The Not-So-Great Escape

When my wife and I vacationed in Miami, we stopped into an escape room with an Old West theme.

Our hourlong, timed challenge focused on retrieving a miner’s inheritance of gold bars by solving a seemingly never-ending cascade of puzzles. It was the first time we had ever frequented an escape room, and we fumbled at almost every turn. Some items looked like clues but weren’t. Others seemingly made no sense but turned out to be critical to advancing. Luckily, we had unlimited access to guidance from the escape room staff via a monitor and intercom. We leaned on that assistance heavily and successfully “escaped” with under three minutes remaining.

As we departed, I wondered how long it would have taken us to successfully complete that escape room without assistance. Could we have done it in two hours? An entire day? Weeks? We might have never left that room!

When I think about my post-traumatic journey—now 19 years long—there was an extended period where I felt like being locked in that escape room with no guidance. If there were clues pointing me to the solution, I may have glossed right over them. Sometimes, I looked for shortcuts. Often, I felt intense pressure to “solve” my situation, and that stress created problems. Then again, at other moments I felt like I just wanted to ignore my predicament altogether and pretend I was somewhere else.

My trauma put me in a place where doors didn’t open, and their keys sat in locked drawers. The knowledge I needed to escape the room always seemed out of reach and left me feeling hopeless and defeated.