Tiny Buddha

Author: Eleni Stephanides

  • How I Found Peace After Feeling Disregarded and Disrespected

    How I Found Peace After Feeling Disregarded and Disrespected

    “Self-care is also not arguing with people who are committed to misunderstanding you.” ~Ayishat A. Akanbi⠀

    It was an early evening in late June of 2020. My housemate and I were eating sushi in our backyard while crickets tuned up for their nightly symphony around us.

    To our right loomed a voluminous green tree, imposing in height but with a texture (furry and cuddly like a Sesame Street character) that made it seem friendly.

    I could’ve really used a friendly creature right then.

    Hours earlier we’d found out that our housemate—who’d contracted COVID while on vacation with a fourth housemate—would be returning home the following day.

    I’d expressed my discomfort with this, in no uncertain terms; however, my housemates had dismissed me and maintained their plans to return home regardless.

    I considered my options. One would be to stay at home. Even if my housemates didn’t transmit the virus, the CDC had advised (when sharing a house with a COVID positive person) to quarantine. I’d pause my life for two weeks, foregoing my income (as a freelance Spanish interpreter my assignments had not yet been moved to Zoom) while living with the anxiety of potentially contracting the virus.

    *This was pre-vaccine, when knowledge of COVID and its long-term effects was minimal. People (younger ones included) were dying from the illness daily. I was experiencing mysterious health symptoms at the time, so my health felt especially fragile. Months later I’d discover the cause to have been Celiac disease.

    Option two would be to stay at motels. I’d spend some of my savings while continuing to pay rent on the apartment I was leaving behind—but my health would be spared. I’d also be able to continue working, which would help to cover these costs.

    I was leaning toward the latter and expressed my line of thinking to my housemate as we ate our meal out back.

    There was more nuance to the interaction than I’m able to capture here, but basically, the news of the uninvited COVID house guest hadn’t fazed this housemate, and she seemed visibly annoyed that their decision was causing me anxiety.

    Here was the gist of our exchange:

    “You could catch COVID from one of the hotel maids,” she said. “Hotels aren’t safe.”

    “Less safe than sharing a house with a COVID positive person?” I challenged.

    Sensing my frustration and incredulousness, her face hardened. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said firmly, her tone suddenly icy and sharp.

    A butterfly had just landed on my chopsticks. To keep calm, I focused my eyes on its gently fluttering orange wings. I continued focusing on them while my housemate stood up, picked up her sushi debris, and walked back toward the house.

    **

    After packing my belongings, leaving the house, and relocating, my emotions fluctuated throughout the week. An internal tug-of-war of, “Just accept the decision they made and let it go / No don’t, your needs and feelings are valid and that wasn’t okay,” played out various times.

    I’d have understood if either housemate had contracted COVID at work or the supermarket, or under any other circumstance that falls largely outside of one’s control. Or if they’d already been home, I would never have asked them to leave.

    That they’d gotten sick in another county though, despite CDC’s strong desperate plea for people to refrain from traveling—and had then knowingly brought it home—made all the difference.

    I brought these concerns up again during a video call with my housemates after I’d been gone for five days, only to be dismissed once more. My housemates suggested that if I didn’t like it, then maybe I should find another place to live (no matter that I’d been living there before them and had even chosen them as housemates).

    After our call ended, the room around me spun as I sat there processing that nowhere in my housemates’shared consciousness had there seemed to be any acknowledgment of my reality or validation of my perspective.

    Moving out indeed seemed like the most sensical and emotionally healthy option.

    I’d left a few weeks earlier feeling like I was fleeing a burning building. While gone, I realized that the fire would have continued blazing had I continued living with them—long after my housemate recovered and COVID ceased being a threat.

    It would be because my trust and emotional safety were broken for me now. When in place, these things provide light and warmth. When they’re broken, that light turns into flames. I felt like my options would have been to armor up indefinitely, or to leave the burning house behind.

    Certain issues (when small enough) can be swept under the carpet. Some are mere annoyances best handled by simply letting go. I’d done that with some of my housemates’ prior behaviors that had bothered me.

    But this one felt too big to fit.

    **

    The day I returned to the house to pack up my belongings, I thought about how different things had been just a few months prior. How at the start of shelter in place, the four of us seemed to be getting along—becoming, if not friends, at the very least friendlier.

    How abruptly things had taken a turn.

    The emotionally stressful situation brought to light two important lessons for me.

    One was that we each have to be our own best protectors.

    My housemates had described their decision to come home as a boundary, which I suppose it technically was (in my opinion, a harmful and inconsiderate one). They were entitled to return, and I couldn’t physically stop them.

    And while they had a right to that boundary, I had a right to decide I wasn’t safe with people who’d feel okay with setting such a boundary despite the stated impact it would have on a person they were coexisting with. I had a right to decide that their boundary was incompatible with my receiving the care, respect, and consideration that I both need and provide in return.

    If others are disrespecting us or disregarding our well-being, we can decide our hearts aren’t safe with them. We can remove them from their reach.

    If they’re uninterested in considering your perspective, don’t try harder to explain it in a way they’ll understand. They don’t deserve the ego boost of having you chase their acceptance.

    We can’t and won’t change others’ behavior. We can only care for our own selves.

    I try now to spend less time attempting to prove the validity of my perspective to people who simply don’t want to hear it. I try to spend more time making decisions that are healthy for my mind, body, and spirit.

    More time on surrounding myself with people around whom I don’t even feel tempted to over-explain—because their care and consideration for me keep that impulse from activating to begin with.

    We all deserve people like this in our lives. But in order for them to surround us, we must remove ourselves from situations that are harming us.

    The second lesson I took was that people who harm us don’t deserve our time or mental energy.

    Following what happened, there was so much I wanted to say. There were comments I thought my former housemates deserved to hear. There were character evaluations I felt tempted to launch their way.

    Ultimately, though, I saved my energy, communicating only about practical matters such as getting back my deposit (which they initially attempted to withhold from me).

    After finding a new living situation, I poured my efforts into friendships; into long phone conversations and Zoom calls.

    I immersed myself in my interpreting work.

    I cooked healthy meals that nourished me.

    I pet the sweet cats who wandered through my backyard.

    I wrote, spent time with my nephew, processed what had happened with a therapist, devoured books, and did my best to heal from the emotional pain that the whole situation and its bitter ending had caused me.

    I also paid attention to moments of goodness—recalling how the morning I left for the motel, I’d approached my car, bags in hand, to find the back window shattered. The glass littering the surrounding pavement felt symbolic of what was happening with my living situation.

    A neighbor had asked if I needed help. Mask on, he came out with a broom and dustpan. He helped me sweep up the glass. Spikes of it still hung from the back window. We broke them off together so that I wouldn’t be driving around with the shards.

    A small audience of neighbors beheld the scene. Kids watched the glass shatter and land against the seats of my car. They watched it rain down onto the pavement.

    In short, I redirected energy I would have spent on vengeful thoughts onto improving my life.

    I want my energy. I want my equanimity and mental stillness. I don’t believe they deserve the satisfaction of taking those things from me.

    Because as Carolina de Robertis put it in her novel The President and the Frog:

    “Rancor and revenge could keep you mired in the past, a swamp of which he wished to be free; [her character] couldn’t afford that sort of thing, there was too much to do in the here and now.”

    Sometimes it’s better to choose peace over righteousness. Above all, it’s your own heart and mind that most stand to benefit.

  • How It Got Better: My LGBTQ+ Journey from Shame to Pride

    How It Got Better: My LGBTQ+ Journey from Shame to Pride

    2003 was when the “gay devil” (as I referred to him at the time) made his first appearance inside my unprepared thirteen-year-old mind. On a trip to Mexico that year, he sat perched on my shoulder while my family and I were out to lunch at an outdoor taqueria. The girl at the table next to us had tan skin and brown-blond hair, and wore sunglasses and a spaghetti-strap black tank top.

    My “gay devil” noticed her and made sure I did too. As the words “She’s hot” crash-landed from his taunting lips into my unsuspecting mind, I flinched—then turned around to make sure no one had heard.

    Luckily no one had. My dad simply smiled kindly into my worried eyes before passing me the bowl of tortilla chips.

    Over the next few years, the gay devil made frequent reappearances, continuing to deliver crushes to me that I wasn’t ready or willing to identify for what they were.

    He was often pretty rude in his delivery. At a Stevie Brock concert, when I realized my feelings for one of his fan club members far surpassed anything the boy pop star had ever made me feel, the gay devil taunted me: You’re not really here for Stevie, huh?

    At summer camp, after a girl I liked gave me a hug, he whispered: You liked that a little too much, didn’t you?

    **

    There were several reasons I didn’t feel safe coming out (not even to myself). One was that even though LGBT people had gained notable acceptance by the early 2000s, it still seemed like relatively few people were “out”—fewer still in high school.

    Another was that despite my attending a fairly liberal high school, it still felt to me like a place where going against the grain—no matter if your difference came in the form of sexual orientation, temperament, or the way you looked and talked—was to open yourself to judgment and ostracizing.

    Some rare people are completely comfortable in their skins from a young age, blessed with rock-solid peer support groups and unshakeable self-confidence. I wasn’t one of them.

    So I hoped I could “wait the gayness out,” as if it were a passing affliction that might resolve with time.

    This concept of homosexuality as a sickness traces back to centuries ago. At one point (before it even started to be pathologized), it was simply so taboo that it wasn’t even spoken about.

    In Walt Whitman’s time, for instance, no discourse existed for understanding or discussing it—for which reason Whitman himself remained in denial, despite developing attractions to the wounded soldiers he treated during the Civil War. (Though Whitman had many relationships with younger men, his writing only implied this, rather than explicitly stating it.)

    After Whitman’s time, a dialogue around homosexuality finally began to emerge, but it was always in the context of illness. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing described it as a “degenerative sickness.”

    The “homophile” movement emerged in the late 1950s to early 1970s to fight back against this, eventually promulgating a “Gay is Good” message (inspired by the Black Pride Movement) and seeking to build gay culture by way of theaters, music, and newspapers catering to the LGBT population.

    The movement also promoted and encouraged gay affirmative therapies (whose goal was not to change but be happy with one’s orientation) over gay conversion therapies.

    Still, homosexuality was listed as a psychiatric disorder in the DSM until 1973. In 2005, remnants of that disdain still seemed alive and well at my high school.

    Because shame kept me from putting it into words, for years I danced around the gay/lesbian label, filling the pages of my diary with circumlocutory fawning over my crushes, all of it coded as admiration.

    After finally taking the plunge—first to my diary at age fifteen, then to friends and family at eighteen—my self-acceptance slowly grew. Many firsts and milestones followed.

    Years earlier I never could have imagined I’d be interviewing a married lesbian Australian pop duo while interning for Curve Magazine, or that I’d attend queer prom with and then date a girl I’d met through my college campus’s LGBT Center, or that such a varied community of beautiful LGBT individuals awaited me, particularly in college but also in the years after.

    Little by little, as the years went on, pride replaced shame—and by now, all the shame is gone. But I still remember how it felt. I remember how it stifled me.

