the ones who learned to walk

16 Mar, 2026

photograph by Karsten Winegeart for Unsplash

There was a Barbie who could walk herself, “Movin’ Groovin’ Barbie”—possibly the first Barbie capable of moving her own two legs. In retrospect, she might’ve been awful. A later doll, released in 1999, needed a dog or a baby carriage in order to walk forward.

A 19th-century walking doll could do a better job, to be honest: held up, stabilized by its outstretched hands, tenderly dragged forward, without needing to be animated by batteries or some awful accessory.

I’d been thrilled by this technological advancement from Mattel, although it had launched too late (1997) for me to actually try or enjoy. Until now, I’d disliked Barbies because you had to bunny-hop them from place to place. This disturbed me. That’s not how people walk, I thought to myself, unable to visualize Barbie’s legs moving of their own accord: I’d always been a sort of Doubting Thomas, despite my strongest efforts otherwise.

For a while—a long while, a painful stretch of childhood—I’d tried to move Barbie’s legs for her one at a time, stepping with the right leg, then the left, trying to keep her hips square and her torso upright. This was tedious work, but also, my efforts were truly embarrassing, because my peers were watching this display of serious control issues with abject horror. Hilarious.

I really thought my marriage was going to be a success because, as newlyweds, we were able to play Octodad co-op so fluidly, walking and turning the Lovecraftian golem, keeping him upright, communicating aloud all the while (QWOP is its mechanical antecedent). Our bodily coordination was almost supernatural, perfectly seamless. Later, I would play miles of Crossy Road, an endless walker for iOS. I was still obsessed, I guess, with moving Barbie’s legs for her.

I’d run into trouble, unexpectedly, at the Alan Wake 2 preview event. I’d been loafing around in the game, goofing off, making small talk with characters, listening to music, literally reading the writing on the wall.

In real life, I’d shamefacedly been trying to lie low in my chair, taking audio notes. But I had not escaped detection: a member of the PR team was finally beelining toward me.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING,” she demanded.

“Uhhh,” I said.

“You have, like, twenty minutes left!” She looked like she was about to start tearing her own hair out. “To do everything! We want you to see everything!” Now she was losing her mind. “GO INTO THE FOREST,” she told me.

“Okay,” I said.

Thing was, I didn’t want to go into the forest. I was afraid. I wanted someone to take over the controller while I observed and took notes, one degree removed from survival horror. I wanted to be the evaluator, but never a player. To use a Ratatouille analogy, maybe I wanted to always be the disembodied Chef Gusteau, a voice of reason, but never poor, uncoordinated Chef Linguini.

“GO,” she said. “GO NOW.”

Good Lord I hadn’t realized there would be overseers monitoring my progress. I started creeping up to the forest. Ugh. I crept into the forest. I continued my creeping pace. I could not do this, yet I was doing this.

I heard a twig snap. (Reevaluating my footage from that day, no, it was a little zombie burp, more like.)

I started power-walking through the forest.

One of the Taken appeared above me. I started running through the forest. I did not walk; I ran. I’d finally found my hustle, I guess.

I got lost in there, in the deep, dark woods, but I actually made it most of the way through—geographically circling, trapped in a loop, just before the chapter’s conclusion.

My spouse would applaud my gameplay footage. Oh, it was some of the worst game-playing he'd ever seen, to be sure: the camera spiraling out of control, my inability to walk in a straight line, the indiscriminate waste of ammo. But he genuinely appreciated, and articulated, how I never gave up the fight, how I’d muscled through and tanked it. Enormously entertained, he watched the first draft of my footage edits through parted fingers, snickering, mortified for me, amused by my grit.

At the preview event, I had finally defeated the mystically indestructible crate standing in my way. The handful of on-site event-worker bros, who’d by then gathered around my booth like a little pep squad, had cheered. I am sure I buried my face in my hands and said “thanks.”

Later, after the game’s launch, my spouse would not want to handle the controller at all. It was fine. I got through the woods, and most of the game, just fine, but of course, with barely one witness. It probably came down to using an Xbox One controller now—finally walking correctly—rather than strugglebussing with whatever DualShock.

The bar is already in Hell, but my standards were always even a little bit lower.

I explained to my best Los Angeles friend what, exactly, had become of my dad, how he’d made it all my fault—unable to take any accountability to the last.

I hadn’t wanted to live with him again. He’d wanted me to help him fulfill his own fantasy of being a good parent, at the expense of my own sense of safety or security. But I’d refused to move again: I hadn’t had a stable home, or caregivers, for the first seven years. I knew his sobriety was a transient phase, a haircut, a pierced ear. Every letter from him had been a precious, rare, overworked thing that I’d cherished, and couldn’t that be enough? I’d already entirely missed kindergarten. I’d finally stayed put long enough to meet my lifelong best friend. He was also lying to me about our options, blatant lies, overpromising, future-faking, pitching me, and I was annoyed, although I did not show it.

