Outrunning ghosts in a place that has broken me

When the town you live in haunts you with past traumas.

Welcome to The Battle Cry, where we face the pain of life head on while fighting for joy in our cosmically good God. If you have been encouraged by my work, I’d invite you to become a free or paid subscriber (and extra glitter points if you share this Substack with a friend!)

It’s 1:30pm on a Monday afternoon, and I have wasted 2 hours driving around my dreary, godforsaken city, looking for somewhere to write. 

This is, in many ways, a first world problem, but the grief behind it is not.

Let me take you back a bit:

For the first time in months, I woke up this morning with some semblance of hope in my chest. The sun was shining (a rare enough occurrence in the English midlands), my chronically ill dog was actually doing well, my body was in marginally less pain than normal, and I had a mind to clean myself up and take myself outside of our tiny village – to give myself a chance for work to feel “worky” by blocking my day with a trip to a coffee shop.

If you work from home and spend day after day alone, you might understand how the act of changing out of sweatpants, making yourself feel even somewhat attractive, and hauling your butt out of the house becomes a big deal. Ever the idealist, I found myself oddly giddy. There is still a great deal that I don’t know about the city in which I currently live, and so I pictured myself stumbling across a new, cozy coffee shop and living out my dark academia dreams of clicking away at my keyboard with the light of my screen reflecting off my gold-rimmed glasses as I breathe in the steam of my cappuccino. Hey, Instagram tells us to romanticise our lives, right?

So I took the dog out for a walk (that, in itself, felt like a miracle feeding into my little treasure trove of hope), got home, threw my favourite summer dress on, and by 11:30am, I was on the road heading south – my first mistake.

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“How do I explain this…” I muttered to my husband as we walked down a dusty woodland path last Sunday afternoon, our dog toddling ahead of us. I stared at the thick woodland of trees to our left, wracking my brain for one of my trusty metaphors.

“Places feel like blankets,” I said finally, “Wherever I go, it’s like I’m physically connected to that place – like my whole body is wrapped in a blanket. And different blankets feel different. Weighted blankets can calm you, soft blankets can make you feel warm, familiar blankets can make you feel safe, and some blankets are beautiful, but the fabric isn’t quite right and they irritate your skin. Places feel like that, too.”

“Okay… ?” My husband said patiently, waiting for me to get to the point.

“Staffordshire feels like a beautiful blanket in the wrong kind of fabric.”

I was staring at the path ahead of us. It stretched wide with thoughtful cobbling, ferns and brush lining either side. Beyond, dark woodland loomed, beckoning us with the magic of moss-covered floors and the sparkling flecks of sunshine that always peek through a thick canopy of branches on a bright summer’s day.

On paper, our life in Staffordshire is so very ideal: we have beautiful woodlands and charming canals; we’re a 15-minute drive from a major city and all of the shop access convenience it offers; our dog’s medical team (yes, our poor boy has an entire medical team right now) is arguably one of the best in the country, which is literally enabling us to find a treatment plan that could save his life; our house has a driveway and a laundry room (for my American readers who might not realise, having enough space to park your car and do the laundry somewhere other than the kitchen is a big flippin’ deal); and even I am receiving better medical treatment due to my proximity to one of the best major hospitals north of Birmingham. 

But no matter where we go, or what new, sweet little pocket of countryside we find, there is something deep inside my soul that feels like it’s being wrapped in the wrong blanket – like I’m desperately trying to find comfort under a beautiful tartan pattern, but despite my best efforts, the texture of the wool keeps leaving a rash on my skin, and I just want to get it off. I cannot ease. I feel no sense of wonder or calm or safety, and having come from a Peak District town where I felt all of those things, the “itch” of this blanket is all the more distressing.

When we drive back over the border into Derbyshire, it’s like we’ve passed over some invisible forcefield. My entire body literally relaxes. I feel closer to God. I feel happier simply to be alive. The hills in the distance sing to me: “Home, home, home.”

Not only am I wrapping myself in the wrong kind of blanket here in the Staffordshire countryside, but certain “parts” of that blanket are more than just an itchy wool – some parts contain the nastiest thorns which, when I get too close, catch at my skin and leave trickles of blood in their wake…

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We moved to Staffordshire out of necessity. I took a job at a Christian organisation which, at the time, seemed like a dream job. The biggest issue, however, was that it was roughly 2 hours south of my hometown, and when the traffic was bad, that 2 hours could easily become 4. 

I started the job at the beginning of 2020, and then lockdown hit. Suddenly, I wasn’t having to worry about the commute, and it bought us a year of time before the world opened up again and the drive back to the office started to kill me. 

