How to Catch the Story Before It Catches You
A few weeks ago, my husband and I went to Cincinnati for a couple of nights to attend Reds Opening Day festivities. Our son had gotten us tickets to the game for Christmas and we’d made hotel reservations well in advance. I’d never been to Opening Day and Tuck hadn’t been since before he met me. In other words, a VERY long time.
Cincinnati is where we had our first date and over the 36 years (gulp) since then, we’ve spent a lot of time there. That first date marked my first time seeing a Major League game in person. It also marked my conversion from a Cubs fan to a Reds fan. (Sorry, Dad). The Reds went on to win the World Series that year, which I’m pretty sure had everything to do with me being on their side.
The following year, we made the trip from Indy to Cincy seventeen times to sit in one of the top six rows behind home plate of Riverfront Stadium for a ridiculously small amount of money. Back then, we almost always drove over for the game and drove back the same day. As the years passed and our family and our bank accounts grew a little, we’d take the kids and spend weekends there. Now, it’s mostly back to being just the two of us.
We didn’t make it to a game last year and honestly, given the way the Reds played, I’m okay with that. This year, however, it’s a whole new ballgame (pun attended). While they didn’t win the opener (didn’t even score a run, thank you), they’re off to a great start.
Opening Day was… crazy. The crowds both around the stadium and across the walkways into downtown were massive. The stadium crowd was there for the party, the downtown throng for the parade. And speaking of the parade, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a longer one. It went on for hours. We watched a fair portion of it from Fountain Square and then lucked into a table at a restaurant along the parade route. We ate a leisurely lunch and when we headed back to the party at the Banks (the bar and restaurant district surrounding Great American Ball Park), the parade was still going on!
When we got back to the Banks, the crowd had grown to the point that we could barely get to the stadium. It was literally shoulder to shoulder and felt a little dangerous if I’m being honest. I kept thinking that if someone fell down, they might not be able to get back up. Not good. I also considered being agoraphobic or claustrophobic in that situation and how difficult that might be. There was a sea of people moving in every direction and the only way to get where you wanted to go was to ride the tide. Tuck got behind me and held onto my purse strap and I got behind a line of rather large dudes and took advantage of their wake.
What’s really notable, in retrospect, is that other than those two observations I had about being in a bigger, denser, probably more dangerous crowd than I’d ever been in, I was remarkably calm. Especially given that six hours earlier, in an arguably smaller, more sparse and completely benign environment, I’d been anything but.
That morning, Tuck and I did what normal people do when they’re staying at a hotel. We went to breakfast. The place was half empty and I was half nuts. While we were sitting there, eating fake eggs and cold bacon, I became hyper-aware of every person in the room - where they were sitting, whether they were looking at me, what they were eating, etc. My shoulders were up around my ears and I couldn’t settle into the conversation. I kept scanning the room like I was expecting something bad to happen any minute, even though nothing was happening at all. It was a normal breakfast at a normal hotel on a normal Thursday.
Tuck noticed. Then I noticed him noticing. And the story my brain started telling was immediate and confident. I must have an anxiety issue. Maybe I’ve always been more of an introvert than I realized. Maybe I’m just not wired for socializing the way I used to be. I’m getting older. This is probably just who I am now.
None of that is true.
What is true is that I’ve spent the past several months sitting alone at my desk, working by myself, talking mostly to myself and occasionally to Tuck. I’ve practiced being alone until my nervous system made it the default. I haven’t developed an anxiety disorder. I’ve just stopped doing the thing that keeps a person comfortable around other people, which is being around other people. When I finally put myself back in a room full of strangers, my system treated it like a dangerous environment, because for me, it had become one.
The label showed up after the behavior. Not before it.
Breakfast wasn’t magical. I didn’t leave the restaurant nor did I have some breakthrough moment where the discomfort lifted and I suddenly felt like myself again. I just had breakfast with my husband and then we went about our day. But I walked out of that restaurant knowing something I hadn’t known when I walked in, which was that my system was perfectly capable of handing me a story that sounded exactly like the truth about who I am, when it was really just a readout of what I’d been doing for the last nine months.
Those are different things. One is self-knowledge. The other is a just a weather report from inside my own head.
Which brings us back to the crowd…
Six hours after the hotel breakfast, I was stuck in a crowd, shoulder to shoulder with more people than I’d been around in a year, maybe two, possibly ever. My system had every legitimate reason to sound the alarm. The crowd really was dense enough to be a little dangerous. I really was noticing that if somebody went down, they weren’t getting back up. I really did consider what this situation would feel like for someone with actual agoraphobia or claustrophobia and concluded that it would be awful. Those signals were accurate. My system was doing useful work.
What it didn’t do was cause me to lose my shit. At all. In fact, I made jokes about the whole scene to the other people in the crowd and thanked the offensive tackles in front of us for making a hole big enough to get through. I think that’s got everything to do with the insight I’d gleaned earlier that morning, when I watched my nervous system try to sell me a story about being an introvert who couldn’t handle breakfast, and then called bullshit on it.
If that hadn’t happened, I probably would have told myself another story about being overwhelmed and claustrophobic, and needing to go back to the hotel. And that story would have felt every bit as true as the introvert story from breakfast.
Before I started working on TC, I might have turned around, retreated back to a quieter block and spent the rest of the day congratulating myself on being mature enough to know my limits. Instead, I let Tuck hold my purse strap. I fell in behind the big dudes. I rode the tide to the stadium and once again sat beside my favorite person on the planet and watched our beloved Reds, on a staggeringly beautiful day in one of our favorite places on Earth.
***
Your nervous system is always sending signals. Some of those signals are accurate readings of what’s actually going on around you. Some of them are stories generated by whatever you’ve been practicing lately. Both feel the same from the inside. Both show up with the same urgency. Both want you to do something about it, right now. The work is learning, little by little, to tell the two apart.
You don’t usually learn that in the crowd. You learn it in the hotel. At breakfast. On a normal Thursday when nothing is actually happening and your brain tries to hand you a label anyway.
Those small moments are where you get the reps in. They don’t feel like training. They don’t feel like much of anything. But they’re the only reason you’ll know what to do when you end up somewhere you truly want to be and one or the other of the voices start talking in your head.
Because eventually they will.
And you’ll need to know which one to trust.