Defended

The Driveway

A couple months after the ICU, I was working on the truck. Mechanical work I probably shouldn't have been doing, but the self-sufficiency script is hard to override.

I was still unsteady and pretending not to be. G was there, one of my oldest friends. The one who drove me to the ER when I was dying, and had already seen me at my most vulnerable.

He saw me struggle and stepped in. Nothing dramatic, just a simple gesture. And of course, the knee-jerk response...

"I might be a little fuckered-up, but I'm not some helpless child."

Almost a joke. Underneath, fear wearing its most practiced clothes.

G is Gen X too, he knows all about walking it off, rubbing dirt on it, and you'll be fine. But he was a scout, brother a scout, dad a scout leader, mom as fierce as they come. Self-reliance, sincere care and looking out for his peeps were all the same thing. Core family values.

He wasn't treating me like a child. Even with one of the safest people I know, something braced, and the door stayed shut.

Not because the present was dangerous. Because the past was.

Weather and Fire

There's the generational weather most of us breathed, vigilance as baseline, rest feeling suspicious. That's one layer.

I learned early that being seen, heard, or needing anything at all invited real consequence. The second layer, the one most never saw.

"I'll give you something to cry about" wasn't just rhetorical tough-love noise. The something was already happening and you absorbed it, very quietly. You learned containment, steadiness and silence was the only path away from escalation.

By seventeen, I was sleeping in a car, finishing high school in gas station bathroom mirrors. Enough years like that, and bracing stops feeling temporary. It becomes structural.

When G reaches for the part in the driveway, his nervous system registers two guys working on a truck. Mine registers exposure and retreats on autopilot.

Even with people I'd trust with my life, I deflect, usually with some version of...

Same shit different day, plenty of people would trade places with me. I won't be some ungrateful fuck about it.

Flat, almost cheerful and technically true. Still, completely unreachable.

Kindness starts to look like something I have to manage, negotiate, or pay for later. For me, achievement and hyper-competence were shields. A way to exist without needing anything, without becoming a target, without giving anyone an opening.

Defense that kept me alive also kept people out.

The Gap

Nearly a decade from that driveway, I let a friend help me stand when my body faltered. No apology, explanation, or resistance. Just silence and care. It took a lot to get there and is still conditional.

The woods don't ask for social calculations. No hidden rules to scan, no history of violence to manage. Terrain, hunger, fatigue, clean inputs. Trees have no agenda, vigilance softens into simple awareness, for a while.

Out there, a small gap opens between feeling and reacting.

Room to notice the reflex to push away, not immediately following it, sometimes. If I've been away from the woods too long, the gap closes. The system goes right back into the only mode it has ever fully trusted to keep me alive.

Defended.

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Connective Tissue:

→ Dead Reckoning
→ Fieldcraft for the Feral Generation
→ Competence Mask

Related:

→ Your Body Isn't Broken, It's Adapted
→ What Regulation Made Possible
→ Before There Were Practices

Also:

→ Sleeping On Childhood Cortisol
→ Layer One: Start Where You Are
→ Raising the Floor: Tools That Helped Me Function Again

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* peer reflections: not medical or therapy advice. *