    I remember the negative effect it had on my mental health, how it exacerbated my feelings of isolation. As Colin Poitras wrote in his 2019 article (for the Yale LGBT Mental Health Initiative) The Global Closet is Huge: “Concealment takes its toll through the stress of hiding.”

    I also recognize that many queer people are still actively fighting to overcome their own shame. People like the many friends in the LGBT community I’ve known through the years—one whose mother, after he told them, cried inconsolably while his grandma accused him of being possessed by demons.

    Another whose mom, while out to lunch with her, tried to set her up with their male waiter right after she’d come out to her for the third time. Still another whose parents simply refused to ever speak about it with him.

    Referring to a new study by the Yale School of Public Health, Poitras writes that, “even with the rapidly increasing acceptance in some countries, the vast majority of the world’s sexual minority population—an estimated 83% of those who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual—keep their orientation hidden from all or most of the people in their lives.

    For these reasons, Pride and community spaces are still very much necessary.

    **

    If given the chance to speak to my teenage self, I’d say to her now: it gets better for you—and once it does, you’ll see that it doesn’t end with you. Celebrate the victories we’ve made—but don’t let them lull you into complacency.

    Not when many young queers—both in rural towns and more urban areas—remain in the closet, compartmentalizing who they are out of fear of familial rejection. Not when in some countries, people can still be killed for living openly as gay.

    And not when the rights of some members of our community (such as queer people of color and transgender people) remain under threat. A Black man who can marry his partner but still has to worry about violence at the hands of police isn’t experiencing equality in the full sense of the word.

    Keep living with eyes, heart, ears, and hands open to the issues affecting members of both our queer community and the larger human family—because if there’s one thing being LGBT has taught me, it’s the importance of not leaving people to suffer in silence. And it’s the power that community, support, and the pride fostered within them can have over combating shame.

  • Trust Restored: Why I’m Letting Go of Preconceived Ideas About People

    Trust Restored: Why I’m Letting Go of Preconceived Ideas About People

    “The problems around us are only compounding. We will need to rediscover our trust in other people, to restore some of our lost faith—all that’s been shaken out of us in recent years. None of it gets done alone. Little of it will happen if we isolate inside our pockets of sameness, communing only with others who share our exact views, talking more than we listen.” ~Michelle Obama

    I’m up at the American River, one of my favorite summertime spots. I have a ritual of floating down it, then hiking back up the hill to my clothes. I love how the swift current knows exactly where it’s going, making any paddling unnecessary. I love how you can just lie back and let it take you as you look up at the cloudless blue sky.

    As I float, the sun beats down on my skin, but the river’s coolness counteracts its scorch. Small groups of Canadian geese speckle the shore. The air is still, its quiet punctured only by the occasional train sounding in the distance.

    Once I’ve reached the bottom, I set out back towards my towel—walking along a series of dirt paths consisting of small hills. They’re quick and steep like bunny slopes, coated with golden dust that glints beneath the sunlight.

    While walking them I notice two men picking fruit from a tree in the distance. Feeling exposed in my half-clothed state, I immediately tense up. I realize that having no shoes means I’ll be unable to walk quickly past.

    Bracing myself for discomfort, I continue walking. As the distance between us narrows, I wait for them to whistle, or to jokingly ask  if I need help finding my clothes—or create discomfort in whatever other way, be it through words or stares (as I’d become accustomed to men doing).

    I walk past, armor on, shield up—raising it a little more when one of the men begins to speak.

    His words are, “Hello,” followed by,  “You’ve got some tough feet!”

    They contain no sexualizing, nor any subtle attempt at intimidation. And in response to this comment— the kind one human would make to another, his equal—I find myself reacting with human thoughts in return:

    Yes—this terrain IS pretty rugged. I guess my feet ARE pretty strong. Thank you, Sir.

    **

    I think about how, in Whistling Vivaldi, a black man whistles classical music when crossing paths with white strangers on the street. He does this in hopes of quelling their fear and discomfort that are born from prejudice. Implying benevolent intentions and sophistication, his whistling preemptively wards off prejudicial treatment.

    Perhaps this man’s comment was the (gender) equivalent to this example—an attempt at polite conversation to keep from coming across as threatening.

    Or maybe he’d briefly entertained the same thoughts that often precede the sorts of comments I’d anticipated. Maybe in the past he would have converted those thoughts into unwitting weapon words, then launched them my way. Maybe, though, because our society is growing and learning and its people are evolving, he decided that day not to.

    Either way, I felt relief that the men did not behave in the way I’d predicted.

    It got me thinking about preconceived ideas. How we often develop templates, then apply them to the individuals we regularly interact with. How few encounters encourage us to challenge or expand these templates, because much of our lives are structured around familiarity. And how it’s easy to take one look at a person and file them away into a specified bin inside our minds, perhaps unaware we’re even doing it.

    How often do we go into an encounter with our mind already made up—both about the person and about what they could possibly have to say? Their words pass through a filter in our head, confirming what we already know or believe to be true.

    Sometimes our expectations turn out to be accurate. Other times they do primarily because we expect this of them, therefore never open our minds to the possibility that we might be proven wrong.

    People act in ways that contradict our initial views of them, but we don’t see it when we’re not looking for it.

    When I was a Lyft driver, I drove many passengers I was sure I’d have nothing in common with. One was a seemingly straight-laced white man who worked for a tech company. I thought we’d have little to talk about, but an hour later we were eating In ‘N Out and discussing everything from our country’s quick fix approach to handling emotions to how his brother’s coming out changed their relationship to finding a balance between impactful work and a job that pays the bills.

    So often we decide a person is a certain way. Our mind closes. Thereafter we do, indeed, fail to connect. But not on account of differences, but the fact that no connection is possible when the heart and mind are closed.

    **

    No shift in thinking takes place in a single instance. The fact that those two men at the river pleasantly surprised me, for instance, doesn’t erase the overall pattern. Many more such encounters would be necessary for a true paradigm shift.

    But it’s a start. And from now on when I have the bandwidth, I want to give people the opportunity to act in ways that contradict my preconceived notions of them.

    I don’t want to get to that point anymore where I stop seeing others as individuals. Where I’m blinded to what we have in common because I’m seeing only what they represent; the harm done by the larger group they belong to; the political implications of their behavior.

    For instance, several years ago a young man had approached me while I was reading at a bar—and I completely ignored him. At that time I was so fed up with men, so annoyed with their repeated intrusions on my dates with women, and so frustrated that it was them who approached me in public (never women), that I just kept staring down at my book. I didn’t say anything back. In the moment it felt empowering.

    When I thought about the incident years later, though, I regretted my behavior. The guy hadn’t even been aggressive in the way he’d approached me. He’d been earnest, apprehensive, even shy—the way I imagine I can also be at times when I approach women. He didn’t represent All Men; he was his own person, doing something in that moment that might have made him nervous, or pushed him out of his comfort zone.

    I’m not saying it was my job to ease those feelings, or that I owed him this. It’s more that I realized that now I would have genuinely wanted to. Wanted to have at least said hi. Wanted to have at least politely told him I wasn’t up for conversation. Wanted to, maybe not have smiled, but at least treated him more like a human than an implied enemy.

    I want to take my frustrations with patriarchy and heteronormativity up with the concepts themselves—and with individual humans only when they are truly practicing it.

    I’d like to believe that polarized positions aren’t set in stone. That they can evolve and expand with time. That we won’t be doomed to perpetual gripping of shields while walking this planet.

    This isn’t our climate right now—but I hope and wonder if one day we’ll at least start inching closer.

  • We Are Both Darkness and Light: How to Reconcile Them and Grow

    We Are Both Darkness and Light: How to Reconcile Them and Grow

    “We have to bear our own toxicity. Only by facing our own shadows can we eventually become more light. Yes, you are kind. But you’re also cruel. You are thoughtful. But you’re also selfish. You are both light and shadow. I want authenticity. I want real. I claim both my light and my shadow.” ~Kerry Mangis

    Many of us can recall the painful moments that have shaped us. As we grow older, we become intimately aware of all the ways we were hurt, wronged, or betrayed. I think it’s a natural impulse, to number these moments and process them in order to heal.

    I reflected on this when on my way to the California River Delta—a peaceful marsh-land setting located between the Bay Area and Sacramento that I often sought refuge in.

    The night before I’d watched an episode of Thirteen Reasons Why that had dealt with the theme of the contradictory elements that live inside each of us. How difficult it is to arrive at a clean summary of good or bad once you’re made privy to all a person has been through, every feeling they’ve experienced or thought that’s run through their mind.

    My own list of hurts floats in and out of my mind, activating more on some days than on others. When I’m doing well emotionally, it largely fades to the background. When stress is higher and sleep has failed to restore me, it’s likelier to make an appearance.

    Here’s a little glimpse into how it reads:

    It started for you at the age of five, when you learned that the girl you’d considered your best friend  wasn’t as attached to you as you were to her. 

    In sixth grade your core group told you, seemingly out of the blue one day, that you could no longer sit with them. You didn’t know why. You only knew that for whatever reason, people you’d trusted didn’t want you around anymore. Traits and mannerisms you hadn’t previously questioned were suddenly suspect now, and subject to intense self-scrutiny.

    The way you talked. Your interests. The sound of your voice. You just didn’t know. It could have been any of these. Or maybe all of them.

    Regardless of what that thing was, the message that resonated loudest of all was “Not good enough. Not worth keeping around.”

    A year later, self-esteem beaten down, you forged a friendship with a girl who showered you with positive attention one day and shoved you so hard you’d bleed (“jokingly” though) the next. This girl told you that you were selfish in order to get you to pay for things and comply to her wants.

    She rolled her eyes and called you “Dr. Phil” when you told her this hurt your feelings. Whenever you spoke up for yourself, it would lead to a fight. You’d sense this was toxic, years before learning what that word even means, but you’d also blame yourself, thinking maybe this was just what you deserved, or was the best you could do. Especially when there was no one else to turn to.

    Years later, dating hurt your heart too many times to count. You let down your guard and began to trust, only to realize you made a choice that wasn’t smart. Rinse and repeat.

    Your feelings were dismissed more times than you can count—sometimes because you were too afraid to be upfront about them; other times, even when you were. You felt like the carpet had been pulled out from under you, over and over and over again like a sinister movie on repeat.

    **

    I realized that day, as I drove to the California River Delta, that this narrative I’d carried for years wasn’t altogether wrong. Acknowledging those moments is an act of self-compassion. Once we validate what we went through, we can then begin to heal it.

    It was just that this narrative was incomplete. What I had yet to incorporate into my story was the harm that I too had left in my wake—and the way both of these, input and output, fed each other in a repeating cycle.

    And so, as I looked out at the blue-grey water after parking my car, my brain began expanding its narrative.

    You carried those childhood scars with you. They slept, only to activate. When they did, you saw from your vantage point and yours only, blinded to others’.

    You said hurtful things when at your breaking point, lashing out at friends and the people you dated. Consumed by your own issues, you sometimes failed to fully be there or show up for others in their time of need.

    You attached yourself to people and relationships, putting unconscious pressure and expectations onto them without their consent.

