Why I Run

Writer: Sean Hotchkiss

There’s a classic country song by the band Alabama that goes “I’m in a hurry to get things done/I rush and rush until life’s no fun.”

I don’t think it was a coincidence that “I’m in a Hurry” was one of my father’s favorite tunes. My dad was constantly in motion. He drove fast. He talked fast. He always had a new car, a new office, a new P.O. Box. Like a shark, he feared if he stopped moving, he’d die. Just when you thought you had him figured out, he was already gone, already on to the next thing.  

This is the man I learned from growing up. And it’s only been in the last few years that I’ve seen how well I learned. In fact, the more self-reflection I engage in, the more I’ve realized that as much as we try to avoid it, we become our parents.

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” —James Thurber

My father’s frenzied lifestyle finally drove him to take his own life in 2005. My guess is he was tired of running. In that act, he passed me the baton. And I had been preparing for this moment. With my dad’s suicide as an excuse, I proceeded to go on quite a fine run myself starting at 22 – running away from jobs, relationships, therapists, even cities, really anything or anyone who tried to keep me around or get close.

In the winter of 2015, still reeling from a recent breakup and surveying the damage of my fast life to that point, I went to visit my mother in Florida. She’s a recovering addict, counselor and therapist. She put a book in my hand: The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man by John Lee. 

“This helped me after your father left,” she said.  

Lee’s book blew me away, because I felt I was reading my own story on its pages. He had a name, borrowed from his mentor Robert Bly, for guys like us: Flying Boys. 

Flying Boys are men with unresolved childhood wounds who are constantly on the run. They are terrified of intimacy, because their own families were so chaotic that they learned that to be close or committed to something or someone equals a sort of death. They are constantly in search of a new rush – a drug, a relationship, a degree, a gadget, a trip, or an idea – to distract them from the agony that exists within them. They are bored by the every day, and they fly off whenever things get too stale or normal.

Flying Boys have long been romanticized in American movies, rock n’ roll and literature: They’re the James Dean or Steve McQueen-types, the rebels hitting the road with only a full tank of gas, a guitar and a pack of smokes. For my father’s generation, this kind of man was a God. He didn’t wait around for direction. He drove out West chasing adventure. A “man on the move” is an attractive archetype for potential partners, too, until you actually try to love one. You can’t make a life with a “Flying Boy,” because just as you’re planning your future together, inside his head and his body he’s counting the days until he hits the road towards freedom again. And all attempts to control him will just push him further away. 

I see a lot of us running these days. I see it in the ways we live lives that are marked by almost constant distraction: scrolling in our phones, working 18 hour days, drinking or smoking ourselves silly, exercising to excess, traveling around the globe reciting that mantra: “Not all who wander are lost.” 

What would happen if we slowed down, or even stopped running altogether? 

Well, it’d be like the old A.A. mantra that says: “Getting high is like driving around throwing fast food wrappers into the backseat of your car, and getting sober is hitting the brakes: all the trash comes flying up and covers your windshield.” We run because we’re scared of what would be there, waiting for us, if we stopped. We stay busy and “loud”, because we fear the parts of ourselves that would speak up if we were silent. 

As I committed myself to self-reflection – getting involved with psychodrama therapy, twelve step programs, and men’s groups – I began to slow down. And I began to see that the pain I’d been running from was the same pain my father had been avoiding. My dad was an orphan adopted by alcoholics, who never felt safe or loved. He believed to be close to someone meant danger. So he ran from everything. And because I had a Flying Boy father who was constantly trying to dodge his own inner demons, the generational pain was passed down, and I became a runner, too. Many of us, when we enter therapy for the first time, are actually doing the work of generations – we’re breaking a cycle of pain in our lineage. It’s heroic emotional work that is hellish to face, and doesn’t go away overnight. So we have to go easy on ourselves.

When I got sober from alcohol and drugs in 2017, I came out oflot of denial, and saw my tendency to run in new ways. I observed myself, often with horror, find more and more excuses to run away from any relationship that became too intimate: I ran away from therapists, twelve-step sponsors, girlfriends, lovers, a pet, anything where I was being asked to commit increasing amounts of time, work, and vulnerability. I learned in those years that I had been holding to the illusion that I could – through careful manipulation and micromanagement – escape intimate relationship all together. And that illusion was keeping me walled off and alone. 

When you confront a runner, it’s common to hear things like: “Get off my back while I figure it out,” or “If I can just slow down, I’ll figure it out,” but the main challenge for someone who has spent a lifetime running isn’t the turning of more wheels, or more time spent alone, it’s in learning to be in relationship to people, places, and things, and, in some cases, to be totally still, to watch, to observe, and to not act on every impulse to bolt or check out. I’ve fooled myself over the years into believing that running was the heroic thing to do. I was brave to run off in search of my ideals and my dreams—if something didn’t work for me, fuck that, I was gone. I was chasing the sun off into some great expanse of the unknown. But I understand now I’ve tricked myself. Perhaps, the hardest part for me of identifying as a runner, or a Flying Boy, has been the friction between my desires to be in committed partnership and the almost violent inner urges to bolt. It feels at times like staying could equal great pain or even annihilation, but those fears are exactly what keep me shut down and removed.

Meditation has been an amazing tool for gaining access to stillness in my life. As has taking breaks from highly addictive things: my phone, alcohol and drugs, sex and pornography – and people as a way of examining my relationship to them. Sometimes just remaining in the day without answering the call to check out or indulge is the hardest part. But it pays off if I’m willing to sit with the feelings, and then be vulnerable enough to share them with someone else. When I share, I let others in, which creates connection, and makes me feel less alone. It quells my self-sabotaging belief that if I run and hide, I won’t be hurt. Because it’s actually the opposite: As long as I keep running, I’ll keep hurting.

“You’ve proven you can run, Sean,” my therapist Charles likes to say. “Your challenge now is to stay.”