One Shared Experience, Yet Different Responses

For the Haitian population, douz janvye, January 12th, isn't just a date on a calendar. It's the day the ground opened under an entire country and changed the course of countless families, including mine. Even those of us who weren't standing on that soil felt it happen in real time. It's a day Haiti carries collectively, the way you carry something that touched everyone you know, even if it touched each of them differently.

I want to use this collective trauma to depict how three people with a similar experience had their bodies respond completely differently.

None of them chose their response. That's the whole point of this post.

Caught Between Getting Out and Turning Back

Picture a woman who was home with her 12-year-old niece when it started. Her body knew exactly what to do. She was already moving, already calling for her niece to follow her out. That's a flight response, clean and immediate, at least at first.

She hadn't made it all the way out before she realized her niece wasn't behind her. So she turned back, mid-exit, and went in for her.

Your brain makes a snap calculation in a threat: can I overpower this? When the answer is no, it decides the next best option is to create distance instead. In the flight response, your body is still preparing for action the same way it does in a fight response; your heart rate rises and your muscles ready themselves. But instead of directing that energy toward the threat, you direct it away, toward getting out. Getting away becomes its own way of overpowering the threat.

When the Body Simply Stops

Her niece's body had done something different. When you cannot overpower or outrun the threat, your brain diverts to its next best survival technique: the freeze response. Your body stays still until the danger passes.

When freeze is triggered, you may feel physically incapable of moving even though you want to. You may feel dissociated, like you're not fully present, like you've become separated from yourself. That's what happened to her niece. It wasn't a choice not to move. Her body had already decided stillness was the safest option, faster than her mind could catch up to it.

That's why her aunt had to physically carry her out.

The Man Who Turned Back

A marché, if you've never been to one, is an outdoor market where you can find almost anything, produce, clothes, housewares, whatever you need, sold by people who know their customers by name. Think of it like a flea market that's also the heartbeat of the city.

Another relative was selling in the marché when it hit. A knee injury meant she couldn't move as quickly as the people around her, even though she wanted to.

Then a man she knew, someone who'd been buying from her for years, came back through the chaos, picked her up, and carried her to safety.

That same snap calculation runs for the fight response too, only the answer comes back different: can I overpower this threat? For him, it did. He felt like he could handle what was happening, and that certainty sent him toward her instead of away. In the fight response, you might feel intense anger, a surge of energy, or an urge to physically lash out. Your jaw or fists might clench, and your instinct is to move toward the threat instead of away from it. For him, that instinct became moving toward someone who needed him.

Your Nervous System Isn't Being Dramatic. It's Doing Its Job.

Here's what I want you to take from all three of these: none of it was a decision. Not the turning back, not the freezing, not the choice to return through the chaos. In a real threat, your nervous system takes over and does what it believes gives you the best chance of survival, right then, with whatever information it has in that second. It overrides your logical thinking on purpose. That's not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

So if you've ever judged yourself for freezing when you thought you should have run, or for a fight response showing up somewhere you didn't expect it, or for a flight instinct that looked like leaving someone behind before you turned back, I want you to hear this clearly: your body wasn't wrong. It was surviving with what it had.

That's inherited strength too. Not just the meals made from scraps, not just the resourcefulness passed down. It's also this: the body's split-second decision to keep you, or someone else, alive.