I was twelve years old when I began planning my escape, but I don’t remember thinking of it that way at the time. There was no suitcase hidden beneath my bed or a secret map tucked inside a drawer. My plan was much simpler—I would become successful.
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in a home that didn’t always feel safe, I understood something very early: if I wanted a different life, I would have to create it. And to create it, I needed options. The logic made perfect sense to my twelve-year-old mind. Achievement would lead to success. Success would create options. And options would give me the freedom to get as far away as possible from the life I was afraid might otherwise be waiting for me.
So, I began achieving, and the plan worked remarkably well. I became a paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and found independence. I graduated from college and later earned a master’s degree, creating opportunities I once couldn’t have imagined. Eventually, I rose into the highest levels of corporate leadership and achieved the financial freedom I had dreamed of.
Every accomplishment carried me a little farther from the life I was running from and a little closer to the one I thought would finally make me feel safe. But it never did, so I never stopped running. There was always another accomplishment. Another goal. Another way to create just a little more distance between the woman I had become and the frightened little girl who had quietly planned her escape.
Somewhere along the way, I believed I had put the past behind me. I was ambitious, driven, and competitive. I still am, but what I didn’t understand was that something else was woven into those qualities. I thought I was simply a high achiever, someone who was wired to chase the next goal. But woven into that ambition was a pattern born from survival, one I had carried with me into a life where I no longer needed it.
The ways we learn to survive can serve us remarkably well, but I wasn’t trying to survive anymore. The danger had passed, my circumstances had changed, and I had options and freedom. I had built the very life that twelve-year-old girl believed would finally make her safe.
That way of surviving had expired, but I was still living by it.
I can see it now in moments I barely noticed at the time. When I graduated from Airborne School, I didn’t celebrate with the rest of my class. I immediately began preparing for life at Fort Bragg. When I was promoted to project manager and received a considerable pay increase, I didn’t treat myself to a celebratory lunch. I went to my boss and asked to take on the biggest project our division had been assigned to date. Years later, when I was overwhelmingly elected class president of a highly competitive leadership program and became the first person to receive both of its coveted leadership awards, while my friends cried in celebration, I was already thinking about the next mountain to climb.
I rarely celebrated what I had accomplished. I simply checked a mental box and kept moving. The achievement itself was never the reward. The chase was. Success was simply me keeping a promise I had made to my twelve-year-old self—Get out. Create options. Stay safe. Achievement was what I was supposed to do.
Understanding that forced me to confront an uncomfortable question. If achievement had been intertwined with survival for so much of my life, how could I know that the things I wanted now weren’t simply a continuation of the same pattern? The answer wasn’t found in what I was pursuing. It was found in the WHY.
I am still ambitious, driven, and highly competitive. I still set goals that sometimes make people look at me and say, Bless your heart. And I hope I always will. But I am no longer checking boxes on the way to safety. I pursue things now because they bring me joy. Because I’m curious. Because they challenge me. Because I believe I am using the gifts God gave me in service of the purpose He intended for my life. The desire to achieve didn’t need to disappear. I just needed to understand what was driving it.
Maybe that’s the expiration date no one talks about. Not the moment when something that once saved us becomes bad, but the moment when a way of surviving no longer serves us. When the circumstances that created it have changed, but we haven’t noticed that we’re still living by the old rules.
Sometimes the behaviors remain useful. Sometimes they’re even part of who we are. But our WHY may need to change.
Most of us have something we learned to do because, at one point in our lives, we needed it. We became independent. Accommodating. Funny. Invisible. Indispensable. Successful. We learned how to anticipate, protect, perform, please, achieve, or endure. Whatever it was, it worked. It helped us get through something we needed to get through. There is no shame in that.
But perhaps there comes a time when we owe ourselves the kindness of asking whether we still need it. Not because the person we became was somehow wrong. Not because the thing that helped us survive needs to be discarded. But because we are allowed to examine the old rules and decide which ones still belong in the life we’re living now.
I spent decades running toward safety before realizing I had already arrived. What are you still doing because, once upon a time, it helped keep you safe?
