I’ve always had a thing for wings. Dragonflies, birds, planes, butterflies — if it flaps or soars, I’m interested. But while flight represents freedom and forward motion to me, many others equate it with running away.

Americans are socialized to believe that fleeing a difficult situation is the coward’s way out. We view flight as an escape from something one should face head-on, as the weaker side of the natural “fight or flight” dichotomy. We are taught that winners never quit, and quitters never win.

But when is “flight” actually a form of “fight”?

Escape from slavery is the most illustrative example of “flight as fight.” For a slave walking out of the South into the unknown territory of the North, freedom was a mystery. Imagine what it was like to flee from the only home — albeit an oppressive one — that one has ever known. And toward what? Conventional wisdom of the day dictated that blacks belonged in slavery. Imagine summoning up the courage to flout the status quo and venture out alone.  

We do not view the slaves’ flight as cowardly, but it is difficult for us to comprehend the depth of courage it took to seek freedom. Two centuries of hindsight enable us to see the value of their choice. At the time, escape constituted a life-altering plunge into the profound and intangible unknown.

Society has similar responses toward survivors of domestic violence. A friend of mine once confided in me about problems with her husband, as their marriage of several years was nearing its end. From the outside looking in, I immediately recognized the signs of physical and emotional abuse and, as gently as I could, told her my impressions. Just as gently, she demurred, declaring their mutual love and commitment.

Weeks later, after a particularly troubling episode at home, she came to me again. We walked through a park together. I listened as she cried, and beyond my distress over her situation, I felt lucky that I had nothing to tie me down, that I had never relied on another person to keep my life in line.

For the longest time, she could not see how to leave him. How easy it seemed to accept her life as it was, even a life so fraught with pain and fears, because that pain and those fears were familiar. She was afraid of her husband — but more afraid of herself. She knew he would hurt her. But she did not know whether the world might further hurt her without him.

It’s impossible to explain freedom to someone who has never experienced it. Concepts of independence, self-direction, and discovery fell on a blank slate. I felt as if I were pushing buttons on a cash register, and no numbers were coming up. For my friend, embracing independence required a leap of faith the distance of which I could not fully comprehend. The day she decided to leave her husband, her eyes radiated fear. She trembled, her body suffused with a terror so strong she wept in my arms from the pain of it.

But then, she lifted her head, dried her eyes, and went on. She gritted her teeth, dug through the uncertainty, fear, and loneliness, until one day she said, “My life is my own. I made it that way, and no one can hurt me again.”

Socially, it has become easier for people to leave abusive partners. We now recognize that staying married for marriage’s sake is not always best. And with that shift in thinking, we’ve adopted the perception that walking away from abuse is the right thing, the logical thing to do.

What is our common reaction to abuse survivors? Pity, perhaps. We feel sorry for the difficult experiences that bring them to places so low. We look at them and see fragility and sorrow. But while we may see crumpled wings, we must also recognize the cocoon and the shape of something being built, something beautiful and stronger than before — a being with dreams and distance to travel. Strength exists in uprooting the status quo, in finding the courage to stand alone.

On my own personal level, the choice between “fight” and “flight” arose in a decision to change my career path and escape what I call the “professional treadmill.”  

American society glorifies law and medicine as the epitome of success, the end result of a long road of study and hard work. But we often forget how prescribed that journey can be for the person who, at age 16 or 17, decides how the rest of his or her life will play out, with little room for variation. Science classes in high school lead to science classes in college, which lead to med school, rotations, internship, residency, and ultimately, work as a physician. I deeply admire the dedication it takes to complete that path; our society admires it also. But for me to have stayed on that path would have been dedication without courage.

The day I chose to stop pre-med classes was one of my highest points of courage. I did not feel like a quitter as the world would have had me believe. I felt free. I was not walking away from a fight. Rather, I felt myself gearing up for the greatest struggles I expect to face in my life: learning who I am, deciding what I will be, and how to make my contribution to this world before my life runs out.

Few things are scarier than stepping off that treadmill onto the regular sidewalk, where you have to choose your own way and get there under your own power. It’s terrifying to step out of the known into the unknown, to lift your feet off the ground and hope your wings have what it takes to go the distance. At those moments, only faith and courage are with you.

And yet stepping off, for me, was to experience texture — the rocks and sand and grass beneath my feet. It meant traveling in my own direction, not in a straight line, and it has led me to places the nervous high school junior who marked “pre-medicine” on her college applications never could have predicted or imagined.

In big and small ways we each have the power to forge new paths for ourselves, and we mustn’t let others think us cowards for defying expectations. We do have to fight many internal — and external — battles to escape, to remove ourselves from negative equations, to cancel out the things that drag us down.

Changing trajectories when our current paths are failing us is not weakness. It is decisive action. Slaves who ran for freedom knew that somewhere in the unknown was a better place for them, despite the world telling them “stay in your place.” Abuse survivors who find the courage to discover their independence do so only by leaping into uncertainty. Such actions must be taken, for to exist solely within prescribed boundaries is to risk never knowing our truths and our potential. By leaping, we learn to fly.

In The Fray Contributor