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This morning I was running through some fierce winter wind that nearly blew wig off and definitely made me want to quit. That’s when I looked to my right and saw a shipwreck; or, rather, a small boat run aground on the cove beach. It was gathering a group of onlookers who were shrugging and pointing while it sat askew, tipped nearly parallel with the sand, unmoored from its original spot and cast to shore.

A few minutes later, I passed another, smaller boat, in the same predicament. The winds can be rough around here.

One of my favourite stories from the Ancient Near East starts off as a travelogue of a group’s journey around the Mediterranean; the group even landed at a place called Fair Havens, which sounds delightful. It was their last stop before setting sail again and heading straight into a storm. One of the louder members of the group–a prisoner, no less–told the rest of them, after days of starvation and all hopes dashed of being saved, that there were still rocky times ahead but that they would make it. Then he rounded out his good news/bad news speech with one of my favourite lines: “Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island.”

I feel like this could be a through-line for my life. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: New York. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: anxiety. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: autism. Nevertheless, we must run aground on some island: Australia.

In the story, the statement was fulfilled because the crew chose to shipwreck; it was the only option available other than death. And though less dramatic, my own choices (or lack of them) felt like they had similar stakes: stay who you were (and die to who you could become), or run aground on this island that is not called Fair Havens and live.

Sometimes it’s the shipwrecks that save us, is all I’m saying.

Author Diane Dokko Kim writes, “But had my child been like everyone else, I wouldn’t have discovered how passionately I could love, how bitterly I could weep, how desperately I could pray, or how fiercely I could fight. Disability demolished my pride and self-sufficiency; it remapped the boundaries of my narrow mind–and even smaller heart–to grow expanses of sorrow, surrender, and submission.”

I have been forcefully unmoored from so many safe spots. Lockdown, with all its gifts and uncertainties, is currently jerking me around. A move across the world with its ensuing reflection-from-a-distance of everything I used to believe? That’ll do it too. I run now, literally and metaphorically, along waters that were at one point in my life completely foreign to me. Now they’re my everyday.

And when I really, I mean really, look around at where I’ve currently been grounded, there’s an element to it that feels like protection. Because sometimes that’s what a lack of other options, what forced stillness, is: protection from the howling wind found only in running aground, the fierce surf no longer able to fling me around recklessly. Because I am trapped? No. Embedded.