When we eventually moved, I remember feeling both grief and utter excitement. It felt like a fresh chapter – like the opportunity to build something entirely new. And yet, as I dropped the keys to our rental property through the letterbox of our old estate agents, I looked across the High Street to see, by chance, our next door neighbour walking up the pavement, and I fell into her arms and cried. Leaving a home behind felt like a death, no matter how hopeful our future prospects seemed.

This Peak District town had saved me. It was where I’d met my husband. It was where I’d run from a traumatic family breakdown and found the rolling hills opening their arms to me, singing the glory of God as they wrapped me up in a sense of family and community and belonging that I’d never known before.

I could only hope that we would find a similar kind of promise as we drove away, the sun setting at our backs, ready to start again…

But we didn’t.

So much good has happened since my husband and I moved: we got on the property ladder, he found his dream career, I learned a crap-ton about DIY and we turned a run-down house into a beautiful home. But despite the many blessings which I consciously try to count, this place in which we live now holds a capsule of pain, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

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I’m conscious of how I write this because I’m fully aware that the people involved in my story could easily stumble across my Substack, and I’m not interested in explaining why this piece isn’t intended to be a form of passive aggression. If, by some chance, you find me here (I know you’ll know who you are), please hear me: I love you (those aren’t trite words – I really mean them), and I pray blessings upon you, but I also need to take my story back.

While the storytelling part of me is desperate to pepper this essay with juicy details, something inside me knows that my only motivation in sharing those details would be to prove to myself (and to my readers) that my pain is valid, that the people who hurt me were wrong, that I’m not the dramatic victim they believed me to be. 

But I choose to believe that I have nothing to prove. 

So right now, all I need to say is this: when I started work at this Christian organisation, I felt welcomed into a family, a home – not just within the office walls but outside of them. I felt quickly and deeply known, and loved, and seen. Until I didn’t. Until I found myself questioning my own mind as people I loved and respected and trusted used their own spiritual gifts to very subtly gaslight me and subdue me into a fearful, angry view of the world (to this day, I’m not even sure they realised they were doing it, which complicates things all the more).

Before we moved, this city I now live in was introduced to me by the very people who, I thought, would make it feel like home. I spent mornings with them walking along the canal and evenings with them at the pub. I was confident that while this new home would be different, it would, like my first English town, be safe. Because safety comes in the people you surround yourself with, and I was certain that I was being wrapped in a new “blanket” of family.

My social life and my work life were inextricably linked, intensified all the more for the fact that it was a Christian environment (if you know, you know), and so when the threads started fraying at both ends, the blanket rapidly unravelled, and I found myself exposed, bare, wondering where the heck I was and how I could get away.

I still wake up sometimes, three years later, disoriented, wondering how I got here and when I’ll be able to go home.

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As I drove south, I had a mind to re-explore the small town which my former friends had first introduced me to (I essentially live in a place that is a main city surrounded by lots of tiny towns and villages). This town specifically was a 15-minute drive from my house and undoubtedly the best place to find a good coffee shop; but it was also a town I’d been actively avoiding because it dripped with the potent memories of people I’d loved and lost. I can still hear their voices, can still remember the first route we took through the High Street and down to the water as the sun shone down on us – just as it shone down on me now.

“You can choose to stop being a victim to them,” my coach had said to me recently. 

I could choose not to be controlled by those memories – not to forfeit entire towns and the pleasures therein to a person with whom I no longer speak. I could reclaim this place. I could reclaim my story.

So I parked up in the same place I always used to dump my car, pottering through a hidden back gate and onto the bustling High Street. The cafés and bars were littered with people, sitting down and enjoying their drinks in the sunshine, their dogs at their feet and their companions sitting across from them.

“Move here! Come live near us!” the ghost of a voice whispered in my head as I walked past the place they used to live.

“You’ll love it here,” I heard again as I walked past the bar where we’d once sat on a chilly Friday night, drinking and laughing at the drunk customers who were falling off their chairs around us.

I saw visions of myself sitting on their floor at midnight, tears streaming down my face as they prayed for me while a thunderstorm raged outside. I heard the sound of their laughter, the songs they’d play as we’d dance around in the kitchen, the parting words they spoke to me on my final day working in that office.

It’s been nearly a year since I left that organisation, and as I walked down this quaint, bubbling street, all I could feel was the nearness of time. The nearness of people who are now strangers.

And I resented the ghosts that were here now, breaking me. I resented the fact that I couldn’t escape feeling like the victim they implied I was. I resented how the passage of time did nothing to help this forlorn place feel any more like home. I resented my own resentment. And all I could do was turn around, get in my car, and drive back out.

