The Urge to Hide

Finding your way with difficult people and situations

I met someone recently who was covered in smiles, but whose words and behavior did not match her kind expression. It set me off balance, and that reaction lasted a little longer than our unpleasant interaction warranted. Since then, I’ve noticed an instinct to avoid not just her, but other humans. This response I have is on such a small scale that my younger self wouldn’t even have noticed. But with years of life experience and the firm habit of paying attention, not much that is internal slips past me now. Our feelings need a way to clear, and when we don’t see a way, we retreat.

Early on in Sparky’s feral rehabilitation

The urge to hide feels primal. I think of my feral cat, living so long alone in the extremes of cold and heat, trusting his fear to protect him. But now he knows a different life, and I can sense the hardness of his former cocoon softening as he sits in a warm window watching the snow from inside. Giving into our fears can keep us from safety.

We humans sometimes push each other out of hiding. As a young woman with a lot of long hair, hairstylists tried to cut it off. “What are you hiding behind with all this hair?” In my thirties, neighbors tried to push me out of my house. “You’re like a hermit. Come out and hang with us.” And there’s a steady social push, even when it arrives innocently enough through invitations that leave you wanting to curl up in bed. I know a woman whose calendar is so full, I’d be hospitalized if it were mine. Friends’ invitations add up to an overwhelming amount of presentation, talking, smiling, eating, and staying up late. It’s hard to step back when you’re trying to maintain a variety of friendships. We need healthy interaction, but we need rest too.

Crisis Intervention

Years ago, a friend called and said, “I need to talk to you. Can I come over now?”

“Sure,” I said.

She came over with wine, looking nervous and scared. We sat on my porch while she told me a terrible story about what was happening at her new job. She’d been accused of something she hadn’t done, and the accusation was smearing a reputation onto her that knocked her off center. She’d moved to a new area with a new husband, new degree, and new job. But a man in her office seemed determined to “put her in her place,” rather than in the rightful position she had over him. All it took was an insinuation that she’d behaved inappropriately with a male client (she hadn’t), and suddenly, the office saw her as a loose woman whose lacking morals would get them all in trouble. It was 1800 again and she’d gone from being an educated professional to a harlot simply by the pointed end of a petty finger. After high school, we expect to be finished with these types of interactions, but not everyone grows up just because we have.

Her considered response was surprising to me.

“I don’t ever have to go back,” she said. She wanted to hide. And here, I became the pusher.

“That’s true, you don’t. But if you don’t go back and address this, you’ll look guilty of something you haven’t done.”

By the time she left, I thought I’d convinced her not to shrink away from this problem, but she looked just as nervous as when she’d arrived. Maybe she was hoping I’d hide her in a closet, and she could live out her life in there. It’s a feeling many of us can understand when we face unfairness in society. Having to right something that was never wrong is not only unsettling, it portrays other humans as deceitful. Sometimes people are untrustworthy and we have to deal with them anyway.

Petty Challenges

I remember Martha and the file cabinet. I was in my late twenties and had been appointed supervisor to an office full of people older and supposedly wiser. Martha didn’t like it. She also moonlighted as the office cleaner and was sneaking into my office at night accessing personnel records. Nobody, including the owners, seemed to care, but it was wrong and definitely an affront to my authority, all because I was young enough to be her daughter. I confronted her and she just smiled her way into a smirking face and walked away. The pilfering didn’t stop until much later when she decided I wasn’t so bad.

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

But the urge to hide showed up in me then too. Her action was one of many tiny things that started to make me regret taking that job. I wanted to go back into hiding where I didn’t have to deal with the weird motivations some people have that gives them pleasure by causing trouble for others.

You have them too. Situations, and people you wish would go away but just don’t. Maybe you, too, have the urge to hide from them. In the U.S. right now, we have an entire country’s worth of situations we wish would stop. But standing in the light against monsters big and small appears to be the only way through. I try to notice my urge to retreat now and respect it. But then I remind myself I’m still here living and that means moving back and forth between periods of taking action and resting in retreat. As always, baby steps get us through.

Thanks for sharing this mortal life with me.