The Fox and the Rabbit: 10 years later

Ten years ago when I was seventeen, I moved out.  Not because I had to, not because I didn’t like it at my moms, but because I wanted change, excitement, to experience something new. That was ten years ago and without a breath I have been seeking out change and newness ever since. But I don’t want change anymore. I just want to live in the now. 

My graduating year of high school was 2010. Many saw it as an end of an era, but I saw it as the start of a new age. I wished for adventure and I got more than I bargained for. Since then I have moved house eleven times between seven cities. I often returned to St. Catharines or Toronto to restart and “try again”. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what I was “trying” at exactly. I changed degrees four times and changed jobs thirteen times, also going on unemployment for depression/anxiety twice. Whatever it was, I was trying desperately to find it.

I read once that the natural response to sadness is a desire for change. I remember thinking, “Is this why I am always craving change?” I had already been diagnosed with Depressive Disorder, but reading this connection between sadness and change led to another level of awareness. A major pillar of my personality, what makes me me, could be due to my depression. 

I’ve had people approach me in awe of all the things I’ve done, places I’ve lived, but I never saw it as an exciting life, at least not as exciting as others made it out to be. The past ten years, for me, could be described as a chase. My depression/anxiety was a fox, and I the rabbit. I made drastic life changes because I was being hunted, and I’ve been running for my life for ten years. More than that.

There have been times where I thought I’d finally found the thing I was searching for: my safe haven where the fox couldn’t find me. But then I caught a glimpse of a dazzling carrot promising whispers of something even better and I risked the safety I’d finally found to go chase it. Other times, what I thought was my sanctuary turned out to be a trap that left me with scars. There were times I ran so hard I caught a cramp that sent me crashing to the ground gasping for breath. 

While writing this piece over the last two weeks of this decade, I had a panic attack and became hospitalized as a suicide risk. Mental illness looks different for many, but for me, when I experience a panic attack, I feel like I am dying from the screaming pain in my body and soul. If one experiences a panic attack, they are unable to see past their present moment of excruciating mental and physical pain. I personally experience psychotic breaks during panic episodes where I have auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and thought disorder. One is unlikely to recognize me in this state. 

My panic attacks are like two animals fighting to the death. It’s hard to watch, harder to live through. Animals fight, not simply because they are hungry, but for survival. They sense a threat and they must eliminate it. The only way to end the blood shed is for them to, by some miracle, trust one another enough to not attack, to feel safe. A panic attack is like two halves of me attacking each other, my emotions vs my will. This is the twist to the fable: I’m not the rabbit being chased by a sad fox. I am the fox chasing the sad rabbit. The moment the rabbit shows weakness, lets out a tear, discovers bad news, starts losing hope, the fox pounces in attack of her prey and chases the emotional rabbit out of sight. The rabbit is a threat to the equilibrium of the forest… or so the fox intuits. But eventually the rabbit refuses to run and chooses to fight back. Crack.

So am I the fox chasing away my emotions? Or am I the rabbit trying to flee from my emotions? Or am I the emotions doing the chasing and the fleeing? In a panic episode I’m all of the above.

There’s someone, or something, else in this equation. The valley, the mountain, the forest. In each I feel a presence. There was a Realness that took many forms. He was the air in my lungs that kept me alive. They were the trees, that surrounded me. She was my blood pouring onto the teeth of the traps. It was the spirit of love I encountered at every sunrise. The mysterious voice guided me with silence and stillness. This was the voice that reunites the prey and the predator, calming the storm in my mind. This voice, this presence, always appears, whether I’m the fox or the rabbit or both at once, the voice whispers and I can breathe. Prescription drugs also help to subdue the wild animals within me, I must make clear. And when the fighting in my mind stops, this other silence speaks peace over me as I breathe: Everything is going to be okay. And it always is. And it always will be. 

As I enter this new decade, 2020, I hope to stop seeing my feelings as an inconvenience I don’t have time for. I will stop chasing and I will stop running. My medication isn’t to aid me in avoiding feeling what I need to feel, chasing out the rabbit or killing the fox, but it helps quiet the fear of the immense, threatening form the fox and the rabbit can each take. 

It has been an adventure. I relish the memories of the valleys and the mountain tops which have formed me into the woman writing this now. I am saddened to see this wild, tragic, epic, ever-changing chapter come to a close as I settle down in Boars Hill, Oxford, England to start a family of my own. But I am more happy than I am sad. Not because this rabbit has outrun the fox, escaping to her sanctuary across the ocean where she can never be hunted again. Instead, by a twist of fate, the rabbit and the fox became friends and have learned to co-exist among these billowing hills. These two friends still fight sometimes (rabbit loves to play the victim, and fox likes to sneak up on her), but I have friends and family and mentors who help me stay grounded and feeling safe with the fox and the rabbit who, for all their shortcomings, simply remind this human to feel.