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When I got on a plane at 18 years old, I felt the air of England fill my lungs like I’d been starved of oxygen. 5,000 miles behind me, the dusty air of California had choked me with its memories of heartbreak and family drug addiction and homelessness. Every dream I’d had in America was set on fire, and I walked away from the ashes and into a country that repaired me and offered me a new kind of freedom.

There is a lot to be said for leaving the place where your trauma happened. I cannot tell you how grateful I was to find myself living somewhere that carried no reminders of what happened to me and my family. That escape was a blessing, and at 18-years-old, I think I needed such a basic kindness from God to rediscover strength and learn what it means to heal.

But at 31, He has not offered me that same, easy escape. After 2 hours of driving around, entering coffee shops and sitting down with a drink before realising that said shop had no wifi or place to charge my laptop, I have finally ended up in a café that is only a 5-minute drive from my house and, annoyingly, a 10-minute drive from my old place of work.

The road outside was my morning commute, but the café inside houses none of my old ghosts. I still have this irrational fear that those old familiar faces might walk through the door, but I shake it off, and my fingers keep typing. The sunshine which lured me to hope this morning is long gone, and the familiar English rain is back.

And I wonder why God hasn’t taken me from this place like He once took me 5,000 miles away from the desert that reeked of abuse and pain. Why is He letting me sit here, totally forlorn in a city I hate, when a town which brings me utter joy and love and comfort lies a mere 2 hours north?

I was about to press publish on this piece, still unable to put my finger on this heavy question I’m grappling with, when I looked down at my phone, and it was like God answered me in live time. One of my favourite Substack writers, Jonathan M. Seidl, had tagged me in his Monday essay. His pieces are refreshingly shorter than my own, so I urge you to hop on over and read it, but in case you don’t, here’s the message that God just smacked me in the face with: sometimes He lets us go through hard things, sometimes He doesn’t, but there is ALWAYS goodness and love to be found, even in the tribulation. I know this, of course, in an abstract sense, but it’s interesting to be reminded of it when the truth of the words become my current reality.

No one talks about the pain attached to place. The pain of friendship breakups. I suppose the closest topics I find address the bewildered state we find ourselves in when we experience church abuse and are suddenly ostracised from our entire community. Where I am right now feels a lot like that because I moved away from my church, my town, my community, my home to come to a place entirely dependent on the community I’d found within my workplace. Now that that story has ended and this community has been lost, I find myself feeling, most days, very much alone. I surrendered my job and thereby lost my friends, and the new family I thought I’d call “home,” and now this city I live in is just that: a city. The blanket has been ripped off, and the emptiness of this place has been exposed for what it is – a leafy, hollow skeleton of livelihood, occasionally haunted by the ghosts of old trauma.

I don’t want to be misleading – I am by no means completely isolated. I have not lost everyone. I still keep in touch with old colleagues. I have a small but precious group of people who I see and cherish. But this place, this community, pales in comparison to the thriving web of love and safety waiting for me in the Peak District, and I find myself, most days, incredibly lonely.

Yet in this loneliness, in this ache, in this discomfort of the itchy blanket that I’m clawing to get off, I find myself asking what it means to bloom where God plants us; and I see things unfolding in sweet places like Substack which bear glimpses of the blooming.

In many ways, I feel starved of the basic things that my soul needs in order to grow. In other ways, I wonder if this loneliness might be an opportunity to hibernate, to dig deep into the ground, blocking out the ghosts, and do the only thing that I know how to do after every other comfort is stripped away: talk to God, and write.

I don’t know how to not be a victim to the pain of this place. But I do know how to claim that which God has said is mine: the ability to write, and write, and keep writing, and trust Him with every gift and passion and pain inside me.

Maybe it is that simple. Maybe it is enough. Maybe in my placeless state, in my world of mixed metaphors and emotionally charged journeys to coffee shops, I find myself in the companionship of a God who bids me to just keep going with what little joy and hope I have left. Maybe within this tribulation, my loneliness serves to remind me just how with me God is. Maybe I am learning to soak in the full meaning of Emmanuel. 

Maybe this is how we claim back our stories. 

We speak them out, in their rawness, and let the reverberations ripple across the water until the waves of God’s redeeming presence prove enough to carry us home.

All my love,

P.S. Hitting that little “heart” button on my essays does so much to help the work I do reach more people and, hopefully, point them towards the hope of Jesus. If you can spare the time to tap that button, I’d be so grateful.