He’d always been in and out of my life. I once tried to drag him home from the playground. He had passed out there, nothing but dead weight. I couldn’t lift him because I was 5ish. I’d walked home instead, terrified as I crossed multiple lanes of traffic, furious with my mother because she surely knew this would happen—a frame-up!—just as I had. I think, most likely, my mother was sick and tired of how much I loved him, had created the situation just to show me he wasn’t dependable or trustworthy, as if I weren’t already aware.

I wanted my dad in my life. But now, for the first time ever, I knew my own home address and phone number. “Move here instead,” I pleaded. Get his own place, visit us at the house, start over, learn my life, come to church on Sundays. I laid out a full, workable plan wherein both of us would be supported. I was nine years old.

The short version is, he’d opted out.

“So now you see,” I concluded, staring at my knees, “if I ever raised my expectations for men even slightly, they’d literally die.” Or they’d rather die, but first they’d make me—my hope and my faith, but also my inability to move them, my unwillingness to leave home once I’d found it—the cause.

I looked up at last, searching my friend’s face.

“Wow,” she finally said. “For most people it’s like a metaphor, but for you it’s right there in your childhood, it’s literal, it’s just what happened.”

I started laughing. I wiped my eyes. “Yes, exactly,” I said.

I used to say the Universe is a bad writer, a hack—so clumsy and heavy-handed, its prose really belongs in an airport. That’s why I started writing in the first place, just to do a subtler, more believable job of my own autobiography.

Eventually I had to admit to myself that, on the contrary, I’m just a very bad reader, thick-headed and stubborn, requiring more hand-holding than I’d ever realized, and that the Universe was simply following the adage “know your audience”: in this case, a dumbass, someone so bad at connecting the dots and meaning-making, the meaning has to be served already readymade.

Lately old friends have been coming out of the woodwork, since Mercury is in retrograde (it’s said). One such friend recently reappeared, to my unhinged delight. Shy of a full year earlier, I’d asked him to have lunch with me before I had to move away. Our conversation had fallen off after that. Now he’d returned simply to radiate utter warmth toward me. Well, I’d always felt warmly toward him, too—and not just warmth, but a respect and admiration.

He was practically a kid when we first met, whereas I was very much already not. I don’t remember any specific details, but a Mutual, beloved by us both, had murmured some mythological backstory to me, perhaps something about familial, interrelational trauma. Regardless of what had happened, though, he’d decided I’m not doing this anymore, had embarked on his own, had rolled into a large competitive corporation, had asked for a job, had received one.

Wow! I remember the way the blood had rushed straight to my face. The audacity! Not entitlement, not grandiosity, just the sheer ability to march directly into the dark and creepy forest, trusting that the path would rise to meet him, illuminating itself only in hindsight. Hero shit. Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade shit, walking the invisible bridge. I was floored by his mettle.

The next day, still a bit tickled, I’d googled him, intending to re-memorize his face. Oh. When I’d first asked him to lunch, he’d apparently been in the throes of leaving a toxic environment. It was news. Oops. I’d immediately closed the browser tab without reading anything else. If there were anything he wanted to say about this, he could tell me directly someday. If he were just messaging wanting to goof off with me, that would be fine, too. If he’d already changed his mind, that would be fine, too. I refuse to overwork it.

Another friend was telling me she’d always had the ability to “hit the bricks” as soon as she saw the writing on the wall, but she regretted not having done so much sooner with one workplace in particular.

“Well, you cared about your coworker,” I reminded her, “and you wanted to see the project through.”

At the same time, at home, in bed on my iPad, I sighed. Always wanting to see a project through.

I started telling her about Lazarus.

Not the one from the Bible; I meant the real-life Lazarus, the man who entered our lives when needed, who quickly became incorporated into it. Very colorfully, this man’s name, in real life, is Lazarus. Have you ever even heard of such a thing?

My bestie was telling me about the way the trainee nurse had seemed close to fainting every time Laz did anything. The trainee had been trying to keep it together, but the physiological effects had nevertheless been plain for all to see. Now we were both laughing. My bestie asked me, then, if I believed Laz were actually aware of the effect he has on all the girlies, who are on constant verge of dropping dead, like the French lassies in Belle's hometown—the lighter side of being a Gaston.

“No,” I sighed. “I don’t think he does. The real problem is, he has big healthy dad energy but, unfortunately for him, he still looks like that. And sounds like that.” We had not been able to stop giggling.

The first time he’d teased me, I admitted to my bestie now, I’d gotten really mad. I’d been trying to accomplish a task, and he was deliberately getting in my way—an impedance.

I’d finally asked someone else to tell me how to do the thing I was trying to do. “Don’t help her!” Lazarus had shouted, running back into the room to interfere with my mission, to obstruct my progress. I’d groaned and shouted “I have to learn how to do this!” and shooed his meddling, can’t-wait-to-be-a-dad ass away. Go commit grand feats of competence elsewhere. I’d been trying to figure out how to turn on a lamp, for God’s sake, no thanks to this man.

My bestie had not stopped laughing.

