I think I’ve been running my whole life.
Not literally, which is almost funny, because running is probably the one physical activity I have never managed to properly start.
I can do Pilates. Yoga. HIIT. Strength training. I learned swimming. Managed to stand on my head for no practical reason. I try to dance sometimes. Give me some mildly torturous exercise that requires balance, concentration, and unnecessary equipment, and I will probably try it.
Running, though? For years, it has lived mostly in my New Year’s resolutions.
*Start running.*
*Run regularly.*
*Become one of those people who run at sunrise and somehow look emotionally stable while doing it.*
Never happened.
And yet, if I look at the shape of my life, I have been running constantly.
When I feel overwhelmed, I go somewhere else. Back to my hometown. To another city. Another country. Another trip. Another room. When I cannot deal with something emotionally, I work. I am very good at that one.
Give me an uncomfortable emotion and there is a very good chance that within five minutes I will somehow remember an article that urgently needs editing, an inbox to organize, a plan to make. Some people sit with their emotions. Apparently, I open Google Docs.
Busyness can look very responsible from the outside while functioning beautifully as escape.
And movement does something similar.
There is always somewhere else to go.
The strange part is that lately, I have started wondering whether all this running has been doing two opposite things at once. Helping me escape myself. And helping me find myself.
I started thinking about this because I actually ran
I should probably warn you that this article might get a little intense. Not because something dramatic happened to me today.
A few days ago, I went for a walk while listening to music. Then a song about running came on. And for some reason, I started running.
Not jogging. Not exercising. Not beginning a fitness journey.
I just ran.
Fast enough that my breathing changed. Fast enough that my body suddenly became impossible to ignore. Fast enough that the numbness cracked.
And for a few minutes, it felt incredible.
I felt lighter. Faster. Almost euphoric.
More importantly, I felt something. That has been surprisingly difficult lately.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been walking around with this strange emotional numbness that I can’t quite explain. Not dramatically numb, nothing cinematic. More like there is a wall between me and everything I should be feeling. I know what should hurt. I know what should make me angry. I know when I am lonely. I can explain all of it very well. But knowing what I should feel and actually feeling it are very different things. Instead, everything seems to sit somewhere lower in my body.
Sometimes so low that it becomes nausea.
There are moments when I genuinely feel as if there is too much inside me and my body wants to throw it out. Not metaphorically in some elegant, literary way. I mean it almost literally. Like those exaggerated anime scenes where a character experiences an emotion so intensely that the body simply refuses to contain it anymore.
Obviously, actually vomiting wouldn’t magically solve anything. But the sensation itself feels strangely accurate.
There is too much in here. Something needs somewhere to go. And apparently, for me, one of the places it wants to go is forward.
Fast.
I’ve spent most of my life running
I kept thinking about it afterward because some of the rare moments in my life when I have felt truly alive have had the same ingredients: speed, movement, music, intensity.
Fast movement, especially.
Riding on the back of a motorcycle. Cycling ridiculously fast with music in my ears. Swimming. Running. Dancing.
There is something about speed that makes me feel intensely alive. Maybe because speed does not leave much room for self-consciousness.
When you are moving quickly enough, your world becomes wonderfully simple.
There is the road. There is your breath. There are your legs. There is music. There is wind. There is your body doing something instead of your mind analysing the fact that your body exists.
For a few minutes, I stop watching myself from the outside. I stop asking whether I am reacting correctly. Whether I am being too much.
Apparently my nervous system has a very specific aesthetic.
There was one run recently that felt different
A little while ago, I was away with someone I care about. At some point, something happened between us that sounds small when reduced to facts.
I was already irritated. Then I became physically frightened during an activity. There was irony at exactly the wrong moment. Later came an argument. Then the familiar, horrible feeling of wanting to leave immediately.
Except leaving wasn’t simple.
And something about the situation suddenly reminded me of dynamics I had witnessed growing up. My rational mind could tell the difference. My body apparently had less interest in nuance.
It wanted out.
And when it couldn’t immediately get out, something in me seemed to shut down instead.
The next day, life continued. The weather was beautiful. Everything looked normal.
But I didn’t feel normal.
Eventually, I decided I would walk for a while. And then I started running.
Fast.
I kept running.
Music in my ears.
Road in front of me.
No conversation. No explanation. No one asking me why. No one determining my pace.
I just moved.
And it felt unbelievably freeing.
The night before, every part of me had wanted to leave. The next morning, my body finally got to perform the action it had been asking for.
Go.
So I went.
And for those few minutes, I felt like myself again.
Then my headphones fell out of my pocket and broke, because apparently even profound psychological realizations are not exempt from stupid logistical problems.
There may actually be a biological reason movement can feel this powerful
None of this means running “releases trauma” from the body in some literal way. The science is more complicated — and more interesting — than that.
Emotion isn’t something that happens exclusively inside the brain. Stress can produce very real nausea. Our emotional experiences are embodied, so it makes sense that altering what the body is doing can alter the emotional state we’re experiencing.
The “runner’s high” also appears to involve the endocannabinoid system rather than simply an “endorphin rush.” It’s also difficult to conduct an elaborate internal trial about everything wrong with your life while simultaneously trying to breathe and avoid falling into a bush.
Then there’s music. Running moves you through space. Dance lets emotion move through you.
And then there is the nausea
This is the part I understand least.
Lately there have been moments when I feel physically full of emotion — not in a poetic sense, full like something is sitting in my stomach. Sometimes I feel like I could vomit.