    You stayed with women you claimed had let you down, hoping they’d change, or trying to change them. You refused to accept the present moment on its own terms, instead insisting on seeing it for how you wanted it to be.

    Small acts of inconsideration built over the years, even when you weren’t blatantly mistreating someone or behaving in an overtly harmful way.

    My mind had briefly ventured to these uncomfortable places before—but that day, with only itself and the bucolic scenery to contend with, it stayed there for longer than its customary five or ten minutes.

    As I looked out at the water, I considered what attitudes, beliefs, and cognitive-road blocks often stop us from going here.

    How might we learn to move through (rather than away from) thoughts or memories of our mistakes when they surface? I wondered. Because taking accountability benefits not just the harmed person, but our own souls too.

    **

    I was able to see that shame is a big contributor. Brené Brown has said that when held back by this all-encompassing emotion, we cease to grow. So long as we remain stuck in its slog, we’re ironically more likely to repeat the very mistakes that pulled us down there to begin with.

    The character Bojack Horseman (from the Netflix show)—who hurts his friends, strings a good woman along, and even commits sexual assault—is one example of a person (er, horse) undoubtedly stuck in this cycle. He doesn’t see how his own conception of himself as irrevocably damaged largely contributes to the continuation of his harmful behaviors. If you’re just bad and there’s nothing you can do about it, then harming others is inevitable—so why even try to change?

    And so Bojack keeps drinking. He keeps hurting people. He keeps making the same mistakes. He himself continues to suffer. By shrouding himself in the shame robe, he self-protects—both from the hard work of change and from the extreme discomfort of examining the insecurities that underly his destructive actions.

    Those with trauma in our pasts developed coping mechanisms in response to what happened to us, often many years before fully understanding and contextualizing our pain. These defenses resulted in some level of collateral damage on the people around us.

    Some of us thought there was just something wrong with us. Or that these behaviors stemmed from character flaws we’d have to learn how to hide. We didn’t recognize them as signs pointing us toward what needed to be healed.

    Nor did we understand that rather than stay stuck in guilt and shame, we could allow it to guide us. That, when a fork in the road presented itself, we could let the sting of remembering direct us onto the kinder path.

    Black-and-white thinking also keeps us away from full acknowledgement of the past. We may think that if we’ve done bad things, it must mean we’re bad people. But it’s entirely within our control to learn from our past actions and become better every day.

    It took some wonderful people years of fumbling missteps to arrive at who they are today. If we were all judged solely by the single worst thing we’d done, many of us would be on our own right now.

    Sometimes we don’t acknowledge the past because it doesn’t line up with our image of ourselves as good people. Even though merely envisioning oneself as a loyal person or good friend doesn’t guarantee we’ll never act in ways that are hurtful.

    **

    Owning up to our role in past events doesn’t mean we’re forgoing self-compassion. I’ve found I can hold myself accountable and learn healthier replacements for destructive defenses while also maintaining compassion for what my younger self went through, and the struggles she didn’t yet understand.

    I wasn’t taught emotional regulation back when I was in school. Nor how to process my experiences. It’s hard to practice what you haven’t been taught. I remind myself, though, that I now have the tools to teach myself. That I can be that person to heal the hurting younger self who still lives somewhere inside me.

    Rather than allow the shame swamp of my past to ensnare me, I can seek to understand the unmet needs and unprocessed pain that prompted my negative behavior.

    We can extract the debris that led to insensitive actions until eventually we come upon that better and kinder self. The one who exists inside all of us.

    In my own journey, confronting regret hasn’t come without pain—but it has motivated change. Reminders compel me to be better now, to the people in my life currently. They also compel me to be a much better friend to myself.

    I’ve realized that acknowledging what was done to me is just one side of the coin when it comes to full healing and self-actualization. The other side is self-awareness and honesty. Looking not just at what’s most convenient, but also at our impact on others.

    That day on the dock, I gathered a few stones—each representing a person I’d harmed in some way. I held each one in my hands. I wished each person well and imagined filling them with a protective circle of love.

    And then I sent each stone on its way. Watched it fly through the air and land in the water with a small and almost imperceptible splash.

    Each of us is capable of so much better than the worst thing we’ve ever done. Yet much of how we strip those mistakes of their long-lasting power is by owning up to them—while at the same time, forgiving ourselves.

  • Why I No Longer Chase Emotionally Unavailable People, Hoping They’ll Change

    Why I No Longer Chase Emotionally Unavailable People, Hoping They’ll Change

    “Never chase love, affection, or attention. If it isn’t given freely by another person, it isn’t worth having.” ~Unknown

    We met at a bar with Skee-Ball and slushy margaritas for our first date.

    She was gorgeous. I noticed that as soon as I walked in. I still wasn’t sure whether we’d have anything to talk about though. The messages we’d exchanged had been minimal.

    It turned out we did.

    Conversation flowed from one topic to the next—meandering from her passion for biology in college to how I tried to master mountain boarding at summer camp as a kid to how both of us were passionate about writing/putting words to the page.

    I found her articulate, funny, sociable, and down-to-earth. I liked her intellect. Her wit. Her seeming earnestness and appetite for unconventional topics like the environmental benefit of eating insects and sexism in the taxidermy industry.

    She came over to my place after; I cooked dinner for us. Talk got deeper. She shared the effect her dad’s depression had on her when she was a kid; how she’d personalize his quiet moods. I shared some of the instability I’d experienced as a kid.

    The evening ended in a hook-up. Nothing like a good trauma spill for an aphrodisiac.

    A couple weeks later we had another date. I felt similarly elated afterwards. But doubts began to surface before our third; she was acting wishy-washy and noncommittal.

    I talked them away, though, because seeing her filled me with buzzy joy. Our interactions powered me through the week with a buoyancy unlike any that my morning coffee had ever provided.

    So we kept going on dates.

    She’d bring flowers to them. Lift me into the air when we kissed, which I loved. Tell me I was a “really good thing in her life.”

    The last day I saw her, we biked around to local breweries.

    The sun shone against our faces as we sipped from each other’s beers out on the back patio—having what felt like a raw conversation about intimacy patterns and fears. She was working on hers, she said. I acknowledged some of my own in return.

    When she asked if she could kiss me (for the fourth time that day) as we unlocked our bikes, I remember how wanted it made me feel.

    I carried that golden effervescent feeling with me into the next day. It was still with me when I opened a text from her—but  shattered into spiky glass shards when I read what it said.

    That she couldn’t continue seeing me. That she wasn’t in the right place emotionally.

    It’s not you, it’s me.

    We all know the spiel.

    **

    It wasn’t the first time I’d had my heart dropped from the Trauma Tower on top of which a woman and I had been insecurely attaching.

    This woman was just one among several in a pattern. You can call it trauma bonding. A hot and cold relationship. The anxious-avoidant dance. These push-pull dynamics that played out through my twenties had elements of all of these.

    One day the person would open up. We’d connect and it’d feel like I’d really seen them, and they’d seen me.

    The next day they’d pull back (even in the seeming absence of overt conflict). The contrast was painful. The shift felt jarring.

    According to Healthline, “Recognizing emotional unavailability can be tricky. Many emotionally unavailable people have a knack for making you feel great about yourself and hopeful about the future of your relationship.”

    Whenever these situationships crumbled, it would really break me. Feelings I’d hoped to have buried for good would resurrect—among them, doubt that anyone would ever choose to see and accept me fully.

    And yet the “connections” felt so hard to disentangle from once formed. From my perspective, the woman and I often had strong chemistry. Words came easily. We talked about vulnerable things, but could also laugh and enjoy the lighter aspects of life. They were my type physically. The perceived strength of our connection compelled me to stay.

    **

    It took me some time to realize that each relationship of this sort that I remained in spoke to unhealed parts of me.

    Part of the healing I did over the past few years involved looking at the role I played in them. It involved realizing that I too contributed to the cycle—by continuing to give chances to a person who couldn’t (or didn’t want to) help meet my needs.

    I contributed by staying and hoping the situation would shift. That the clouds obstructing their full attention and investment would magically lift. That they’d depart to reveal the sun that was waiting all along to wrap its powerful rays around my heart.

    I contributed by not establishing boundaries. For instance, in one situationship I felt as if I’d become the woman’s therapist, there to reassure her when self-doubts overtook her; to validate her following any perceived rejection by strangers; to coddle her ego when she felt unattractive in the eyes of the male barista who’d just served us our coffee.

    I could have set a limit around how much she confided in or leaned on me. I could’ve communicated that if we were just friends with occasional benefits, then I only had so much bandwidth. That it didn’t feel reciprocal to be her on-call therapist.

    I also could have left at any time. I chose to stay in these situations, though, despite the signs. Perhaps I thought those signs were ambiguous enough to be negotiable. Or that I was just giving the benefit of the doubt.

    Additionally, I chose to look at the women for who I wanted them to be, who they could be somewhere down the line, and who they sometimes were—rather than seeing them for who they fully were on the whole and in the present moment.

    When we see others for their potential, no matter how innocent or well-meaning our willful obscuring of the present reality may be, we pay a cost.

    **

    Inconsistency and unavailability are less attractive to me the older I get and the more that I heal from my past trauma. Game-playing has even begun to repel me in a way it didn’t used to. When a person shows signs of it, I notice my interest starting to wane. Conversely, qualities like consistency and decisiveness, and earnestness are increasingly attractive now.

    In my thirties I no longer find the emotional ups and downs of an anxious-avoidant dynamic sustainable. I want something calmer.

    I hope for a connection that takes a load off—not one that adds more stress to a world already saddled with the weight of so much of it. One wherein we’re both safe spaces for the other. I believe this is what we all deserve, granted that we too are willing to put in some work.

    In general, having a choosier mentality means you may stay single for more years than you imagined—because it’s true that the dating pool bubbles with people whose traumas and defenses are incompatible with our own. I think maybe it always will.

    Still, when I picture all the heart pain spared, it’s an approach that feels right. The thought now of being pulled back into another cycle of fleeting hope and optimism punctured by blindsiding shards of disappointment unsettles me more than the thought of staying indefinitely un-partnered.

    Not only that, it also saddens me. The sadness I feel is for every person ever caught in the same emotional cyclone. I can’t help but think it’s such a tremendous drain of energy. Energy that could be used instead to vitalize both the larger world and our own lives.

    **

    No more will I follow the bread-crumby path to another person’s heart when it takes me so far from the integrity of my own.

    And anyone who’s been through similar experiences—I encourage you to remain hopeful that one day, a person who’s deserving of your love will step into your life and onto your path. Until then, remember you have you. Treasure yourself, treat yourself well, and realize you’re worth more than chasing. You deserve to put your feet up and let someone chase you—or better still, come meet you in the middle.

  • Has Your Path in Life Meandered? Why It’s Okay to Take the Nonlinear Route

    Has Your Path in Life Meandered? Why It’s Okay to Take the Nonlinear Route

    “Even when we think we have things figured out and everything is going to plan, it can all change in a moment. Inspiration fades. Beliefs transform. Goals shift. Life happens. And that’s the thing. Life is not linear.” ~Aly Juma

    I was maybe around nine years old. My dad and I were working with orange play-doh in the shed next to the garage that we used for arts and crafts. Dioramas stood on either side of us—one with an underwater scene from The Magic School Bus, the other a solar system complete with styrofoam planets. Through the window the wind rustled our wooden swing-set.

