Pick Your Storms

How we hate to take backwards steps, and why they might be the best steps.

A drop lands on my cheek like a tear. It is not yet raining, but it is the premonition of rain. To my left the slug of bare trees on the Downs are silhouetted against a bright white sky, but to my left the horizon is smudgy with grey watercolour.

I have watched enough bands of rain from enough hillsides to have a good guess of one coming my way. I know I should turn around, my coat is not waterproof. If I turn around now I will have just enough time to get home without soaking through. But I dont. I keep walking.

***

It sounds like a metaphor from an inspirational podcast, to see the rain coming but to keep walking, keep walking into it to where you want to go. We are given hardship as inspiration and for some reason we gulp it down and say “yes, more, more”. In this case it would not be awful to get wet, necessarily.

You would get in and you would have to find somewhere to hang your sodden coat, you would notice where the water was sagging along the hems and hope it had not reached the lining. You would have to peel off your trousers, turn on the heating, mop up the puddles of drip water from wherever you moved. You would have to spend the rest of the afternoon warming up and getting cosy to recover. And what would you have really gained?

There is a pleasant place in life for the hunkering down after a rainy walk. But putting yourself through it, day after day, month after month, hoping that it will all be worth it? Why put yourself through that?

I have always been someone who kept walking when I should have turned back. After an argument with my now-ex I ran out of the house into the middle of the night, into the black black dark of the field opposite our house. I had not been able to bear the weight in the house, of the things that were said but mainly the things that were not, and had to burst onto the street in order to breathe.

I walked in that black field weighing up my options for a future. I was 25 and I couldn’t see another one. I felt it was too late, or perhaps more honestly with hindsight, I felt it was too hard to start again. I turned and looked back at the house, twinkling like a port from my dark sea. I didn’t know whether it was a safe harbour or the ruse of smugglers, luring me towards unhappiness. But I had come this far, and I walked back towards the rain. It took me another four years to turn back.

In my two years of dating I was soaked to the skin. I thought that if I walked for long enough, if I just kept going, if I refused to turn back at the first sign of red flags, I would get to the rainbow at the end. I thought if I gave more of myself, if I was perfect enough, if I listened to the right music, if I said I wanted the right things I could walk us to a happy ending - to my happy ending. I kept seeing the memes saying “you can’t win someone back by giving them more of what they don’t want”, I kept hearing my friend saying “if he wanted to, he would”, and still I kept walking. I kept trying to force a relationship out of someone who had shown no inclination toward one.

In all the situations where I have forged on without turning back, there has been so much clearing up to do. Some of that mental and emotional clearing up is still ongoing. There were long periods of burnout to recover from, relationships to rebuild, ever-emerging puddles of emotional trauma to mop up. Imagine if I’d turned back, how much time and energy I’d have had instead. What could I have done, with the time and energy I spent committedly walking wrong paths?

We all hate turning back. Is this hatred happening on a species level, or just a cultural one? I can’t imagine our ancestors, draped in their furs and out with their flint weapons, refused to turn back to safety when the snows came in, or they came across a flood, or a carnivorous animal was spotted up ahead. I can’t imagine our survival instinct isn’t to turn back when necessary.

So maybe it’s our more recent forefathers who stop us from turning back. The ones who built gleaming steam engines that moved only forwards, forwards on two straight lines that kept going or crashed. The ones who forged and stole and climbed all over other peoples, other cultures, who would not turn back because they believed in their own ideals more that what was right. The ones who bred the ones who sit behind podcast microphones and goad people into seeing turning back as a weakness, into carrying on into the abyss.

We see turning back as negative. As a coach I often heard people say “I can’t go back to where I was” or “I feel like I’m going backwards”, and it was always a bad thing. Good things could only happen on an upward line, no matter how unhappy they were in actuality.

For a long time, turning back was the worst thing that could have happened to me. Turning back, to me, looked like having to move in with my parents and get a job. That was when I’d know I’d failed. And then, as I walked, literally, in the rain, I couldn’t help but feel that being cold and alone, holding out for a man who didn’t care, was a lot more like failure than sitting in a warm living room watching quiz shows with my mum and dad. Being where the love was. So I turned back, and in the turning back, my life lurched forward.

***

In the end it does not rain. A few more fake tears scatter my cheeks and the pavement around me, but it does not rain. Over on that horizon the grey smudge turns to a muted navy blue, but that is where the water stays. Just because it did not rain, though, doesn’t mean that nothing I’ve said here is true. The truth is that on this literal walk that happened it did not rain, and the truth is that sometimes, you just get lucky. Other times, you don’t. Pick your storms.