“Since then, though,” I said slyly, “I’ve enjoyed popping in on him while he’s working, just to get a quick flirt in.” I sighed. “He’s a cup of coffee.” I meant the effect of his presence was like a stimulant, one pep pill.

“Do you know his story?” she asked me.

In his own words, she said, he’d been brainwashed. He was a software engineer, and he was all set to be married. He’d made all his life choices very young; he was already in the pipeline, being carried off toward a destiny, right into the mill. Finally his father had pulled him aside, had quietly told him he didn’t have to do any of this if he didn’t want to. So he didn’t. He left his country and started over—completely over. He’d taken the L, so to speak. My bestie concluded her retelling of his origin story.

“Lazarus,” I had breathed, “the man who taught himself to walk.”

Not only that, I reminded her, he’s studying how to do infusions: that is, how to very literally pump a fresh dose of life into the ailing. Lazarus, raised from the dead. Lazarus, divine intervention; “God has helped.”

I recounted almost all of this to the friend, the one who’d once overstayed at a job, who still regretted her time and effort wasted. “I tell you all this just in case it helps to reframe things. It isn’t just a matter of hitting the bricks,” I suggested. “It’s deciding to use both your legs to walk straight out of your own tomb.”

I sighed, then, since I am in still very much in the process of learning to do this for myself.

It was beginning to dawn on me, by now, why so few of my little rescue missions had ever worked out.

Nobody asked for this. Rescue your own damn self, rather than perpetrating a little rescue on someone else.

Stop projecting your own feelings of helplessness onto me and then staging ‘help,’ making yourself feel big and capable and competent at my expense.

It was a scathing indictment of my own behavior. My expectations were still killing things. Suddenly, I felt my heart change: a lightning zap. I cannot stand to wait for other people to stand up on their own scrawny chicken legs and start walking. Artax stays in the mud and drowns, no matter how you yank and pull on him and cry for your dad to stop giving up. Maybe you just bet on the wrong horse.

“I divest!” I suddenly shouted, losing all interest in others’ stakes. No one has ever fully invested* in me, so why do I keep fully investing in others? And then we both just stand there, trapped in limbo together, slipping under mud. In this present moment even a shred of hope felt like a total ruse: This doesn’t end well for me. It will never work out. Nothing is supposed to happen.

*This isn’t true, but it felt true in the moment. My best friend’s family, my high school English teacher, Shivam, some editors... there were those who were willing to get in on the ground floor of this very valuable opportunity, explaining my own fiercest loyalties.

“I divest,” I said aloud again, quietly, much calmer.

The word “jenny” can refer to a female donkey: a burro, a beast of burden, weighted under a rider and his luggage, or perhaps yanked hither and yon by a bridle and rein. That’s why I don’t go by that name anymore.

Designer of escape rooms Laura Hall once explained, in an interview, that people in escape rooms have a tendency to “never look up.” As soon as I read this, I knew it was true. I’d done a room in Austin once, the type where you have to sign a release first, because you’re about to be bound up, put in chains. For whatever reason, I’d seemingly been much more tied up than any of the other players, with both my hands shackled above my head and chained to the ceiling.

The other players all freed themselves, leaving me there. I started to sound a little whiny, since I’d obviously been forgotten and my arms and body were getting very tired. The more I asked the other players to help me search for my own set of keys, however, the more resolute they became about ignoring me. This sounds like a bad dream. It felt like a bad dream.

Finally I’d looked up. It had taken me forever to just look up.

My own keyring, a big iron thing, was hanging right above my head, just out of reach of my hands. I’d need a free person to grab them for me, but also, I was the only one who could likely see them, unless someone else walked over and stood exactly where I was. It was so comically awful, I should have experienced ego annihilation then and there.

I recently watched an expert explain that being gaslit—gaslit into learned helplessness—is a type of locked-room mystery, where you’ve become convinced that the lock is surely on the outside, but it’s actually on the inside of the room, inside with you.

“I think we have the same problem,” she began.

She couldn’t understand why everyone she liked, at least romantically, just seemed to want to run. We talked about this dynamic, the runner/chaser dynamic.

“It’s just the Golden Shadow,” I said. That’s why the instinct is to chase after it.

We have certain strengths, but in very early childhood we’re programmed out of believing them about ourselves: they simply, for whatever reason, do not become a part of our self-definition. So when we see them in others, we light up, we admire those traits, we break into a run after them. We are chasing ourselves, trying to perform a sort of soul retrieval of our own fragmented selves. The chase ends when we recollect, re-member, our dismembered, discarded identities.

It’s just a mirage, this instinct to chase after someone who is running the wrong way. Worse, I’ve decided, is to just fucking stand there, already burdened with baggage, sinking, drowning, watching the shadow shrink and vanish over the horizon like fucking Looney Tunes.

“So I think I’m supposed to keep running forward,” I told her, “mapping the territory, marking the way, building cairns.” For whom? I don’t know. Nobody, probably; just myself. Nothing is supposed to happen.