I can stand still. I can let the tide rise and fall, let the storm pass, and trust that the ground beneath me will hold.

And maybe that’s the lesson after all—that some things, like the tide, will always leave and return. The point isn’t to stop the waves from going out. The point is to believe I’ll still be here when they come back.