    Taking the play-doh in my hands, I blobbed it into the shape of a hill.

    “It’s the hill between us and Aunt Maria,” I announced to my dad as it took form.

    Earlier that day we’d visited my aunt and cousins, who lived in a town that required crossing a tunnel through the hills to get to.

    My dad helped me carve out the tunnel. Then we chiseled the winding roads that seemed to coil up and down from one side of the hill to the other.

    I realized we’d never been up on those roads. I was curious to know if cars could drive across them, so I asked my dad. He told me they could.

    “Why don’t we ever?” I wondered aloud.

    It seemed like it would be fun—going up, down, and around all those curves. I wondered what we might see along the way. I wondered if it would feel like a Disneyland ride.

    “It’s very pretty up there,” my dad said. “But going through the tunnel gets you there much more quickly.”

    **

    As I got older, I realized I liked taking the hillier route in life.

    Those who had their mind made up seemed to zoom through a tunnel. My more meandering route looked quite different.

    My life after graduating from college included moving to Uruguay for a year, taking a job in social work upon returning, then driving Lyft for two and a half years before becoming a Spanish interpreter. I had a lot of time to write, practice my hobbies, and figure out my next move during this stretch of time.

    The Lyft driving in particular was a move that some might have seen as aimless and unambitious. Yet it felt like the best option for me then—a point in time when, with unresolved issues to heal, I needed freedom, flexibility, and control. Few other jobs offered those things.

    I enjoyed riding the wave of adventure wherever it took me.

    One time, after delivering flowers to an Uber Eats client in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco on a rare sunny day, I went for a glorious barefoot jog along the beach.

    Another time I ended up at a cafe in Turlock where tables were barrels, next to windows that peered out at a street that looked plucked from the 1800s.

    Still another time I found myself at a storybook cafe attached to jacuzzis that cafe-goers could rent for an hour.

    When people asked, “Why would you want to drive Lyft?” or “Why would you want to live that lifestyle?”, small moments like these made up part of my answer. The freedom in my schedule (part of the independent contractor lifestyle) allowed them to happen. I learned to be a treasurer of beauty in random places and unexpected moments.

    **

    Sometimes unanticipated events can derail even our best laid plans. There are so many things we can’t control, and practicing flexibility can help soften the blow of this.

    Let’s say I’d planned to give a couple of quick rides before ending at a cafe to study for my Spanish interpreting test—but then a passenger requested a ride that was longer than I’d anticipated. In order to still meet the studying need, I’d translate passengers’ conversations into Spanish in my head.

    I also joined 24 Hour Fitness so that no matter where I ended up, a workout facility would never be too far out of range. (Whichever was closest by the end of my last ride was the one I’d work out at.)

    I was reminded that there are multiple paths to meeting our needs. To not wall myself off to doing this in unconventional or creative ways. The more adamant you are about the “hows,” the likelier you’ll be to neglect meeting them altogether. I learned to choose instead to satisfy them in a perhaps less conventional (albeit un-ideal) way.

    When we aren’t flexible, we become victims to our circumstances. This can lead to learned helplessness.

    **

    For anyone who’s still not quite sure where their life is headed, or feels like they’re trekking the hilly meandering route:

    You don’t need to immediately—or ever—commit yourself to the rat race. Sometimes you just don’t know what’s right for you. And it’s okay to take time to figure it out.

    I’ve learned that we don’t need to be the car shooting straight through the tunnel. The tunnel may be the quickest, most straightforward commute. But there are so many ways to arrive at your ultimate destination. Our route can be like the alternative, unexplored roads over the hills.

    Remind yourself that your ultimate goals probably aren’t to live aimlessly and hedonistically. You just haven’t figured out what your ultimate goals are yet. Maybe it’s taking you a little longer to get there. And that’s okay.

    Keep listening to your intuition until it takes you where you need to be. Maybe your path is to keep moving, until eventually you arrive at your wiser end goal. And maybe once on it, you won’t look back—because no one forced you onto it. You arrived there on your own. It happened when it was supposed to.

    And if your ultimate goal is to aimlessly and hedonistically, that’s okay too. There’s no wrong path in life—just what feels right to you.

  • What Most People Get Wrong About Singles and 6 Messages You Might Need

    What Most People Get Wrong About Singles and 6 Messages You Might Need

    “In a world that treats a forty-one-year-old single woman like a teenager who didn’t get asked to prom, I think it’s extremely important to recognize the unique wisdom of a solitary life—a wisdom that develops slowly over many years, that is fundamentally different from that of, say, the person who was between boyfriends for a year when she was twenty-six.” ~Sara Eckel

    I was twenty-three and had just told a woman I was casually dating that I’d never been in a long-term committed relationship.

    Her response was this: “Wow, really? I mean, you’re attractive, so why haven’t you?”

    Having spent more of my life single than coupled, I’ve become accustomed to questions and comments like these. And although I am currently at a place of contentment and acceptance with my singleness, I wasn’t always. Shame often attaches itself to people (women especially) who remain un-partnered for long patches of time, particularly as we get older.

    As author Sara Eckel put it: “In polite society, there’s an understanding that inquiring about the reason two people marry is completely inappropriate. Singles are not afforded this privacy. Instead, the rude inquiries are wrapped in compliments about how attractive and together you are.”

    “For many of us, living alone in a society that is so rigorously constructed around couples and nuclear families is hard on the soul,” she wrote.

    Look to sites like Quora and Reddit, and you’ll find a plethora of questions posted by the worriedly un-partnered—from “What’s wrong with me? I’ve been single for seven years” to “Do you become undateable after being single for over ten years?”

    There are many negative messages and annoying presumptions about singleness percolating through society that I wish would stop. It’s no coincidence in my mind that women (more than men) are the more frequent targets of them.

    Here are my own counter-messages that I’ve developed in my thirty-two years as a woman on this planet.

    1. It’s quite possible that you’re not trying too hard.

    From the time I was eighteen, people told me that the desire for a connection was what kept me from finding one. If I just stopped caring or wanting it, a relationship would find me. As Sara Eckel wrote, “The fact that you want love is taken as evidence that you’re not ready for it.”

    I’ve known many people through the years whose desire for a relationship definitely didn’t stop them from finding one.

    2. Wanting a relationship doesn’t mean you are ungrateful for all the other positive aspects of your life

    In my ambivalently single years, I often felt I was constantly pushing myself to look on the bright side, count my blessings, and express gratitude (both to myself and to those around me) for the friends, hobbies, and other things I had going on in my life.

    I feel this way far less now. That is, I don’t feel as if I need to force the gratitude and appreciation; it flows in naturally in response to all the positive that currently fills my life. I’m living it in alignment with my values. I’m spending my time in the ways I want to.

    Still, it was okay to want more, even back then. The desire for partnership is human and valid, and it’s more than understandable for it to surface from time to time.

    As Rachel Heller put it in Attached (which she coauthored with Amir Levine), “Our need for someone to share our lives with is part of our genetic makeup and has nothing to do with how much we love ourselves or how fulfilled we feel on our own.”

    Singles are wired to want love and companionship as much as the next person. Our own company can be wonderful, but we’re not weak if that “there’s something missing” feeling still creeps up unexpectedly some days.

    What gets me about this one is the contradiction. Being single raises antennae. So too does the inability to find happiness on one’s own. It’s a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t predicament.

    3. It’s completely possible that you genuinely just want companionship, not necessarily someone to satisfy all of your emotional needs.

    At times people assume a woman’s desire for a partner is rooted in an unrealistic expectation for a romantic relationship to fulfill all of her emotional needs. The truth for me, back in my twenties, was that I would have been happy to meet some of those needs through platonic connection. The older I got, though, the less available friends seemed to become.

    I feel more content with my friendships now, and a combination of expectation adjustment and meeting more like-minded people has helped me to feel like my connection needs are mostly met. But this wasn’t always the case. And for the people out there currently feeling a void, it’s not always due to lack of effort.

    As Sara Eckel wrote, “Our society is structured around couples and families—and if you don’t fit neatly into one of those units, you often have to build a support system from scratch, which is a big task. Friends move, or marry, or disappear into time-sucking work projects. And they usually don’t consult you about it.”

    Back when I felt more of that connection void, many of my friends had partnered off, become consumed by career commitments, or moved out of the area.

    It would be convenient to believe that the full secret to happiness lies completely within oneself. But individual efforts and self-care can only enhance one’s life so much. The truth is we do need others, to some extent. Most of us need (at least some amount of) healthy and satisfying connections. If you feel like you’re doing all that you can and not getting back what you need, it’s disheartening.

    4. Your life might actually be full enough as it is.

    “Take up a hobby.” “Become a more interesting person.” “Work through your issues.” “Focus on your friendships.” “Get more settled in your career.” These are just some of the many morsels of advice bestowed upon singles.

    I think that at times people prescribe the “have a full life” advice too heavily—using it to justify why some remain un-partnered, even when it doesn’t apply.

    For instance, back when I really wanted a relationship, I enjoyed the life I’d carved out for myself. I led a mostly full one, making time to hike and appreciate the outdoors at least several times a week. I biked. I read voraciously. I cooked healthy meals. I planned solo trips and made ample time for friends. I kept myself open and receptive to the beauty of the world around me.

    Though my job didn’t always feel like a perfect fit and lacked the comfort of a consistent coworker community, it drew upon my skills and passions while allowing me to serve a vulnerable population.

    Even though I had all that, I still at times found myself wanting a partner.

    The truth is that all kinds of people, from those with full lives to ones with few hobbies, find love. Even people whose lives seem unadorned or ”empty” when viewed from the outside are capable of intimate connections. Our species would not have persisted if the only ones of us who partnered were those with past-times and over-stuffed days.

    Many of the same people who prescribed “spend more time with friends or on hobbies” seemed to have also (ironically) been the ones who’d never had to fill their time in this way for more than a year (or maybe two) tops—either because they’d been in a partnership for many years or had only been single intermittently (having spent far more of their adult lives coupled off).

    5. The losses of “mini” or “almost” relationships are still losses.

    Chronically single people are likelier to have more experience with the dating apps. More time spent in the dating game means more exposure to the muck and unhealed emotional issues that circulates its fetid waters. We’re more susceptible to getting caught up in a frustrating and constant cycle of false hope and cautious optimism, followed by disappointment and disillusionment that the partnered don’t have to deal with.

    As much as I wanted to “just get over” some of these dating situations and not let them affect me, as blogger Janis Isaman wrote, “inside our bodies, it doesn’t work that way when we feel loss—over and over again—and lack support, lack feeling, lack an empathetic abiding witness, or lack self-compassion.”

    She writes, “this failure to give space to: ‘this is painful,’ ‘this feels like rejection,’ ‘this feels awful’ means we not only abandon our authenticity but also that we experience trauma. The tiny interactions of serial dating transmute themselves up into pain and disconnection, and we might find ourselves increasingly angry or panic-filled because we haven’t metabolized the previous losses.”

