Finding Safety at 3:45 A.M. at the Price Chopper

Because when it comes to feeling safe, you gotta do, what you gotta do.

Nothing — absolutely nothing — could compete with grocery shopping at 3:45 a.m. Of course, it took me a long while to figure this out. Months, in fact.

Photo credit: Frank Chamaki

Months spent testing and tracking every possible variable I could control at the 24-hour Price Chopper near my part time job. (I was raised by nerds, after all, and statistical significance was discussed more than hobbies in my family. So building a spreadsheet to track people, shifts, and shopping trends didn’t feel weird whatsoever.)

But unlike the trends in big data my dad identified, I wasn’t looking for the trend. I was searching for the outlier — the time when no one was there at all. And 3:45 a.m. was precisely that.

It was the time of night cashiers were toasted. Dartmouth frat bros had finally called it on their beer runs. And the turbo early risers of the Upper Valley — the ones that run a half marathon or bike a “casual 50” before heading to work had yet to arrive for their protein bar or cold-pressed juice.

Yes, 3:45 a.m., when the aisles and the parking lot were a ghost town, that was the best time to grocery shop, indeed.

My outfit was as well-considered as the hour.

I even considered my “wedding outfits” as camouflage. A girl coming back from a wedding? She wouldn’t be shoplifting at 3 a.m., right?

Although a baseball cap pulled down tight, oversized hoodie and raggedy grey sweats felt most comfortable, presenting myself as “put together” was key. The night shift had to trust that I wasn’t up to something, that I wasn’t about to pocket a fifth of tequila or gin — so ‘polished preppy’ it was.

And once a week, when my cupboards lay bare and I couldn’t procrastinate any longer, I’d awaken to my alarm at 3:15 a.m., throw on a collared shirt and slacks and add the finishing touch before walking out my door: my grandmother’s pearls.

And then, once there, in the one 24-hour grocery store that had the first self-checkout the Upper Valley had seen, I’d commit to embody casual confidence (the exact feeling I didn’t possess), as I mastered the aesthetic of invisibility so that I could feel safe… just a little bit safe while grocery shopping.

The absurdity of this is not lost on me now. Spreadsheets to optimize human avoidance. Alarms in the middle of the night. Preppy outfits, to boot!

But I was a different human back then.

I was plagued by visual and command hallucinations, fugue states, chronic suicidality and an outrageously inconvenient incontinence response to seeing people, my life was devoted to one thing and one thing alone — survival.

And although my doctors believed that survival hinged on facing my fears, for me, it actually hinged on the belief that I could build a life beyond them. Yes, my survival hinged on feeling safe long enough to remember that this — this one moment where I could catch my ever-heightened breath — that, was what I was working for.

Safety, in this context, was of course relative.

Nothing felt safe back then. I mean, how could it?

Visual hallucinations stormed my viewshed constantly while command hallucinations echoed suggestions of murder and suicide over and over again in whispers of contempt. My life revolved around this quest for safety, an endless battle of problem-solving against the endless onslaughts for a chance — just a single chance to feel safe in my being and body.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about that time in my life a lot…

…how the world and my reality felt like they were entirely too much to handle…

…how paralyzed I would become with even just one foot out the door.

…and how endlessly stuck my life seemed: one day of suicidality, isolation and psychosis at a time.

The onslaught I felt back then — though entirely individual in my reality — is how our collective existence feels to my system right now.

And though the hallucinations have been swapped for news alerts and the isolation is one of exhaustion and not agoraphobia, the reckoning of this world’s brokenness has me once again stuck, paralyzed and living in fear.

As easy as it is to get lost in that quagmire, like I did.

But that was before I said, normal be damned. I’m going to grocery shop alone whenever and however the hell I want to. Because we all need to eat, damnit — both physically and metaphorically.

I see that some things are helping too. Most notably, the same things that helped me get my weekly groceries back then, help me now:

The the absolute dismissal of what might be “normal” in society eyes and the pursuit of safety, on my terms in my being.

Yes, right now, as I still continue to process the Harvard summit, what’s helping is not preppy pearls of invisibility, shoes that don’t squeak on linoleum or 3:15 a.m. alarms to go to the store.

Instead, it’s snuggling Waffle and Tug for three hours a night while rewatching The Summer I Turned Pretty over and over again (team Conrad for life). It’s turning my camera off and dork dancing in the middle of zoom calls. It’s cancelling plans that overwhelm me for no explicit reason and throwing out every single one of my bras.

Begone, cruel and stupid underwire.

Yes, those are homemade cheese fries, and yes they were goddamned delicious. (And no, I didn’t share).

Yes. What’s helping is at least once a day, unabashedly doing whatever feels safe — to me, in the moment.

And this week, as we weather yet another unraveling of our country as we know it (though I know it’s a privilege in its own right to do), I encourage you to throw out whatever standards of “normal” are capturing you in fear. Normal doesn’t exist anyway — and relentlessly pursue your own safety.

Yes, I encourage you to join me in the knowing that your safety matters and that whatever offers it is worthy, powerful and oh so needed right now.

And only when we find that safety — only when we carve out that oasis of security within ourselves — can we brave this world and fight for its reclamation.

---

💜 This Week’s Experiment in Safety 💜

If you’d like to join me in a Healing Lab experiment:

1. I invite you to write out the places, people, actions and things that offer you safety.

2. Next, I invite you to intentionally engage with one of your safety strategies, once a day.

And if that feels completely impossible — I offer these questions to guide it — the very questions I asked myself many years ago after losing Maura and wrote about daily so that I could remember that life — that my life — was still worth fighting for.

What makes it better?

What calms your breath?

What stops that shifting from foot to foot and glance to glance?

Yes, what makes it better? If only for a nanosecond?

That — that is what you are fighting for.

As always, these experiments are yours to do what you will. They are not a judgement or a “to-do,” even. They are just an offering.

And if this one feels wildly overwhelming because safety feels goddamn impossible right now, please know that means you are in the EXACT right place because for the next few months, that is precisely what we will be exploring. Because “Getting Safe First” is the First Step in Healing.

And let me just say one more thing (said with love and as little pressure as a buttery kiss): this is the singlemost important experiment to try… Because only with safety, even as momentary as I found it at 3:45 a.m., can we grow beyond the hardship of the moment and towards ourselves and others.

P.S. This is the first of a multi-week series on Safety — what it is, how to build it, and why safety forms the foundation of healing. In upcoming weeks, we’ll be doing a deep dive on the science, sharing strategies for building safety first, and sharing real, human stories about this vital work.

If you’d like to check out our most recent series on what you need to know about The Nervous System, to navigate it as you heal.