What Safety Looks Like in Real Life
Most of you probably don’t know that my daughter is on a gap year between highschool and college. She is through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Alone.
Well, not actually alone, since she’s met a cast of wonderful characters along the Trail, but she’s not with a group or anything. I’ll probably write more about this later, as there are many lessons I’m learning from her as she has gone through her process of planning, working toward, and executing her vision of 6 months on the Trail (up to, and including, her extreme grace and flexibility in cutting her walk short due to Hurricane Helene). But I digress.
Today I want to share a snippet - with her permission - from my daughter’s almost-weekly newsletter, Trail Tales.
C and I took a bus … for a fun day of wandering in NYC. The amount of people in one place was insane. I was surprised how quickly I adjusted to the city though, and I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I expected to be. As some of you may know, I have a pretty terrible sense of direction, but it has improved so much since starting my hike! I was able to navigate around the city so easily without even pulling out my phone which I was proud about. I feel like my brain is finally starting to picture a map and use it to get around.
That last sentence is the one that made me literally burst into tears.
Here’s why:
To my daughter’s earlier point: from the time she was a little girl, it was clear that her sense of direction, her sense of “geolocatedness” did not run in background. You know how some kids look around and say, “oh, we’re close to the park”? My daughter would never. Could never.
As a toddler, when visiting a new house, she needed to be shown all the rooms. Then, she needed to practice navigating the new space so as not to become disoriented. I would walk her around the place, set her in a room, tell her where I’d be and have her come find me there. We did this many times.
When she was about 8 years old, we allowed her to walk to our neighbor’s house (a block over and 2 blocks down). She could do it ONLY IF SHE LEFT OUT OF THE SIDE DOOR of our house. Take her out the front door and she was lost. We worked with her to connect the dots between the front and side doors so that she could put that piece of the puzzle together.
Fast forward to her at 18 doing that for herself in New York City!
Here’s the thing, though: if we had laughed at her or chuckled at “Oh, daughter never knows where she is” (in other words, had we NOT HELPED HER), she would have created an internal narrative that her lack of geolocation was a character flaw that she needed to hide or banish. She would have gotten lost (over and over again) and then gone into flight, fight, freeze or fawn (over and over again) thinking “what is WRONG with me?”.
She would have felt UNSAFE at being lost in the world.
Instead of letting that happen, my husband and I decided to actively teach her about her brain. We decided to teach her that she could feel safe even when she was lost. And we decided to take her mobility independence at her pace. So that she could experience more success than failure. Over many many iterations and conversations, the gist went something like this:
“Some people’s brains can track location in the background. They don’t even have to pay attention to it. Your brain doesn’t do that. Isn’t that so interesting!”
“When I think I’m lost, I look around for something that might be familiar. What do you do?”
“What can you do if you get lost? Who are some people who can help?”
Over many years, our daughter has come to know her own brain, recognize its strengths and weaknesses and accept all of it. Which is why she can blithely write the first part of that paragraph about growing up with a terrible sense of direction.
Like I said, I take a lot of learning from my daughter, and her self-acceptance and self-love is one of them.
What are you learning from your kiddos? What do you take from this story? I’d love to hear.