    Now I’m able to see: these experiences were still losses. Any time you invest heart and time, you are building some form of connection. When that connection dissolves, you will feel the hurt. It’s not only more than okay to feel your feelings; doing so is necessary for moving on.

    6. It’s not because you’re broken or need to spend more time healing your issues.

    This counsel isn’t totally without merit. In several relationships when younger, I had a lot of issues to work through; I wasn’t emotionally healthy. A relationship would not have been the wisest move.

    Still, this piece of advice mythologizes perfect health and implies we can arrive at a place where we’re fully healed—when health is always along a spectrum, with no human ever completely on the side of perfection.

    People with far more emotional baggage than both me and other chronically single people I know have found loving connections. Perpetual worriers. “Boring” folks. Individuals all across the spectrum have found partners who think the world of them. They didn’t have to work to improve themselves in order to. They didn’t have to go through years and years of rigorous therapy. They didn’t need a full-on personality transplant.

    The underlying message I hear poking out from this piece of advice is this: Change who you are.

    What if we were to shift to this message instead? You don’t need to perpetually strive. Therapy can help you become more self-aware, secure in yourself, and clear in what you’re looking for—but ultimately, a lot of meeting a compatible partner has to do with luck, timing, and the types of people you are encountering. You are worthy of love as you are.

    Not only does this feel kinder, but also more accurate.

    ~~

    For years I sought reasons to explain my single status. The conclusion I’ve arrived at now is: There is no grand overarching reason. Or rather, there are so many that it’s no use trying to pick them all apart. Seeking to fully untangle the bundle would be an unproductive use of time.

    Yes, some societal positions might increase your odds. And healthy relationships are less likely to occur between people with unhealed emotional issues. Ultimately, though, timing and chance are key aspects.

    The right partners will grace our lives when they’re meant to. I can’t say when that will happen. I just know that what we can control is the amount of energy we spend pursuing, perseverating, and picking ourselves apart in our pursuit of the “why.”

    I feel less urgency to be in a relationship now than before, and I am grateful for this. Having a more discerning lens has allowed me to be a better guardian of my emotional energy (and life in general)—where before, I would let in a questionable fit just for the sake of being able to say I was in a relationship. It has also led to growth that I don’t think I would have achieved if a significant other were a part of the equation.

    My hope is for anyone who’s struggled with shame and self-doubt to breathe a little easier, knowing you don’t have to try so hard to improve yourself—that you’re as lovable as the rest of us, exactly as you are.

  • After the Assault: What I Now Know About Repressed Trauma

    After the Assault: What I Now Know About Repressed Trauma

    TRIGGER WARNING: This article details an account of sexual assault and may be triggering to some people.

    The small park down the street from my childhood home: friends and I spent many evenings there as teenagers. We’d watch movies on each other’s MP3 players and eat from a bag of microwave popcorn while owls hooted from the trees above.

    Twigs lightly poked against our backs. Fallen leaves graced skin. Crickets hummed in the darkness. The stars shone bright through the branches of the redwoods.

    Eight years later at a park in Montevideo, Uruguay, darkness again surrounded me. Leaves and twigs once more made contact with my skin. This time, though, I couldn’t hear the crickets or notice the stars. Details of nature were dimmed out, replaced by the internal clamor of a rapidly beating heart and shock flooding through me.

    By day, Parque Rodo bustled with life. Later that year I would ride paddle boats there with my girlfriend of the time. I would feed crumbles of tortas fritas to the ducks alongside my Uruguayan housemate, while he shared with me his dream to become a dancer in New York City. I would do yoga on the grass with fellow English teacher friends. It would become a place of positive memories.

    That night, though, it was anything but.

    ~~~

    One week earlier, I’d moved to Montevideo to teach English and become fluent in Spanish.

    My first week passed by in a whir of exploratory activity. I traversed cobblestone streets past colorful houses resembling Turkish delights; past pick-up soccer games in the middle of some roads; past teenagers walking large groups of varied species of dogs.

    I learned Spanish tongue-twisters from native Uruguayans while drinking mate on the shores of the Rio de la Plata. I sand-boarded for the first time and became accustomed to answering the question “De donde sos?” (“Where are you from?”) in nearly every taxi I took and confiteria (pastry shop) I set foot in.

    Now that it was the weekend, I wanted to experience the LGBTQ+ night life (which I’d heard positive things about). Located on the periphery of the expansive Parque Rodo, Il Tempo was one of Montevideo’s three gay clubs, catering mostly to lesbians.

    I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, so my plan before heading in was to grab a chivito sandwich (one of Uruguay’s staple foods). Chiviterias abounded across Montevideo, present on nearly every corner, so I imagined I wouldn’t have to walk far to find one.

    After taxi-ing from my hostel, I asked the bouncer if he could direct me to the closest chiviteria. Pointing down the street, he told me to walk for half a block. I’d then make a right and continue down 21de septiembre until reaching Bulevar General Artigas.

    ” Y alli encontrarás una” (“And there you will find one”), he said.

    A few blocks didn’t sound like a lot, so off I went.

    I walked for what felt like a while, without crossing paths with any other pedestrians.

    Isn’t this supposed to be a major street? I wondered. Also, shouldn’t there be some streetlamps?

    It was then that another pedestrian—a young man wearing a backward baseball cap—came into view.

    He was walking briskly toward me from the opposite direction. Pretty much the minute I saw him, I knew my evening wouldn’t be playing out as I’d envisioned. A chivito was no longer on the table. I wouldn’t be dancing with a cute Spanish-speaking lesbian at Il Tempo.

    “Adonde vas?” (“Where are you going?”) the man asked me as he got closer. Tension immediately took hold of my body, which I did my best to hide while quickly responding that I was on my way to a chivito spot.

    Yo sé donde comprar un chivito” (“I know where to get a chivito”), he said, gesturing toward the park. “Te muestro” (“I’ll show you”).

    My heart hammered, but I again tried to obscure any signs of fear. Maybe if I exuded only niceness and naivety, it would buy me more time—because the grim truth (that there was nowhere within eyesight to run to) was quickly becoming apparent. The foggy pull of disassociation came for me, wrapping its wispy arms around my heart and mind.

    Similar to how Laurie Halse Anderson wrote in Shout: “The exits were blocked, so you wisely fled your skin when you smelled his intent.”

    I chose not to run—because who knew how long it would be before I found a more populated road, or even a passing car? And how far could I flee before the man caught up? He’d likely become angry and violent if and when he did. Also, flip-flops make for pretty dismal running shoes…

    Maybe if I kept walking with him, we’d cross paths with another person, went my reasoning at the time. No one else was present on that dimly lit street, but maybe in the park someone would be—a couple taking a late-night stroll, or a cluster of teenagers cutting through on their way to the next bar; or someone, anyone who could step in and become a buffer. Parque Rodo’s website had, after all, mentioned that many young people hang out there at night.

    ~~~

    I don’t remember what the man and I talked about as we walked. I do remember a half-eaten chivito lying atop a trash can off to the side of the path; the sound of my flip-flops crunching against the gravel; that we continued to be the only pedestrians on our path; and that after a minute or two, the man announced, “We’ve almost made it to the chivito place.” I nodded in response, my appetite now completely nonexistent.

    Part of me still hoped I could buy time. That I could pretend I didn’t know what was about to happen, for long enough so that someone, or something, could intervene—so that maybe it wouldn’t.

    Nothing and no one did though. When the man finally grabbed me and pushed me against a tree, my feigned composure broke. Noticing the shift, he used both his hands to cover my mouth while whispering that he would kill me if I raised my voice (“Te mataré,” he repeated three times in a low hiss).

    Over those next few minutes, I kept trying to hold eye contact in attempt to get through to his humanity. I desperately and naively hoped that at any moment he would awaken to what he was doing and feel ashamed enough to stop.

    He didn’t though.

    When he tried to take my shorts off, a disorienting sequence of imagined future scenarios swiped through my mind like sinister serpants.

    They showed me dealing with an STD.

    Taking a pregnancy test.

    Getting an abortion.

    Doing all of these things on my own in a country 6,000 miles from home and from everyone who knew me.

    My fear of those imagined outcomes pushed me to speak up.

    ”You don’t want to go down there,” I warned, feigning concern for his well-being.

    He reached for my shorts anyways.

    And so I tried again, this time while looking him in the eye. Though I wouldn’t know the Spanish word for STD until years later when taking a medical interpreter certification course, I did have others at my disposal. Enough to explain that I’d once had “a bad experience” that left me with algo contagioso (something contagious).

    If this man cared at all about his health, he’d stop what he was doing, I explained.

    Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I saw the slightest bit of uncertainty begin to share space with the vacancy in his eyes.

    Whether or not he believed me, he stopped reaching down and settled on a non-penetrative compromise.

    Afterwards he snatched up my shorts and emptied their pockets of the crumpled pesos inside them (the equivalent of about fifty U.S. dollars). Then after tossing them into a nearby bush, he ran off into the night.

    ~~~~

    As I stood up a dizziness overtook me, my soul quavering and disoriented in its return from the air above to back inside my skin.

    Still shaking, I found my way to the closest lighted path, walking quickly until I reached Il Tempo—the club I’d started at.

    I asked the bouncer if I could use the bathroom.

    Once inside I washed my mouth with soap—one time, two times, five then six. No number of times felt like enough.

    After returning to my hostel, I fell asleep, telling not a single soul. I wouldn’t for another six months.

    ~~~

    Part of it was that I didn’t want to bother anyone. What had happened was heavy, but it was over now. I was fine—and what was there to say about it? Telling people, this soon into the start of my year abroad, would just be needlessly burdening them. Not to mention disrupting the momentum of what I’d wanted to be a chapter of growth and new beginnings.

    Another aspect of it was that I feared the questions people might ask, even if just in their own heads:

    Why were you walking on your own at night? Why didn’t you take a taxi? Why were you wearing shorts? Why didn’t you run? Scream? Why did you follow him into the park? Why weren’t you carrying mace? Why didn’t you…?

    I too had asked myself these questions. And I had answers to them.

    I was walking on my own because I’d just moved here and didn’t know anyone; I didn’t take a taxi because I thought the walk would be quick, and taking one every time you need to walk even just a block or two gets expensive; I wore shorts because it was a hot summer night; I followed him into the park for the reasons outlined in my thought process above, and perhaps because fear was clouding and constricting my rational thinking.

    Still, I couldn’t shake free from the shame.

    The people I confessed to months later turned out to be wonderfully supportive. Looking back, I can see that though I’d worried about them judging me, I was the one judging myself—then projecting that self-judgment onto them.

    Still, even though my support group didn’t, I was also aware that society does lean toward placing accountability on victims—even more so in the years before the Me Too movement. Often, even now, the knee-jerk reaction is to question victims.

    After determining that the best way forward was to put the incident behind me, I then locked it away into a mental casket and began the burial process. I covered over it with mate and dulce-de-leche; with invigorating swims through the Rio de la Plata; with meeting lively souls in the months that followed.

    Though unaddressed, at least safely buried the memory couldn’t harm me. Or so went my thinking at the time.

