Running Away, Staying Still

I was restless and nomadic in my 20s and early 30s. In a span of ten years, I moved to Hanoi, Saigon, London, San Francisco, Hanoi, Geneva, Hanoi and finally landed in San Francisco. To an onlooker, I appeared adventurous, but I was well-aware that my itinerant lifestyle stemmed from a deep fear of forming real attachments and committing to people, places and jobs.

Years before, when my mother passed away, I did not shed a tear for days. I did everything possible to avoid my overwhelming emotions associated with her illness and death. Instead, I moved at a frenetic pace, from school to a part-time restaurant job to hours studying.

I returned to school only two days after my mother’s funeral. A teacher stopped me in the hallway and complimented me on being so brave and put-together in the face of this obstacle. Three years later at my high school graduation, she handed me a card telling me that her mother passed only months before mine, and seeing me so composed days after my mother’s death gave her courage.

Looking back, I don’t view myself as courageous. If anything, I was avoiding. Adults labeled me as ambitious; I appeared to be a curious and energetic youth, who was single-mindedly focused on finishing high school and moving out of state for college. On occasion, my father advised me to “slow down,” but I never heeded to his warning. Little did I know that these emotions would one day catch up with me.

While I was living in Geneva, I faced one of the biggest heartbreaks of my adult life. I couldn’t tolerate staying there to face the ending of something I treasured and my feelings of loss. A previous ex that I’d maintained a friendship with, and who had lost his father to cancer years before we met, recognized my pattern; he pointed out that I was always running away from my problems. I started to see the connection: every time my romantic relationships ended, the feelings were overwhelming and often all-consuming, because they triggered the pain, still unprocessed, from my mother’s death.

Instead of staying still and facing these new realizations, I moved again, returning to Hanoi for the third time. During this one-year sojourn, I began to question why I kept fleeing to and from Vietnam. I started to seriously consider the type of life I wanted to live – and whether the expatriate lifestyle was actually for me. After talking to close friends who were certain they wanted to remain abroad to build their lives and careers, I realized I wanted to create roots in San Francisco, where I already had a handful of good friends and where I would only be a few time zones away from my father and my sister. I wanted to build a life, not live a lifestyle. I wanted to learn the art of staying.

Now, I’m trying to stay more present with my life. I have lived in San Francisco for over three years, the longest period of time I have been anywhere since college. I have even been in the same job for almost that whole time. Staying-put is still novel to me, but I am starting to feel the benefits of my new stable life – a solid group of friends, a creative community, colleagues who I am lucky to call friends, and neighbors who call me by my first name. On occasion, I miss the newness of travel and the excitement of exploring places, but I no longer feel the pressing need to escape.

I try not to beat myself up about the amount of time it took me to process my mom’s death (it’s been twenty years since she passed), and I don’t regret the path I ventured in my 20s. But if I could go back and advise my teenage self, or another fourteen year old girl who had just lost her mother, I would tell her sit still, to feel her emotions, and to not rush to process – or avoid – the pain. I would tell her to cry if she felt like it, to tell people how she feels, and not to cover up her feelings. I would tell her that the more you allow yourself to feel, the sooner you’ll be able to let go. I am sure my mother would have told me the something similar – no matter where you go in the world, you can’t run from yourself. And, while building attachments to people always means the risk of losing them, the greater risk is living your life without truly feeling anything.

 

Christina Vo is a writer in San Francisco (christinavo.com). 

Image: 24th Street Intersection Study by Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1978)