023 wherever you run, you meet yourself

As I spend some time on the West Coast and take a few days off work, I’ve been thinking about the idea of healing. They say that no matter how far you travel, you keep running into yourself. So what if the self we’re so desperately trying to escape is the very one we need to meet?

We fill our days with motion, commutes, deadlines, and dinner reservations, believing that movement equates to progress. That distraction is healing.

But when the noise quiets, and it’s just you and the silence, that’s when the real you shows up. It’s like your body remembers what your mind tried to forget. The feelings you pushed aside, the grief you swore you’d outgrown, the questions you buried under your to-do list—they resurface. Uninvited, but never without reason.

Beneath all the productivity and performance, something lingers. A feeling. A memory. A pain that isn’t dissipating simply because we refuse to make eye contact with it.

There comes a moment, maybe during a quiet morning, a solo train ride, or a sudden lull in conversation, when the noise dies down and what’s left is… us. The real us. The one we’ve tried to outrun through ambition, busyness, or reinvention.

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? To realize that no matter how far we travel or how curated our routines become, we keep encountering the same emotional echoes. The grief we packed away. The anxiety we dressed up as drive. The sadness we mistook for solitude.

And yet, maybe this return to the self isn’t failure. Maybe it’s an invitation.

A soft but persistent call to stop running, not because we’ve given up, but because we’re finally ready to listen. To slow down. To sit with what hurts. And in doing so, begin again.

This time with presence, with intention, and with truth.