    ~~~

    Following the assault, I began my teaching job at the English academy. I assimilated to Uruguayan culture as best as I could, all while providing positive updates to friends and family back home.

    The pushed-down trauma manifested in other ways though—in stress, depression, and near constant irritation. As Tara Brach put it, “The pain and fear don’t go away. Rather, they lurk in the background and from time to time suddenly take over.”

    I drank unhealthy amounts of alcohol (not just in groups, but also when alone). Many things overwhelmed me. Countless triggers seemed to set me off.

    The Uruguayan girl I’d been dating even said to me once, “Te enojas por todo” (“You get irritated by everything”). I ended up getting banned from that lesbian club I’d gone to the night of the assault, after arguing with the bouncer one night.

    Nightmares plagued me. I’d learned in my college psych class that one of the functions of sleep is to escape from predators. I wondered why, then, I came face to face with my predator every night in my dreams.

    ~~~

    I’d had other traumatic experiences prior to this one—many of which I’d stuffed away.

    The pain pile-up will level off, if only you just stop looking at it, I often tried to tell myself.

    It didn’t level off though. I’d flown down to Uruguay with the pile still smoldering, my conscious mind numbed to the fumes (having been trained to forget they were there). Following the assault, the pile grew—and continued to grow well into my return to the U.S.

    When we avoid processing, the traumas form a backlog in our hearts and minds, queuing up to be felt eventually. Numerous studies have found avoidance to be “the most significant factor that creates, prolongs, and intensifies trauma-reaction or PTSD symptoms.”

    It was only when I began inching closer toward my pain that I began to slowly heal the parts I’d stuffed down for so long.

    Healing took place when I began opening up to people. It took place in therapy and through getting a handle on my drinking. It took place when restructuring my network, prioritizing the friendships that were better for my soul, while trimming the ones that had served more of a distracting and numbing purpose.

    It took place in redirecting care to my relationship with myself—spending more gentle one-on-one time with her, out in nature or in a quiet room.

    Every time I run barefoot on a beach, my heart heals a little.

    Every time I leave a meaningful interaction (with either a human or the planet), my soul inches closer toward realignment.

    I practiced turning toward my truer self in all these ways—until eventually, as phrased beautifully by Carmen Maria Machado, “Time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, [had] stepped between the two of [the traumatic incident and me], and [were] keeping [me] safe as they were once unable to.”

    Though I want this for everyone who’s survived an assault, or any other serious trauma, it’s only within judgment-free space that true healing is possible. This means letting go of self-judgment, and surrounding yourself with people who can validate you.

    May the idea be wiped from our collective consciousness: that the choice to wear a particular item of clothing, or to consume a few drinks, or to seek out a snack late at night—basic things men can do without fearing for their safety—are responsible for what happened to survivors.

    May the prevailing understanding become that what is responsible—100%—is a person’s decision to assault. Full stop.

    May all of these things become true—because no survivor should have to experience shame alongside the pain that’s already so difficult to bear on its own. Because every survivor deserves a space to heal and reclaim what was taken from them: the ineffable sense of emotional safety that should be our birthright. We deserve a viscerally felt “you are okay” coursing through our veins. We deserve to feel completely at home inside our skin.

    May we arrive there some day.

  • How to Mindfully Temper Road Rage and Make Driving Less Stressful

    How to Mindfully Temper Road Rage and Make Driving Less Stressful

    “Smile, breathe, and go slowly.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    As a Lyft driver, I once spent significant time out on the road—a setting rife with provocations and stressors.

    Driving can feel like a constant challenge to employ mindfulness instead of giving way to destructive emotions like impatience and frustration. Meditation can be difficult to practice when you’re navigating a vehicle (demanding as both activities are of your full attention)—try channeling all your senses into it, and you’ll likely plow over a pedestrian or end with your car in a ditch.

    Navigating the road mindfully, though, doesn’t have to mean closing your eyes or adopting any of the other classic “meditative” stances. I think it involves something simpler: momentary detachment—both from everything that’s happening around you and from your own internal reactions as you watch from an ever so slight distance while they ebb and flow.

    Here’s some of what I’ve learned about maintaining equanimity when out there on the stress-inducing road.

    The importance of keeping in mind that sometimes there’s something we’re not seeing.

    Driving down Market Street through downtown SF, I once noticed a number of pedestrians stopped inside the crosswalk in the middle of the street. They didn’t have the right of way; the light was red for them and green for us drivers who were trying to get through. Cars were honking.

    For maybe a second my impulse was to add to the honk melee. Then I took a closer look and saw what was actually going on: a lady had dropped her bags, causing their contents to spill to the pavement. The people in the street were passersby who had run to help her pick them up.

    Once they were finished, I noticed how they stood and raised their hands in apologetic gestures [to the perturbed honkers] that seemed to say both “Just wait one minute please” and “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

    Witnessing this got me thinking about how often in this fast-paced world we jump to reactivity before even understanding what’s going on first. We’re especially primed to do this out on the road, I think.

    As Shankar Vedantam said on his podcast Hidden Brain, “This woman didn’t bump into you maliciously; she’s blind. This soldier standing in formation didn’t pass out because he doesn’t have what it takes; he’s diabetic and needs his insulin. This woman isn’t heartless because she didn’t help the elderly person who had fallen; she’s paralyzed from a spinal cord injury.”

    Often in life, crucial pieces of a larger whole are unavailable to us—yet sometimes we act or respond as if under the assumption that we have access to all of them.

    Particularly when a driver in front of me is moving very slowly, or randomly stops, I sometimes feel the impulse to honk. I wonder why they’re being “so inconsiderate.” I ask them, in my head, if they’ve forgotten where the gas pedal is located. My immediate instinct is to cast blame on whoever’s holding me up.

    Yet I have to remind myself that I’m missing information. Maybe the driver in front of me is stopping to let someone cross the street. Maybe there’s a red light in front of us that I can’t see. Maybe… [insert any other number of possibilities here].

    I can’t see any of that though.

    I’ve also been on the receiving end; for instance when I stop to let a baby animal cross the road. Unable to see the road-obstructing animal, the cars behind me get annoyed and honk their disapproval.

    Willingness to admit when I am wrong (similar to the point above).

    Once when driving home across the Richmond Bridge, I thought there were only two lanes, which led me to assume that the guy next to me was cheating by driving along the shoulder.

    In response, my mind wove an entire narrative involving an entitled driver that does whatever he wants—weaves in and out, causing near collisions; uses the shoulder as his own lane, so that he can accelerate past the mass of stopped cars before cheating his way back into the pack once he’s gained a clear edge.

    To the driver he has endangered [through this behavior], who has responded by honking, he says, “Why don’t they just chill out?”

    I pictured the people out there who engage in similar behavior when not in their cars. The ones with blinders on to their own actions, who maybe call out others for “being too sensitive” while refusing to acknowledge their contribution to eliciting this supposedly sensitive response from them.

    Outraged, I honked at the driver—yet he kept driving along the “shoulder.” I shot him a look of disbelief; he didn’t look back. He seemed to not have even registered that my honk was directed toward him.

    That’s when I realized why: the “shoulder” was actually a legitimate lane.

    Remembering I’ve been wrong in the past helps me practice equanimity when I’m tempted to get outraged on the road.

    Practice forgiving mistakes.

    I think about those cars that get stranded in the middle of the intersection during high-traffic hours—usually because the light turned red when they were halfway through it. I think about how the cars around them often unleash an ambush of honks to signal their disapproval.

    I say this to myself when I’m about to become an angry honker: The trapped driver made a mistake. He or she is probably already aware. Your honk won’t teach him something he doesn’t already know.

    I realize that all my honk would have added was more noise to an already overly raucous road, compounding the driver’s shame while maintaining my own stress and self-righteousness.

    On somewhat of a side note, I’ve noticed how at times the most reckless drivers can also be some of the most intolerant of other drivers’ mistakes. One time a man who’d been driving eighty on a commercial street seemed very disgruntled when I changed into his lane (even though my doing this wouldn’t have been a “near miss” to someone who’d been following the speed limit).

    First he slammed the brakes. Then he wove theatrically around me into the lane next to us. From there he proceeded to change lanes three more times in the course of one block, dodging cars like they were opponents in a high-speed chase video game.

    If we can remember we all make mistakes, it will be easier to offer other drivers grace.

    Practice gratitude. When you do have a smooth ride, acknowledge it to yourself. Hold onto that moment and remember how it felt.

    A metaphor comes to mind each time I drive over a trafficless bay bridge (which happens very rarely but when it does, feels magical). Cruising over the smooth pavement without a car in sight conjures a wintery, white Christmas feeling.

    This calming and cleansing sight contrasts starkly with the default state of the freeway: normally a long stretch of cars, constant reminders of overpopulation and limited resources. It feels similar to gliding down a ski slope when the snow is fresh, pristine, newly plowed, and un-scuffed by other skiers.

    I made a note to be grateful for it.

    Even machines like Siri can be recipient to your gratitude. When traffic clogs the freeway, for example, I appreciate how she escorts me onto an alternative route. On one, we drove down bucolic side roads past fields of sunflowers while country music played from my car speakers (and bugs splattered against the windshield). On another, a river gushed a few feet away from us, providing a peaceful backdrop both visually and auditorily.

    Don’t force it, but when a moment that might be worthy of some gratitude does present itself, register it (even if it’s extended toward an inanimate object). Acknowledge it, if only to yourself.

    Humanize the other drivers around you.

    I think part of what exacerbates and heightens road rage is the ease with which we’re able to dehumanize the drivers we’re sharing the road with because we see cars first, people second. Attuning to certain visual cues, though, can reinstate a human component.

    I’ve found that making eye contact with another driver can at times quell any road rage that’s starting to bubble on my end. Other little things, like keeping my corgi stuffed animal visible, also help (when drivers get mad, the sight may calm them).

    One time when driving, I came upon a car stopped in the middle of the road. Just as I was about to get annoyed at the hindrance, a little Latino boy eating an apricot stuck his head out the car window. Juice dribbled down his chin while he waited for his dad to fix their car (which was why they were stopped). The innocent sight instantly calmed me. It was almost Hallmark-card level of sweet and centering.

    Another “tempering” visual cue: when a dog sticks its head out the window to feel the breeze against its face. Irritation was beginning to mount one day when I saw them: those big, brown eyes—opened wide, earnest, and slightly damp—shining above a golden snout in the back window.

    Once again I was calmed, my anxiety diffused by our eye contact—reminded that we’re are all flesh and bone, even when stress pushes us to reduce each other to the metal contraptions we cart ourselves around inside of.

    Take your time, Sir. I’m just going to have a moment with your sweet fur baby in the meantime, if that’s okay…

    In the absence of visual cues, use your imagination.

    Whenever I start to feel impatient with the slow driver in front of me, but I can’t see their face (or no other visual cues are present to temper the impatience), I take a deep breath. Then I gently counsel myself to envision the human inside the car.

    The specifics of whichever person pops into my head don’t really matter. What matters is that I recognize their humanity and extend patience toward whoever does.

    If that doesn’t work, try picturing one of your family members. What if the driver was your uncle, or your kind elderly neighbor, or your mom? Use your imagination to see inside the 2,000 pound metal machine that’s obstructing your path. Draw features onto the faceless foe inside it. De-objectify its operator.

