Great Escape
I Ran Away From My Life, and I Don’t Regret a Thing
It isn’t always the weaker decision
I was five years old the first time I ran away from home. My mother wouldn’t let me play with a set of watercolor paints, and I resolutely decided that it wasn’t a situation I could live with. I snuck out after dinner, but it was still light when I set off down our dirt road and into the woods. Soon I walked into a clearing, where I saw — stay with me here — the witches. Two smiling women stood next to a bubbling black pot. I stumbled, terrified, and sprinted home.
When I told this story years later, my mother was dumbfounded. As a child, I had neglected to mention the women — whose bizarre appearance she finally chalked up to the New Age mysticism popular in our small Australian town — and simply told her I would never run away again.
I was 25 when I broke that pledge. It wasn’t spontaneous like it had been two decades earlier, but the underpinnings were the same: Something was wrong, and I decided I couldn’t live with it.
I had long been cautioned against losing myself to a relationship, but nobody ever warned me that a career could be an equally wolfish consumer of my identity. A career, I was taught, was a conduit for independence; establish one, and everything else would…
