So my husband is back on his medieval warfare and tactics special interest lately, and he was telling me about how so many battles were lost because the knights would just disobey orders and break ranks because they got too excited and just went full Leroy Jenkins. Prey drive switches on and they see somebody running and they just blank out and go.
Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.
It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)
We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.
And I took off after them.
I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.
I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.
Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.
And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.
So yes, I believe it now. People are so unbelievably dumb and the prey drive instinct is absolutely real.
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