    —

    Driving and traffic can be stressful and draining. During the times when it feels like the surrounding cars and I are basically just crawling to our destination, I feel like I might as well be outside the car, pulling it with a rope—at least that way I’d get some exercise and Vitamin D.

    Sometimes I wish someone would invent a car feature that would allow the driver to switch to “pedal mode.” It’d be a great way to release endorphins through exercise (thereby reducing stress levels) during these inherently stressful situations.

    Until those innovations get brought into existence, though, we can work on controlling our own internal responses to whatever external road frustrations come our way.

  • The False Comfort of Having More: Finding Peace in Living with Less

    The False Comfort of Having More: Finding Peace in Living with Less

    “Be a curator of your life. Slowly cut things out until you’re left only with what you love, with what’s necessary, with what makes you happy.” ~Leo Babauta

    As a kid, I remember begging my dad to take me to Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds, and any other number of fast food restaurants. Their food was okay, but that’s not the main reason I went. The toys were what beckoned me.

    Each chain offered different ones, some of which interested me more than others. The Mini Nintendos at Taco Bell? I was there. Assemble your own Inspector Gadget at McDonalds? Count me in on that Happy Meal.

    I remember gleefully jotting my Christmas lists inside the Grinch who Stole Christmas ornament-shaped notepad I’d extracted from beneath a soggy container of fries at the bottom of my Wendy’s kids’ meal bag.

    When Burger King came out with Pokemon toys, I raced on over. My goal was to get enough Poke balls to strap to every belt loop—because people in class, pedestrians sharing the street with me, and my family at home all needed to know how serious, esteemed, and accomplished of a Pokemon trainer I was.

    Meanwhile, the neglected burger and the remainder of fries glistened untouched beneath the fluorescent lights, off to the side.

    Ever since I was little, surplus brought me comfort.

    An all-in kind of girl when it came to my belongings and collections, I threw myself into the hobby of collecting and amassing—everything from Archie comics to souvenir pennies to Pepsi cans featuring photos of different Star Wars characters (which my mom hated and my cat enjoyed swatting around, only to be startled by the noise whenever they crashed against the ground).

    My room contained surplus—whether that was after a trip to the library with my mom, or from Beanie Babies scattering the floor. Bobbleheads crowded my shelves. Shot glasses that I used as cups for my dolls and stuffed animals during our play tea parties did as well.

    So did the pages of my angsty adolescent diary. One poster of Aaron Carter or a single pin-up of J.T.T. didn’t cut it for me—I had to fill the entire wall. How I managed to not feel unsettled falling asleep under the watch of so many prepubescent boy eyes still mystifies me.

    Material surplus as a child became surplus of a more abstract kind as a young adult. People, experiences, a large social circle, and nonstop activities took the place of physical objects. These grown-up versions of childhood collections served the same function my clutter once did.

    I scheduled back-to-back activities, unnerved by the thought of banking on solely one interaction to sustain me though the day. My schedule was constantly full.

    Where Does the Drive for More Come From?

    Reasons for “hoarding mentality” are numerous. I can see looking back now how surplus brought me comfort as a kid. Material excess likely allayed feelings of solitude.

    At one point I even wrote in my journal: “I believe many of us collect to fill voids. More means never going without, never living in scarcity. More confers safety. More means escaping alone-ness. If I just keep accumulating more more more, maybe at some point I can let out all this breath I’ve been holding in.”

    Our cultural climate likely also contributed. It capitalizes upon low self-worth and generalized ennui to sell the message that solutions and relief lie in consumption—consume more to fill the emptiness, may as well be their mantra.

    Additionally, I believe we create surplus when we don’t trust. We don’t trust what we have is enough. Or we don’t trust it’s good enough.

    I think about all the unfinished drafts on my computer over the years. Littering the pages were paragraphs of clumsy prose and scattered ideas, all chucked into the document and then abandoned.

    One paragraph on racial inequality. Introduction, scattered thoughts…  abandoned.

    Two paragraphs of a fiction piece on a one-night stand. Introduction, rising action… abandoned.

    I didn’t trust the voice. I didn’t trust the content. I didn’t trust the direction the piece was going in. I didn’t trust anything about it—so abandoning it felt like the comfortable, somewhat logical option.

    After fleeing it and attempting to start anew, I didn’t trust in the voice of this draft either, so I fled that one as well. Abandonment seemed the common trend, syntactically if not thematically. And over time all these abandonments, fueled by lack of trust, left surplus in its wake.

    I once compared the scatter-focused to the hyper-focused work style: More cups for the scatter-focused worker means less likelihood of failure—because if one’s not working, they can always shift focus to another. A half-finished project isn’t a failure. It just hasn’t been completed yet.

    Or think of it as putting your eggs into different baskets. You don’t want to put too much pressure on any one friend; instead, you spread your efforts onto multiple so that no one gets overwhelmed.

    It’s similar to the way some scatter-focused workers might view tasks. Dividing our attention amongst various simultaneous assignments takes pressure off any single one of them, reducing the likelihood of “botching it.” Because if one’s not working, they can always shift attention to another.

    Some of us who allow surplus into our lives may have difficulty with letting go.

    I grow attached to the things I write, for instance, even if I know they’re bad. A weak sentence, or a paragraph wherein the phrases are all jumbled together and not working in unison—even as this clunky tangle of words on the screen makes my head spin, I still fear hitting that delete button and watching my ideas vanish completely.

    I fear hitting it because even in their imperfect expression, they were still my ideas, born in a moment of generativity. I was adding something to the world, however small and insignificant, when I spawned them.

    Is Surplus Bad?

    I’m not trying to say that surplus is inherently bad; many people not only can successfully juggle multiple commitments, but likely even have to in order to stay afloat in this increasingly demanding world.

    What I am saying is that sometimes the hoarding mentality can prevent us from mindfully attending to what’s directly in front of us.

    As I came to find through my own later life experiences, “‘more” can sometimes feed disconnection.

    I once drove a Lyft passenger who, together with his wife, fostered twenty-two cats—a number he said was a “manageable amount.” He said that he didn’t think he could take in any more.

    “It’s very hard, because we want to say yes to all of them,” Jacob said, “But we’ve also got to think about how many we can realistically care for.”

    He then quipped, “Crazy cat ladies get a bad rap because they’re too idealistic. They’re in over their heads even, is what I’d say. She’s crossed the threshold from cat lover to cat addict.”

    We talked about the point at which a loving impulse turns into an addiction. About how even if the addicted person started out loving the thing they’re now addicted to, once compulsion has replaced it, love may no longer be at the center of the equation anymore.

    Jacob’s saying that he “wouldn’t be able to love fifty-six cats” resonated with me. I recalled how back when I had only one or two Pez dispensers, I really treasured them. They meant more to me. We had as close to an intimate connection as is possible for a human and a chunk of plastic to have with one another.

    The more my supply multiplied though, the less connection I felt with any single one of them.

    Looking back now, I’m just glad those Pez were inanimate objects rather than living creatures with needs and pain receptors—because they surely would have felt the sting of negligence under my care.

    ~~

    Becoming more aware of the roots of these tendencies has helped me to gradually shift them.

    The past few years I’ve slowly and steadily fengshui-ed many of the items accumulated throughout my past. The Pez dispensers were the first to go—to a customer through eBay.

    Next it was 1,050 of my 1,075 Archie comics (I kept a few as souvenirs from childhood, for nostalgic purposes). Writing I’d always found too difficult to part with, I’ve slowly recycled as well (after salvaging whichever remnants I saw some potential value in).

    I’ve sought more one-on-one interactions, careful to not plan too many in too short a period of time—both to preserve my energy and give each encounter the attention I feel it deserves.

    As minimalist Youtuber Ronald Banks said, “Minimalism is living with more of what matters by choosing to want less of what doesn’t.”

    When I do find myself starting to accumulate—be that material items or events on my social calendar— I ask myself questions now. Questions like, Am I saying yes to have one more item to add to my stash? Or because I genuinely connect and derive meaning from it?

    Are my motives extrinsic and escapist—tied more to bolstering my image or avoiding an uncomfortable emotion? Or are they intrinsic and self-actualizing—aimed toward the purpose of connecting?

    I wouldn’t say I’m a minimalist now, but I have become a bit more intentionally resistant toward what I now regard as the false comfort brought by surplus. I realize now I don’t need more things, more friends, more projects, more commitments. I just need to recognize when I’m trying to fill a void and instead focus more on the things I value most.

  • All It Takes Is One Person to Start a Chain Reaction of Caring and Kindness

    All It Takes Is One Person to Start a Chain Reaction of Caring and Kindness

    “People will never know how far a little kindness can go. You just may start a chain reaction.” ~Rachel Joy Scott

    One afternoon a while back, after stepping onboard to a full train car with no available seats, I situated myself in the standing section.

    A couple of stops later, two passengers vacated their seats, allowing me the chance to sit. I embraced the opportunity to people-watch. The woman in front of me began chapter four of her book, titled How to Jump for Your Life. The girl next to her alternated between the Tinder app and a school report. A little dog ruffed from the black duffel bag on the lap of the woman across the aisle from me.

    One minute I was staring down at my iPhone screen—earphones in, listening to a podcast. The next I was looking up to a group of teenagers yelling at a middle-aged man. The man was seated next to his bike in the bike section. I didn’t see what he’d done to provoke them.

    Their voices grew louder. Removing my earphones, I watched as the man stood up, chest puffed out. Barely an inch of space separated his face from the younger man’s. His opponent bridged this distance by stepping closer and punching him square in the eye. The older man hit back.

    As the spat escalated into a physical altercation, each hit delivered with more force than the last, passengers (myself included) watched incredulously. Headlines broadcasting the recent senseless murder of Nia Wilson on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) flashed through my mind, and I wondered if one of these men would pull out a weapon.

    I wondered how long they would fight for, and I wondered what would put an end to it. Was there anything we witnesses could or should do (and if so, what?)—or were we just captive audiences to the violent scene occurring in front of us?

    Visibly shaken, and with tears in her eyes, a woman passenger with dark curly hair, who looked to be in her early thirties, got up from her seat. “Stop. STOP!” she yelled, her voice at once insistent and pleading.

    About twenty seconds later the train came to its next stop, and the teenage boy and his group of friends ran off. The older man with the bike stayed behind—left side of his face twitching, injured eye watering heavily (he seemed unable to keep it open).

    Though I’d witnessed violence like this on television, this was the first time I’d been so close to actual, real-life physical aggression. That the fight had occurred between real people rather than actors— powered by raw anger and heightened emotions—and that it hadn’t been manufactured for audiences to consume from behind a screen both jarred and disturbed me.

    Still, the initial collective response seemed no different than had we all just watched a scene from Orange is the New Black together.

    Some BART riders put their earphones back in. Others appeared minimally affected, yet still somewhat removed and distanced from the spectacle. Almost everyone remained seated.

    Everyone except for one woman—the one who had been noticeably shaken by the altercation. The one who had cried and pleaded with the two men to stop.

