Running Away, by Gillian

I thought about this in the sense of escaping, but we're going to write about escape in a very few weeks so I'll skip that idea.

So now what? I guess I'll just have to re-cover some old ground and pepper it with quotations to make it seem more interesting!

Writing or talking of my mad dash from the closet, I have often likened it to hurtling along on a runaway train over which I had little, if any, control. It was almost as if I had never actually made that conscious decision to come out, although of course I had, at some level. But it didn't feel like that. It simply felt as if some wild-west movie train with a big old cow-catcher on the front had scooped me up and run away with me. (As Kimberly McCreight says, in Reconstructing Amelia, 'Sometimes its hard to tell how fast the current's moving until you're headed over a waterfall.''') I had no objection, but I was just along for the ride until we got wherever we were going. Doug Cooper, in Outside In, asks, 'Am I running away or moving forward?' It's difficult to feel firmly that you are moving forward when you have very little vision of where you are going. Yet in a way, I did know. I knew I was going to be openly gay. What I did not know was what exactly that meant. But that was not truly having no destination; rather it was having no experience or knowledge of that destination. As Glenda Millard says, in A Small Free Kiss in the Dark, 'Running away was easy; not knowing what to do next was the hard part.'

As a child I never remember harboring thoughts of running away, or wanting to. On the other hand I was often accused of letting my imagination run away with me. Thinking back on that now, it sounds very like a somewhat passive form of running away; which, in turn, sounds typical of me - back to the cowcatcher and that runaway train. I seem to have a pattern of allowing things to happen to me rather than proactively forcing the pace.

And, as I continue thoughts along that vein, that seems still to be true. Now it is time constantly running away with me. I am not running away from or towards anything. Life is close to perfect right where I am. But alas time is not content to let me be. Time rushes headlong at me from the moment I put a foot on the floor in the morning. It grabs me up and rushes me through the day. I am by nature an early riser; nevertheless before I have even planned my day it is lunchtime and before I actually start anything it's suppertime which means it's almost bedtime. Life is one constant rush to keep up with itself.

Why does it do that when we are running out of time, anyway? Surely time should slow down in order to preserve as much as possible of what is left; but no, off it speeds in a rush towards the point where it, or at least our portion of it, will, inevitably, run out.

And on that cheery note I shall give up on this topic. But I want one erudite end quote; something that will anchor my ramblings with style. I don't even have to turn to The Web, I already have the perfect words stored midst the jumble of quotations in my head.

“How did it get so late so soon?
It's night before it's afternoon.
December is here before it's June.
My goodness how the time has flewn.
How did it get so late so soon?”

Dr. Suess

© March 2018

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

When I Decided by Gillian

Well, y’know what? If I’m perfectly honest with myself, (if that is even a possibility for me or for anyone, but I do my best,) I fear that there are few, if any statements, at least with reference to my earlier years, that I could make beginning with those words. At least if I did, they would all end up like this; “When I decided .... whatever .... I didn’t really decide at all but just drifted along due to inertia.  Or, was swept away by emotion.  Or, Let someone else decide for me.”

Really! And this came as a surprise to me! I always thought I made decisions, but looking back I’m not so sure. Much of the time they certainly did not add up to what I truly consider to be active decision-making; weighing the odds, listing the choices, analyzing the figures. At best they were passive decisions, if decisions at all. In my own defense I must say that I never simply tossed a coin, but maybe even that would have been more pro-active. At least the coin toss acknowledges that there is in fact a decision to be made. With me it was often as if I spaced out the necessary decision completely, and, as if sleepwalking suddenly woke up in a new situation. And to top off this sad tale of inadequate thinking, it appears to me that sometimes when I did actually decide something; it was for the wrong reasons. I have been mighty lucky, then, that most changes I have drifted or been dragged into, have been very positive.

Take, for example, my decision to go to college. A good decision made, admittedly subliminally, in order to fix this queerness I did not even acknowledge having. The men there would be different from the farm boys at home. I would fall madly in love and live happily forever after without this unidentified thing eating away at me. A great decision, my college days were among the happiest in my life, but made for completely the wrong reason. I hadn’t been there a week before I fell madly in love with a woman in my class.

After college I fell into deep infatuation with another woman, who one day casually tossed out the suggestion that we go to the United States for a year. “OK,” I shrugged, and that was the extent of my decision-making. Had she suggested an excursion to the South Pole I would have responded in the same way. Talk about decisions for the wrong reasons! And letting someone else make them for you.

My “decision” to come to Denver was mighty casual, as well. I had trailed my ineffectual self around the U.S. in my inamorata’s wake, ending up in Houston where she married a very rich and mighty cute Texan, which put an end to me as her shadow. I might as well start saving the money to return to England, I thought, gloomily. The new unwanted man in my life had a friends in Denver and said I should see Colorado before leaving the U.S.

“O.K.”

Another shrug decision. “Why not?”

I cannot even remember really deciding to go to work for IBM, where I remained for 30 mostly very happy years. I was working at Shwayder Brothers, later to become Samsonite, when the guy working next to me said that if I wanted some quick bucks to get myself home, I should apply at IBM, which at that time was rapidly filling it’s new plant in Boulder with just about anyone walking in off the street. What an opportunity. It’s difficult in this day and age even to imagine such a thing, never mind remember the actuality of it. But I don’t recall finding the prospect exciting at all.

“Yeah, O.K.” I responded, “Thanks. Why not”

I never did return to England permanently, but again I have little recollection of actually making a conscious decision to stay in Colorado, for all that I recognized I had found God’s country. It was more a case of drifting: allowing nothing to happen. In the absence of decisions, the status quo remains.

My marriage was most definitely a product of non-decision. (Which is, by the way, nothing like indecision, which implies at least some attempt to make a decision.) I simply drifted effortlessly into the vacuum created by my future husband’s needs.

As for coming out, to myself, that is, there was no decision involved at all. I was picked up by the cowcatcher of a runaway train and away I went. I couldn’t stop it and I couldn’t get off.

When that train arrived and dumped me firmly on the ground at it’s destination, I of course had to leave my marriage. And it was as a result of a very conscious decision that I left. Not long after that, I came out to everyone else in my life; another conscious decision. When I asked Betsy if she would consider actually, really, legally, marrying me last year, that again was a serious decision.

You see, before I came out at least to myself, in my early 40’s, I wasn’t myself. I was an actor plugging along on the stage of life, playing me. But I was not me. At some deeply-buried intuitional level, I always knew this. So what did I care what that person playing me did; where she went or how she lived? Why bother making decisions about what moves this person, in some ways almost a stranger to me, makes?

Then I came out and I was me. The real me. The actor was gone. From then on, of course it mattered what happened to me. ME. MYSELF. The original. The one and only. You talk about being born again! Suddenly, in middle age, the real me was born. And I am important to me. I care for me. I make decisions very carefully for me. I most emphatically do care what I do and where I go and how I live. Finally and forever, I am me.

“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

― Dr. Seuss

© 15 August 2014

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.