What Happens When You Stop Running

Dear Sovereign:Julia Faire became a famous actress because she never grieved a terrible loss.That is not a criticism. It is the most honest thing I can say about how she built her life. Eleven years before the story of my second novel begins, something happened that should have unmade her. Instead of allowing it, she ran. She left everything behind, moved to Los Angeles, and poured herself into becoming someone extraordinary.And she did. The running was fuel. The thing she refused to feel became the engine underneath everything she built. Until the day she accepted a role she realized she could not play. Until the performance itself, the very thing that had been protecting her, cracked the container open and let eleven years of unfelt feeling come flooding in.Julia’s story is fictional and part of the Sovereign Women series, but what happened to her is not. You have your own version of what she was carrying.What We Do With What We Cannot FaceWomen are extraordinarily capable of functioning through feeling.You learned early that the grief can wait because the children need dinner. When rage is not appropriate, you folded it into something quieter. Fear, if you allow it to be as large as it actually is, will undo everything you have worked so hard to hold together.So you do what Julia did. You run away from these painful feelings. Not always literally. Sometimes you run into achievement so consuming there is no space left for what is underneath. Or you submerge yourself into a spiritual practice that is genuinely real but is also, if you are honest, a way of staying above the feeling rather than inside it. It could be you lost yourself in service, in busyness, in the performance of having it more together than you actually do.The running works. That is the most important thing to understand about it. It is not dysfunctional because it is a survival adaptation. A woman who runs from what she cannot yet face is a woman who found a way to survive something that might otherwise have broken her.The problem is not the running. The problem is what it costs you over time.What Suppressed Feeling Actually DoesThe body keeps a faithful record of everything the mind refuses to process.This is not metaphor. It is the lived experience of women the world over.The unfelt grief has to live somewhere and your body is the place. The swallowed rage takes up residence in your jaw and your chest that has been tight for so long you stopped noticing. The shame that was never allowed curls into the body who makes you small. The unspoken fear is stuck as low-grade anxiety that you believe is manageable.The identity you built on top of all of it requires continuous maintenance. Because the thing you are running from is not getting smaller. It is getting heavier. The faster you run, the more energy it takes to stay ahead of it.The main character in Book 2 of the Sovereign Women series is Julia Faire. Her container was to repress her grief and use it as fuel for her acting career. Yours might be your professional identity, your role as a mother, or the carefully curated appearance of a life that is working. The thing to recognize is not what you created. It’s when your creation prevents you from ever stopping long enough to feel what is underneath.The truth is that what is underneath never goes away. It waits with extraordinary patience. And it will find a crack in the container eventually, and the grief will begin to seep through the crack. Your carefully constructed persona can’t handle the stress. One morning you wake up and cannot remember why any of it matters.The crack is not failure. The crack is the invitation.“There is a crack in everything.That’s how the light gets in.” ― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968What Stops the RunningI want to say something honest about healing that the wellness industry rarely admits.You cannot think your way into feeling what you have been avoiding. Understanding your patterns with sufficient sophistication does not make the feeling unnecessary. Understanding is not the same as feeling. And feeling what is underneath is the only way through.What stops the running is not readiness. Nobody who has been running for eleven years, or twenty, feels ready to stop. Readiness is another story the mind tells to defer what the body already knows is necessary.What stops the running is usually this: The running finally costs more than the stopping, and something in you makes a quiet, exhausted decision that you are done. Either way, the stopping is not graceful. It is not a conscious spiritual choice arrived at in meditation. It is usually a woman in some ordinary place, out of argument and out of road, finally willing to feel what she has been outrunning because she has nothing left to outrun it with.That is where Julia finds herself at the beginning of Sovereign Women Book 2. And in my experience, it is where transformation becomes possible for the first time.What Is Waiting on the Other SideHere is what I know about the feeling that has been waiting.It is not as bottomless as you believe it is. The fear that you will fall into it and never find your way back is a fear about the feeling, not a truth about it. Feelings move and change, because they are not permanent states. They are energy that needs to pass through the body, and when you stop preventing that from happening, they do.What is waiting on the other side is not the absence of pain. It is the absence of the weight of carrying pain that has never been allowed to move. And underneath that weight, the self that was there before the running started. The one who knew things before you began running, using competence, achievement, and the performance of being fine as your persona. She has not gone anywhere. She has been waiting, with the same patience as the feeling, for the woman who ran to finally turn around and come home.That homecoming is what sovereignty actually feels like in the body.Not arrival. Return.An InvitationSovereign Women: Book 2 is the story of Julia Faire finally stopping. I wrote it for every woman who recognizes the running, who has built something real on top of something unprocessed, and who is beginning to sense that the container has a crack in it.You do not have to be ready to stop running to read it. You only have to be willing to sit with a woman who was not ready either, and watch what Love does when she finally runs out of road.The book will be available soon. Subscribe to The Sovereign Voice on Empowered Way and I will share the news here first.And if something in what I have written today has named something you have been carrying without language for it, the first book in the series is available on Amazon. To your presence,KathrynIf you know a woman who may see herself here, please share this article. The more we support each other, the more Love moves through us. That is how the world shifts.P. S. If you haven’t read the first book in the series, it’s waiting for you on Amazon. Sovereign Women: Love is a Revolutionary Choice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com