Half Cocked in the Fuck You Room
I got-got. Something was up.
I’d been over-stimulated since the freezing rain. Now the day was topping out at ninety and I was still in the same register. What snapped me out of it was snapping at a student — a tone too brusque. The point landed, but so did the realization: my personal life had bled into my professional one.
Tough stuff. Cavalier and amiable. Grounded enthusiasm. Cosmic cheerleader. Those are my modes. Lately I’d lost them. Dry had turned to sharp. I heard it in my own voice. Certainly not everything is annoying.
After a tense call with my mom, I called Melba. I felt useless. Impotent. Unsure. Not my favorite traits. I stole cavalier from her.
“Now Michael, you know I love your cavalier attitude. It makes me feel safe when you’re that way. But not everybody always feels that way.”
No one always feels that way. I knew that. But I hate one mode. I’m new to being head of house. I’d rather be animated.
Sorry for my bad attitude lately. I didn’t realize how burnt out I’d become over the winter.
My mom’s chemo treatments loomed large in her eyes — she remembered what it was like in the early nineties, when she had breast cancer. Three times.
It’s not just mastectomies that leave scars. That cleared up some of what came after. Compartmentalization. A small child at home. A nudge toward rose-colored glasses.
That trauma tactic runs into friction with my commitment to stark reality. I see what’s real and what isn’t — usually. So it was a shock when I finally clocked it: high-alert hypervigilance, all the time.
I was running a deficit I didn’t know I had. Time delays are tricky. I didn’t realize how hard it had hit me until I started canceling plans just to lie flat.
Try as I might, it got to me. When I went glasses shopping with my best friend — a game we’ve played many times — she was immediately concerned I needed to eat or something. Hangry, or overly serious.
“This is who I am now,” I told her.
“I mean, okay. I love all the Michaels,” she said.
Thomas doubted. Peter denied three times. It took a third friend before I knew. Kazi asked if I was mad at her — I hadn’t seen her in over a year, and we happened to run into each other on her first day back in the city.
“No, I’m sorry. Apparently I look like this now.”
Kazi lost her dad during COVID and returned to North Carolina to help her family regroup after a great run at Second City. She didn’t know I was ever mad — she’d been that far off the radar.
Mom has had six surgeries in eighteen months. She’s doing great, except this is all so hard and it really does suck. And boy, we all love each other.
“I guess I know one of the reasons I’m back in DC,” she said, as I felt familiar, compartmentalized tears making their demands on the edges of my eyes.
Kazi’s hug kept them at bay.
I feel better this week. I’ve been such a pill. Apologies. Water off a duck’s back, as Jinx Monsoon might say.
Easy come, easy go. Emotions have weather patterns. Sustained insight practice yields thank-yous and I’m-sorries. But that’s built on starting over at the beginning, again and again.
Karma yoga asks for right effort. Notice what isn’t working. Cultivate the opposite.
Time with Kazi, Melba, and Ruja.