    This woman marched over to the intercom and reported the assault to the station agent, asking that he please send a person to attend to the injured man. She then sat with the man, allowing him to use her phone to provide his information to the police.

    Once he hung up and handed her phone back to her, I felt suddenly compelled to leave my seat. The woman’s actions had emboldened me to push past my apprehensions. After getting up, I approached and offered the man some water to wash out his eye with.

    And then I watched as other people followed suit.

    One woman handed him eye-drops. Another conjured towelettes with disinfectant from her bag. A third offered Ibuprofen.

    I observed, and felt calmed by, the prosocial Domino effect playing out in front of me. And the precipitator of it—that woman in her thirties with the dark curly hair—stayed in my mind for a long time after.

    Since then, I’ve reflected a lot on the initial collective response. I don’t think it’s specific to our time; our desensitization in the presence of large groups of strangers is nothing new, as much as we might like to blame it on the disconnection from one another that technology has engendered.

    What came to mind was the bystander effect, “a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present” (Wikipedia). In short, according to this theory, the more people there are, the less likely it is that any one of them will step forward to help in a given situation.

    One of the most famous examples of the bystander effect took place in 1964 Queens New York, when Kitty Genovese was brutally stabbed, sexually assaulted, and left to die while returning home from work on foot at 3 am. The New York Times reported that thirty-eight witnesses watched the stabbings and did not try to intervene. They did not call the police until the assailant was gone and Genovese had already passed away.

    It’s disconcerting to read what the worst-case scenario of bystander effect can lead to, but at the same time I think we can glean a hopeful message from it. I think we can use it as evidence that any one of us may take it upon ourselves to model responsible, prosocial behavior for one another.

    I think a lot of times people shut down and check out when they don’t see a way to be useful or help the situation. To me, it’s comforting to know that all it takes is one person to get the helping momentum going, though.

    One person can drag us out of this paralysis by leading by example, perhaps motivating others to be that initial precipitator in a future scenario—the one who steps up and steps in, encouraging others to follow their lead.

    Imagine what the world would be like if we all did just that?

  • Busy Mind Keeping You Up? How to Mindfully and Peacefully Drift Off to Sleep

    Busy Mind Keeping You Up? How to Mindfully and Peacefully Drift Off to Sleep

    “I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.” ~David Benioff

    I can feel the night converting into day. Hooting owls pass the baton to chirping birds before flying off into the slowly fading night. Low-grade panic sets in as total silence gives way to minor stirrings, and I realize my time to carve out at least a tiny patch of sleep amidst this mostly sleepless night is running out.

    These words, which I wrote during one of my first face-offs with insomnia back in college, aren’t reflective of my life-long sleeping patterns. Sleep and I hadn’t always had such a complicated relationship. As a child, I’d nod off without any struggle, pretty much as soon as I entered my bed. It wasn’t until I reached early adulthood that it started playing hard to get with me.

    Sometimes sleep’s elusiveness could be attributed to my surroundings. Like many young adults, I’ve resided in a fair share of environments that weren’t the most conducive to restful sleep—whether it was the house in Montevideo, Uruguay with twelve housemates who liked to blast reggatone music at 3 AM, or the apartment in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district where garbage trucks, drunk people peeing (or puking) outside my window, and music blasting from nearby parked cars constituted the typical nighttime cacophony.

    External factors weren’t the sole cause of my sleeplessness, though. A lot of times even if my room or the street was relatively quiet, a clamorous mind kept me awake.

    While I still have trouble sleeping some nights, practicing mindfulness has made a significant overall difference. For anyone else who’s at times plagued by a revved-up night-time mind, here’s some of what has helped me.

    Read before bed.

    Ideally material that won’t over-activate your mind. Cramming your brain with new information or revving the analytical wheels may prevent it from relaxing, making for a more difficult transition into sleep. That said, the newspaper might be best reserved for starting your day with (to wake the mind up) while fiction may help to calm you down.

    I’ve found fictional stories provide a smooth transition into dreaming. Reading a short story or novel, all cozied up in your blanket, takes your mind off of the day’s stress and helps you relax, physically and mentally. If reading the newspaper is like climbing a hill, immersion into fiction is like slowly submerging one’s self into a jacuzzi.

    Recent books I’ve read that have helped guide me into sleep were The Island of Missing Trees, narrated by a sensitive and observant fig tree (I could feel my thoughts slowing down the more I got pulled in to the story); and Crying in H Mart, poignant and evocative in its exploration of a nuanced but deeply loving mother daughter relationship, with mouth-watering descriptions of Korean food.

    Practice free association.

    As I lay awake certain nights, the thoughts trundling through my mind tended to be: “Don’t think these things. Stop worrying. Go to sleep.”

    As I found time and again, though, telling yourself not to do something proves far less effective than providing an adequate substitute or stand-in for the habit or behavior in question. So what might that substitute be?

    After reaching an impasse, we writers often engage in free-association to unearth new ideas—the only rule being that we keep typing, documenting any thought that comes our way without forecasting ahead to the possible outcome. This allows our mind to relax, creating space for new ideas to flow in.

    Applying a comparable technique to your night-time mind can result in a similar effect. Instead of abolishing my thoughts, I’ve shifted now to giving up my attachment to any one of them, focusing more on letting them flow in and then out.

    Allow nonsensical or loosely related associations to pass on by through your mind without judging or obsessing over them. Maybe a regret from your day brings up a random embarrassing memory from seventh grade. Maybe a worry about tomorrow evokes an irrational fear of getting sick in a meeting. Let your mind go wherever it goes.

    You can think of it as a night club, yourself as the bouncer and your thoughts as the guests. Rather than make your venue into a snobby, selective place, allow it to be all-inclusive. At the same time, don’t provide the guests with any compelling reason to stay. While it’s natural to feel uneasy about letting in certain characters, you can rest assured that they won’t stay for very long if you don’t engage with them.

    Once I adopt a more permissive mentality, the motley crew starts finding my night club lame and boring. They’re used to VIP service, so my negligence simply doesn’t appeal to them. Barred from free food, drinks, and preferential treatment, they vacate soon enough—leaving my mind quiet, pristine, and more welcoming of sleep.

    In short, the monkey mind wherein thoughts run rampant is not what’s to be feared. It’s the lingering on any one of these thoughts that we could benefit from shifting away from. Because it’s when we’re trying too hard to control our minds that it often remains awake, vigilant, and filled with tension.

    Don’t despair.

    In some cases, deeper exploration and more individualized analysis is necessary to address the underlying issues, as insomnia can at times be only one symptom of a deeper-rooted health problem.

    Other times, though, as Alain de Botton wrote (even while acknowledging that insomnia that lasts for weeks “can be hell”): “In smaller doses—a night here and there—it doesn’t always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often only be received at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.”

    ~~

    While these aren’t full-proof remedies by any means, the primary nugget I hope you’ll take from them is that similar to many things in life, the more we adopt a drill sergeant mentality, the more elusive sleep becomes. The gentler and more permissive we are of our minds before nodding off, the likelier it is to descend upon us. As Ronald Riggio put it, “My expectation that eight uninterrupted hours of sleep is required was a big part of the problem.”

    I once wrote in my diary, “My body tenses up—the opposite of what it needs to do in order to achieve sleep. <— ACHIEVE sleep. That word choice alone reflects your misguided approach. Sleep is something you SURRENDER to. Leave the achieving for your job or future marathons.”

    So the next time you’re tossing and turning, try surrendering yourself to free-association. Maybe the next place it takes you to—amidst all the random corners the mind inevitably traverses—will be the [restorative] kingdom of sleep.

  • Why the Right Choice for You Isn’t Always an Immediate “Hell Yes”

    Why the Right Choice for You Isn’t Always an Immediate “Hell Yes”

    “If our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more. If we’re all wrong, all the time, then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress?” ~Mark Manson

    I often hear people encourage others with the following advice: “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”

    Don’t get me wrong: I see where they’re coming from when they say it. Far too often we are dissuaded from listening to our gut feelings. Often, we follow the tyranny of shoulds. We compromise on our true needs and desires. We talk the inner voice away in favor of what’s expected of us.

    And yet I also see how this well-intended nugget of wisdom eliminates grey area. The more black-and-white view of the world that it inadvertently espouses may not be entirely helpful to everyone, especially those who struggle with depression or anxiety.

    Sometimes a maybe or an underwhelmed response means I don’t really want to do this. Other times it can mean I’m having complicated feelings that are worth unpacking and investigating.

    We often feel ambivalent about taking part in experiences that are outside of our comfort zones, even if those experiences may help us to grow. Our moods or current struggles can affect our commitment to activities we might ordinarily enjoy.

    Back in college when I was in the throes of a serious depression, for instance, I felt no pull to do anything—not even hobbies that I used to love. I said no to jogging and running. No to preparing nutritious meals. No to any experience that might bring me outside of my safe cocoon.

    The only activities I said hell yes to were invitations to go out and get wasted at house parties with friends—which, needless to say, made my depression even worse and perpetuated a vicious cycle.

    I wasn’t hell yes about healthy things. Drinking and escaping my pain were the only activities that elicited anything close to a passionate response from me.

    If I had misapplied the above advice, I might still be drinking in problematic ways and eschewing more mindful activities that align with my values, simply because I don’t always feel hell yes about doing them.

    Another example: a friend of mine told me there are weeks when she reads an hour before bed, and that the experience is lovely. When she becomes embroiled in a Netflix show, though, that habit dissolves. The thought of reading loses its appeal. Does this mean she doesn’t like reading? Is it a sign that she inherently prefers TV?

    I don’t think it is. What I do think it means is that activities involving passive consumption often have addictive properties.

    As David Foster Wallace wrote: “Television’s biggest minute by minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.”

    Other examples: I’m drawn to sugar. Consuming it “feels right.” Picking up a celery stick feels more difficult. It doesn’t come as naturally.

    At certain points back in 2012 (before I moved to Uruguay), I wavered in my decision to teach abroad in South America.

    In 2019, when I considered the work and planning involved (as well as the money it would require), I even felt hesitant to take a vacation to Mexico City. Doubts and conflicting feelings dampened my “hell yes” into a “I don’t know, maybe….” shortly after my friend invited me.

    Did I still go, though? Yes! Did I have an amazing time? Also yes. Do I wish I could go back? One hundred percent.

    My point is this: don’t let ambivalence or a lack of “hell yes” convince you that you must just not really want to do something.

    It’s important to develop trust in our inner knowing; however, it’s also important to remember that our not always benevolent impulses sometimes masquerade as wise intuition.

    Even though we might pick up on a bad feeling, we never know what that bad feeling means. It could mean so many things. Instincts never come with clear instructions.

    That’s why it’s so hard to “just listen to them.” Listen to what? What action do we take in response to “this feels bad”?

    As for the hell yeses: especially for those of us with mental health struggles, immediate impulses and strong instantaneous reactions at times warrant further unpacking before being acted upon or blindly obeyed. It’s just not always true that they unequivocally have our best long-term interests in mind.

    A lack of an instant “hell yes” doesn’t necessarily signify that something isn’t right for us. It’s important that we allow room in our lives for the grey area, so as to ultimately act in alignment with our highest selves.