Chapter 8 - Into the Wilderness | Eden's Flaming Sword
For a long time, I lived in chronic flight.
I did them all; fighting, fleeing, freezing, and fawning; but flight was home base for me. I always had to get the hell out of there. My nervous system demanded it. I'm tired now and I'm not running anymore. And to be honest, I had nowhere left to run. I arrived at the place I thought would save me, and there was nothing left to escape into. So I had no choice. My survival pattern had reached its end. No one to fight, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. I went into the wilderness. I'm not talking about a forest. I will explain what the wilderness is later in the chapter, but before that, I want to tell you what I found there, and why it surprised me. I found that grieving is something the body already knows how to do. It's as natural as laughing or yawning. It's how the nervous system finds its way back after everything's been shaken, putting us back together in a wiser way than before.
But we don't want to face our grief. We don't want to go there. And it's understandable. Who would want to? Because facing your grief feels like death to our nervous system. Death. Your body will react like you're dying—heart racing, trouble breathing, everything in you screaming to get out, to fight or disappear. People have done extreme things to escape that feeling.
Society reinforces this avoidance by calling it success. The system says don't feel, that's a waste of time! Go forward! Don't feel! Go forward! Keep producing! Keep climbing! Keep spinning that wheel and prove your worth! When you grieve, you can't pretend anymore. You can't perform or produce at the pace the system demands. Instead, you slow down. You feel. You stop defending the story that everything is fine.
And the system? Can't have that. No way. So it shames and suppresses. We've built a world where showing that you're human; that you need time to fall apart; is treated like weakness. Like failure. Like you're a broken object. But it's not weakness. It's honesty. And it's this very honesty that threatens every structure built on denial.
The system needs you to keep producing. The economy requires it. If everyone stopped to grieve what they've actually lost, the childhood safety, the belonging that was severed, the control that was taken, and the felt sense of self that never fully formed, the whole machine would collapse.
Corporations need workers who don't slow down. Schools need students who don't question. Families need members who don't rock the boat. Governments need citizens who don't break down from what's been done to them. So we're taught this. Keep moving, stay busy, distract yourself, medicate, numb, achieve, and consume. ANYTHING but stop and feel. If you stop and feel, you are no longer useful to the system.
Oh is that so? That's fine by me. Now fuck off.
What happens when you stop performing in a world that demands it? You are a threat because you can now see. You are awake. You see the patterns and you refuse to participate in the collective numbing. You won't pretend anymore and people around you get uncomfortable. Your stopping makes them question why they're still performing. Some will shame you for it and that's okay. They're trapped in the same system you were trapped in. Your grief reminds them of their own, and their nervous system can't handle it. Others will distance themselves. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because seeing someone face what they're avoiding feels dangerous to them. But a few will recognize what you're doing. They'll see the wilderness you've entered and realize it's the same wilderness they've been circling.
So what is the wilderness?
It's that place we've been avoiding. The place that remains when the false lights of society go out. It's the world beyond the Ego, beyond survival patterns—a place stripped of pretense, where you finally meet what's real. The times from childhood when you learned the world wasn't safe. The belonging that got severed and left you alone. The control that you lost and felt utterly powerless. And underneath both; the felt self that never got solid ground to stand on. These are real, and they're waiting in the wilderness; waiting for you and your attention. They want to be felt by you. Why? So you can finally move through the wound you got stuck in decades ago. The wilderness holds the grief you bypassed to survive, and your body remembers the losses even if your mind forgot.
So here's what matters.
The survival responses themselves aren't the enemy. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These responses are wisdom when danger is real. The problem is being chronically stuck in these states; responding to imagined threats as if they're real.
That's when fight becomes chronic rage. Flight becomes chronic anxiety and overthinking. Freeze becomes chronic depression. Fawn becomes chronic self-denial.
There's a difference between using a survival response to survive, and chronically living in that response.
One can save your life.
But the other? It can destroy it.