I don’t mean vomiting would be therapeutic — deliberately making yourself sick is not emotional processing. But the sensation has made me think about how much we describe emotion through the body. I can’t stomach this. I swallowed my anger. My heart sank. Language figured out long ago that emotions don’t stay politely inside the skull.
And lately my body’s metaphor seems to be: there is too much in here, get it out. Maybe it’s anger I didn’t express. Maybe loneliness.
Screaming. Running. Dancing. Crying. It’s as if my body has an emergency evacuation plan for emotions while my mind keeps insisting everything is under control.
Maybe running away and running through are not the same thing
This is where my therapist’s question gets harder.
What am I running from?
Conflict. Feeling trapped. Other people’s expectations. The possibility that if I stop moving long enough, I might have to sit with everything underneath.
Some of my running is avoidance. There are conversations that eventually need to happen, feelings that can survive multiple flights and cross borders without a visa.
But there’s another kind of running too. Running through something. Movement that doesn’t numb emotion but gives it somewhere to exist. Dance is the clearest example — you can’t call dancing away from your problems geographically. You finish in the same room. Yet you may not be emotionally in the same place.
Maybe the distinction isn’t movement versus stillness. Maybe it’s avoidance versus contact.
You can sit perfectly still for ten years while avoiding yourself. And perhaps you can run down a road for ten minutes and finally encounter something you’ve been refusing to feel.
3 different urges hiding inside the same impulse
The more I think about it, the more I suspect there are at least three.
- Escape: I need distance from this.
- Release: There is something trapped in me that needs to come out.
- Aliveness: I need to feel my body intensely enough to know I’m here.
They can look almost identical from the outside.
A person runs. But internally, those runs can mean completely different things.
One might be avoidance. Another might be expression. Another might simply be an attempt to feel something strong enough to break through numbness.
Speed does that for me. It creates intensity strong enough to penetrate emotional shutdown.
Wind.
Exertion.
Acceleration.
Music.
Breath.
Muscles burning.
It also gives me agency.
*My legs are moving me.* *I choose the speed.* *I choose where I go.*
For a few minutes, I am not reacting. I am acting. And that feels enormous.
Dance taught me something running couldn’t
Dance complicates the whole “running away” theory because dancing does not actually take you anywhere. You can dance for an hour and still be standing in the same room.
So maybe what I’m craving isn’t always escape.
Maybe it is expression.
Years ago, I attended a movement workshop where we were encouraged to let emotions move through the body instead of trying to make everything look graceful.
That experience stayed with me.
Not because I suddenly became enlightened through interpretive dance. But because I remember how unusual it felt to let my face show something.
To move without trying to look correct.
To allow the body to become part of the emotional experience rather than something I was supposed to control from the neck down.
There was another experience I keep thinking about too.
We were gathered around a fire in the snow. As part of the exercise, we were symbolically burning the masks we wear.
At some point, I felt this enormous impulse to scream. I remember asking whether I could.
And the person leading the exercise simply said: Do it.
So I screamed.
Then other people started screaming too. And for some reason, it was one of the most freeing things I have ever experienced.
No carefully constructed explanation. No psychologically sophisticated wording. No “what I’m trying to communicate is…”
Just sound.
Raw, loud, ridiculous sound. And something in me loved it.
Sometimes a scream is hiding a sentence
My therapist recently said something that complicated this memory in an interesting way. She told me that sometimes she deliberately does not let people scream during therapy. Because occasionally the scream becomes a substitute.
A person screams instead of saying: I am angry with you. You hurt me. I needed you. I didn’t want that. I’m terrified.
And when the scream is taken away, the sentence finally has to come out.
I love that distinction. Because I think there is a kind of expression that helps us avoid language. But I also think there is another kind that comes after language has reached its limit.
Sometimes you know exactly why you are angry. You have analysed the situation. you have identified the trigger. You have drawn a conceptual diagram in your head linking Past Event A to Current Emotional Response B.
Congratulations.
Your body may still be furious. Insight is not necessarily the same thing as release.
Sometimes I can explain my emotions beautifully while barely feeling them. That might actually be one of my better coping mechanisms: turn the feeling into an idea. Study it. Name it. Make it interesting.
Anything except fully experience the inconvenient thing.
Which might explain why running, dancing and screaming feel so different.
They do not ask me to understand first.
So maybe I don’t need to become “a runner”
I know myself well enough to predict what happens next. I could turn this realization into a project — buy running shoes, download an app — and three weeks later it would become another thing I was failing to optimize.
Maybe the point isn’t that I need to become a runner. Maybe I just need to become more curious about movement — about what happens when my body asks for it, why dancing changes my mood, why speed feels like freedom.
Maybe I need to learn the difference between two impulses that look almost identical from the outside.
I need to run because I cannot face this.
And: I need to run because this is how I face it.
I don’t know the difference yet. Maybe that’s something I’ll spend a long time learning.
But today I went for a walk feeling emotionally numb. A song came on. I started running. My legs moved faster. My breathing changed. For a few minutes there was no past to analyze and no future to organize. Just movement. And something inside me moved too.
We spend a lot of time telling people to stop running. Stop escaping. Stay. Face what hurts. Sometimes that’s exactly what we need to do.
But I’m beginning to wonder whether there are moments when the body knows something the mind has forgotten. Sometimes emotions have nowhere to go. And sometimes, before we can explain them, understand them, or find the right words for them, the body simply says: run.
