When a female sea turtle hatches, she’s maybe two inches long, and her first act in life is a wild sprint to the water. She doesn’t look back or hesitate. She runs. She’ll spend the next few decades in open ocean before finding her way back to the exact stretch of sand where she was born to lay eggs.
She carries a map inside her body, an imprint of her beach, encoded before she ever reaches the waves. Scientists call this natal homing. I have always imagined that we carry maps like this too, destinations we’re moving toward before we know exactly where we’re headed.
Somewhere in my late 30s, I began to fear that there was more life behind me than ahead. That my greatest loves had come and gone, and the doors were closing, and that was it, all I would get.
I believed this, and I thought: Fine. What I had wanted wasn’t to be loved or chosen. I had wanted to feel safe inside my own life. To be in a room with someone without cataloging what I’d said wrong, waiting to forgive or apologize. And a man had never given me that.
I had been proposed to four times, said yes to half of them, married and divorced twice before I was 30. I’d loved people who had loved me back, and none of it had left me feeling like I was on solid ground. I kept thinking the next person would steady me.
I edged toward 40 the way a person finishes a marathon, legs cramping, lungs burning, too depleted to feel triumphant. Each relationship had required a different version of me, and I had shapeshifted each time, losing a little more of whatever self I had started with. If the doors were really closing, I thought I could live with that. I was so tired of running, from something, toward something. Which is maybe why I went looking for turtles in the first place.
The turtle conservancy sits on 90 acres of dry chaparral at the foot of California’s Topatopa Mountains. More than 600 turtles and tortoises live there, tended by keepers who move through the enclosures with a patience that looks like devotion.
I raked the enclosures, added fresh avocado leaves, refilled plates with lettuce and flowers and dried cuttlefish. I spent mornings rubbing coconut oil into turtle shells with my hands while they pressed into me with something that felt like trust. Up close, a tortoise shell is art. Each scute is ringed with overlapping lines. The patterns repeat across their backs but never exactly. This is what it looks like to carry your whole history on the outside.
Before I started coming here, I thought a turtle’s shell was a borrowed house it would outgrow and leave behind. But the shell is not something the turtle carries; it’s something the turtle is. I thought about this constantly, wondering what it must feel like to be born with such safety.
There were so many nights throughout married life, lying in bed with my lamp on, listening to my husband breathe beside me. He loved me as much as he could love, in the ways he knew how. And I lay there calculating the distance between us, the inches of sheet so wide I couldn’t imagine crossing over to his side.
I didn’t say anything. I never did. That was the whole problem and also the whole marriage, a woman turning off her light believing there were things that could stay unseen.
I lost count of how many times I reached for his hand during an argument while my body was still shaking. I had become so fluent in abandoning myself that I offered tenderness before ever acknowledging my own injuries.
It’s possible to be loved and still not feel safe. What was missing was something I didn’t yet have a name for, something I kept asking the wrong people to provide. I was giving every man who loved me an impossible job: Be solid so I feel solid. Protect me so I feel protected.
There’s one turtle I’ve grown attached to; I named him Damien. Damien the doorstop. Galápagos tortoises can live well over 100 years. Many have been alive since before the Civil War, before the telephone, before any version of existence I would recognize.
Every morning when I open the gate, Damien is blocking the doorway with his entire body, a nonchalant boulder. The other tortoises eventually climb over him. He comes out when he’s ready; he’s old enough to operate on his own time.
I get it. Something shifted in me the year I turned 40 — a bone-deep, almost chemical unwillingness to move before I was ready. An end to the apologizing and accommodating. Go around me.
Most people don’t know that if you gently scratch a turtle’s shell with your fingertips, across its domed hump, something happens that the keepers call finching. The turtle rises up on its legs, almost hydraulically, extends its neck, and its whole body lifts toward the touch. As if to say: Yes, thank you, more please. It doesn’t lunge or race, just slowly rises to meet whatever feels good.
I had never once finched. I only knew how to lunge.
I collected beginnings the way some people collect debt: excitedly, quickly, with confidence that future me would sort it out. The hourslong phone calls, the feeling of being freshly known. I was exceptionally good at that. It was the long middle that got me: the laundry, the grocery lists, the fights, the distance between the life they had promised and the life they could actually offer.
It took me a while to understand that I wasn’t falling in love so much as falling in love with the falling. I was chasing something that dissolved when I caught it. Every time, I told myself the problem was the person. The right one, I believed, would sustain that free-fall. I was like the hare in the fable who loves running so much that she forgets there’s a finish line. All circles and speed and the sound of her own breathing.
I had stepped over so much of what love wasn’t that I had become fluent in its imitations: the weight of a relationship held together by momentum, how we stay because leaving requires admitting how long ago we should have left. I knew what it felt like to disappear by degrees: the opinions first, then the needs, then the preferences, then finally the instincts whispering, “Something is very wrong.” When I went looking for the self I had silenced, I found only a woman-shaped cutout where I used to be.
So, I stopped searching. No flirting, sex, scrolling or swiping. No one to manage or impress. I stopped avoiding my own company and started noticing who I was when no one was watching. The first month felt like withdrawal. The third felt like ease. Around the sixth, I started to hear myself think.
And somewhere in that stillness, I found my way back to the woman I had been before I let other people tell me who to be. She was defiant and funny and brave. She pulled over for sunsets and cried when other people cried. She learned how to keep things alive in the garden, then in herself. And she stopped caring so much what anyone else thought of her.
By the time I found the turtle conservancy, I was almost two years into being alone. I came each week and learned to step carefully around animals that didn’t need me to rush. I prepared the enclosures for hibernation, making small shelters for bodies that knew when to retreat.
And one afternoon, elbow-deep in hay and leaves, I felt the thing I had been looking for — the ground solid beneath my feet, holding me up from the inside. Nobody tells you that becoming yourself again is unglamorous. It’s mostly unlearning and erasing, and saying no to the things you used to say yes to.
And then one day it’s just there. You’ve become someone who takes her time and doesn’t apologize for it, someone who can sit in the silence trusting she will survive whatever comes next, someone who knows what it is to move through the world without needing anyone to stand between her and it.
Scientists call the years between a turtle hatching and returning home the lost years, because there’s so little data on where she went or what she did. But I don’t think she was lost at all. Decades of open water, thousands of miles of strong current, violent drift and the slow shift of the magnetic field itself, and still her map stayed steady. She didn’t need anyone to show her the way home. She just had to stop long enough to feel the pull.
Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, a writer in Ojai, Calif., is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, “If You Loved Me, You Would Know.”
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