I'm still here

And I'm not going anywhere

Dear Writer,

A few months back, Ian and I were going out for an early morning run. As we got out of our car, I heard a man yelling. I looked up to see a guy, I pegged him at mid- to late-20s, and a woman of about the same age, packing up their things into backpacks; by all appearances, they had spent the night in the park. She was clearly upset, and he was shouting at her and calling her a bitch. At one point she shouted, “Leave me alone!” and started walking away from him. He went after her, grabbed at her backpack and pulled her back toward him.

And then he threatened to kill her.

After that, it’s all kind of a blur for me. I did not make the decision to chase after them, but I did. They had about a 30-yard head start on me, but I wasn’t weighed down by backpacks as they were, and I walk at a pretty fast clip.

Ian, who doesn’t walk quite as fast but was watching his wife go after someone who was threatening to kill someone else, booked it behind me to catch up.

I don’t know what I was thinking, except that I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t have a choice.

There was simply no universe in which I didn’t go after this motherfucker.

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Brave? Or stupid?

There is a common perception that courage and stupidity are just two sides of the same coin, and like most things, I think it’s complicated. Any situation in which there is risk, but a person does the thing anyway, can be seen as both courageous, and stupid, it just depends on how you look at it. And often, how you look at it will depend on the outcome.

Except… we can’t know the outcome, right? If it goes well, you’re brave. And if it goes horribly, horribly wrong, you’re stupid. So if the assessment can only come on the heels of an outcome which is unknown at the time the choice is made, which is it?

And does it matter?

There is a commonly stated definition of courage, which isn’t the absence of fear, but rather choosing to take the action in spite of that fear. By that definition, I wasn’t courageous. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t think. I didn’t decide. My feet just moved, and as I closed in on this guy and he turned his attention and vitriol toward me instead of his girlfriend, I wasn’t afraid then, either.

I just knew that this was going to go down how it was going to go down, and I was already in for both penny and pound, so fear wasn’t part of it… yet. All I knew was that if that asshole was going to lay a hand on that girl, he was going to have to go through me to do it.

That which requires courage

There are a million things to be afraid of at any given time. That’s why so many of us are awash in anxiety; the world is a scary, uncertain place with risk around every corner, and that can make it hard to do a lot of the things we want to do.

This is because we live an individualistic life, in an individualistic society, and that’s not how humans are designed to live. We are not meant to be alone in the world, having to do everything by ourselves.

But we live as though that’s what we’re supposed to do. Living in direct conflict with how you’re supposed to creates a lot of problems, including ones that will actually outright kill you.

I have for a long time been increasingly of the opinion that there are few problems to which community is not the answer. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, you may have heard of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a small town settled mostly by a community of people in Italy looking for a better life in America in the mid-20th century. The community basically transplanted from Roseto, Italy to found Roseto, Pennsylvania, and continued their way of life, living as a tight-knit community whose kids ran all over town safely, because at any given time, some adult was watching over them. When anyone experienced a calamity, the community came together to care for them. Everyone in that community knew they had a safety net, and everyone was able to be a safety net for others in return.

As a result, in the middle of the 20th century, this town had the same obesity, smoking, and alcohol abuse rates as the rest of the United States, but they had almost zero heart attacks.

Since that time, as the Italian community died off and their descendants scattered into an individualistic society, Roseto has developed essentially the same health outcomes as pretty much everywhere else.

What does community have to do with courage?

Courage isn’t always about taking risk in the face of fear; it’s about living aligned with who you are. We have created a world in which we are afraid all of the time, because we are one bad day away from disaster all the time. Because we have learned to be afraid of each other, to see as threat the exact thing we need to not be so goddamned afraid all the time.

That guy shouted at his girlfriend in public, threatened to beat and kill her in public, because he didn’t think she had community looking out for her.

But she did.

She had me.

I was watching.

I followed them, keeping enough of a distance back that I’d have some warning if the dude came at me, but close enough that he knew someone was on his tail. When this guy turned and started yelling at me and threatening me, I ignored him and pulled out my phone and called 911. At this point, the dude was in a pickle; his girlfriend, who he desperately wanted to beat, was making progress getting away from him while he was shouting at me to mind my own fucking business.

What he didn’t know is that I grew up with a brother who was just like him. This was not my first fucking rodeo with this shit, and I was not going to back down.

Finally, I hung up the phone and looked up at this dude, meeting his eye. In a flash, his expression entirely changed, and I saw fear. It took me a moment to realize that my six-foot-three, bearded teddy bear of a husband—who could look damned threatening if he wants to—stepped up behind me.

And that’s when the dude decided I came with more trouble than I was worth, and he high-tailed it after his girlfriend.

It was then, as the police car pulled up to the curb to get my statement, that I realized what I had just almost gotten Ian into. I don’t remember entirely what was said, but I know that I apologized for dragging him into a potentially violent situation, and he looked at me like I was crazy, and said something to the effect of, “I go where you go. That’s how this works.” In the same way that I hadn’t had to think about following her, he didn’t have to think about following me.

I don’t know what happened to the couple. By the time we gave the details to the police, the couple had disappeared down a side street, still fighting.

Was that brave of me? I don’t think so. I didn’t make any choices; I just did something that I could not have stopped myself from doing. I have extremely mixed feelings about involving the police in anything, but I have very clear feelings on bullies threatening people they perceive to be weaker than them, and even clearer feelings about the potential of them following through on those threats. If Ian hadn’t been there, that guy might well have attacked me. If I hadn’t been there, he might have killed his girlfriend.

Or, she might have been fine anyway. It’s possible that my interference made things worse, and once he got her alone, he did worse things than he might have otherwise.

I can’t know if what I did was a good thing or not, if it was brave or if it was stupid, because I don’t know the outcome. I both regret getting involved, on the chance I made it worse, and know I would do the exact same thing again if the same situation arose again, because of the time my brother tried to choke me on the lunch line at school, and his girlfriend stopped him. Because of the time he came after me with a baseball bat, and a neighborhood kid stopped him.

Because I was that girl once, under threat by a murderous rage that wasn’t ever about me but had somehow found me anyway, and someone had stepped in.

And the more I think about it, the more I feel strongly that what I did that day wasn’t courage, but the ember of community that is my birthright and yours saying, I’m still here, and I’m not going anywhere.

Everything,

L