What Desperation Looks Like From the Outside

The times I’ve been told I was brave, I took it as a compliment. Obviously. I’m not going to interrupt someone complimenting me.

But I knew the secret behind my bravery: most of the time, it was just absolute desperation to resolve an issue.

Bravery and survival are not the same thing, although from across the room they can look remarkably similar.

When I picked up my life in Toronto and moved to LA several years ago, people told me I was brave. The truth was I was desperate. Desperate to get away from an abusive ex I had a restraining order against, and desperate to get away from a collection of stalkers I had somehow accumulated through the dog rescue world, which is not a sentence you imagine having to say when you decide to help dogs.

It didn’t feel brave. It felt mostly scary and disorienting.

I think it was the right move.

My time in LA has been cinematic, to say the least, but it wasn’t part of some grand vision. There was no vision board with palm trees on it. I wasn’t manifesting anything. I was trying to solve a problem, and Los Angeles was very far away from the problem.

Sometimes distance is a strategy.

Years later, after years of misdiagnoses, I was finally diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening illness. Again, people told me I was brave. Brave for going from doctor to doctor, for refusing to accept the answers I was given, for eventually finding my own “Dr. House,” someone willing to map out my chart and figure out what everyone else had missed.

He did.

But I didn’t feel brave then either.

I knew I was dying if I couldn’t get an answer. I also knew there was no mysterious adult coming to take over. No one else was knocking on hospital doors or calling random doctors. Apparently I was the adult, which felt like an administrative error.

I was desperate because I didn’t want to die.

And so I did the things.

And I didn’t.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about the word brave. It makes survival sound much more dignified than it usually is. From the outside, you see someone making enormous decisions and think: courage. From the inside, sometimes it’s just a woman frantically pressing every button because one of them has to open the door.

I wonder sometimes what I would do if I weren’t desperate.

What would bravery look like if nothing were chasing me? If nobody were hurting me, if my body weren’t failing me, if there were two perfectly acceptable doors and I simply chose the one that frightened me more because I wanted whatever was behind it?

Maybe that’s bravery.

Or maybe bravery was never about having a choice.

Sometimes you have to pull the goalie on your own life. Perhaps that’s a very Canadian philosophy.

Maybe bravery is just what desperation looks like from the outside, once you’re the kind of person who turns it into motion instead of collapse.

So the next time someone tells me I’m brave, I’ll still say thank you, but I won’t correct them anymore. I did what I had to do because the other options weren’t humane. Maybe that’s where real bravery comes from. Not fearlessness, but desperation put to good use.