You Can’t Go That Way…

The other day, I was walking down my alley to go to the City Market around the corner, and I stopped to talk to a former student of mine (we’ll call her “M”) who’s now a member of the Blue Suede Brigade, downtown’s boots-on-the-ground safety and hospitality personnel. As she and I are celebrating her fifth day without a cigarette (good for you, chica!), this lady in a minivan drives up the alley and stops beside us. I immediately think, “But you can’t go that way.”

She tells us that she wants to drive across Main Street to get on Front Street. And while continuing straight down that alley was most certainly the quickest access to Front, there was a small hitch in her plan. Main Street in that area doesn’t allow motorized traffic. There’s also a big pole sticking up in the middle of the road to indicate that you just can’t go that way.

So M, doing her job, politely asks if she can help the lady with anything. The driver starts getting super nervy. “I have to cross the street. I have to go this way.” M calmly looks at her and lets her know that, apologies, she just can’t go that way.

The lady loses her mind at being told no and then her nervy turns belligerent. I’m standing back, keeping quiet, while M explains to the woman that she’ll have to back down the alley and turn around at the cross street. This lady ain’t having a single drop of that.

She starts aggressively pointing across Main and raises her voice to whine that she’s just got to go “RIGHT THERE!” M is totally pro at this point, whereas I was ready to launch on this woman. M politely explains once again that it’s not possible to cross there and she’d be more than happy to help the lady navigate out of the alley so she could get to her destination. Patience of a saint that one.

The lady still ain’t having it.

Now she’s working her best “can I speak to your manager” attitude and M is calmly repeating herself trying to manage this obstinate human. It’s part of her job to maintain a cordial exchange and be helpful and all, but after a bit of this back and forth, I can’t take this lady’s rudeness anymore. I just looked at the woman and (politely but firmly) interrupted her whining with, “Seriously, ma’am. You can’t cross here. It’s quite literally against the law. Big pole in the road. Where’s the confusion?”

Lady stares at me a second. It was actually a serious question because I’m beginning to think she’s on something and maybe shouldn’t even be driving at all. She blinks at me. I stare back stoically. She’s got nothing in response.

I finally break the silence with, “Look, M’s just doing her job here. She’s trying to stop you from breaking the law and tearing your car up, ’cause… big pole in the road. Just throw it in reverse and let her help you.”

I look at M and tell her I’ll let her get back to work and catch up with her again soon, that it’s great to see her, and I hope this all works out okay. Hugs. And M’s already on it. She starts walking to the back of the van calling out instructions to get it out of the alley safely. The lady’s not whining anymore.

Life’s going forward.

As I walked to the City Market, I got to thinking about the whole bizarre scene. I was struggling to understand why this lady wouldn’t just realize that she wasn’t going to get across Main. She said she was local, so surely she knew she couldn’t. And again, big ass pole in the road. So why cling so hard to this idea that she was headed THAT way?

Made me think about how people just don’t like change, how sometimes you get to a place where you only know one way to do something, and it’s the totally wrong way to do it, but you just don’t know any differently. I get it — change is scary. Learning new things is scary. Throwing it in reverse and apologizing for being belligerent is scary. Letting someone help you do something scary is, well, scary.

Then I started wondering… why do we struggle so mightily with change, even when we get that it’s the only option in the moment? Sure, there’s fear and all, but this lady had a support system. She’s lucky. Hell, I’d have backed it out for her if she was going to have a meltdown about it.

But we do that. We lose our bearings when we’ve got to change things. And while some people claim to love change, I’d argue they’re not big fans of change they weren’t aiming for.

We get determined. And we convince ourselves our way is right. We make it normal in our heads and expect the world to bend to our process. But that’s not real, and it’s certainly not fair to everyone around us who inevitably become prey for our stubbornness or ignorance.

I’m guilty.

I’m trying really hard to change, realizing that my way is skewed sometimes and that it’s not always the best way, that sometimes it shouldn’t even be an option. There’s a lot of frustration in that. Sometimes, I just don’t know any better, and I hate that. I feel like I should. That’s what happens when your normal is sideways, though.

It doesn’t mean I’m not trying my ass off, of course. God knows I am. And I’m just as angry at myself when I get it wrong as anyone affected by it, maybe more so because I’m tired of getting it wrong. I’m tired of feeling stupid and like I should just “know better” already. It’s agonizing to constantly doubt your own judgment. Exhausting, too.

But folks like me don’t just “know better.”

We question everything, which leads to some glorious sleepless nights filled with overthinking and kicking our own asses for being so obviously wrong, now that we’ve got the gift of hindsight. That’s the damn problem, though. I want it to be foresight.

I’m to the point where there are some obvious rewrites in my head. Things that I thought were normal have been replaced with an understanding of what actually is. But there’s nuance left, and that’s the tricky part. There’s a hole in the logic, and sometimes there’s no logic at all. Just impulse. That’s generally blown up in my face pretty spectacularly.

Count to 20, my BFF says. Think about it first. Check in with yourself. Don’t just trust others to have your best interest at heart because people are typically only thinking about themselves, even if you’re not, kid. You should. What do those people want from you? What’s the message you might be sending? Don’t put yourself in a situation to create that message if that’s not what you want to say. Good advice. I’m trying to make it all muscle memory. It’s a process.

Change doesn’t have to be scary, though. That lady changing routes didn’t mean she wasn’t going to get to her destination. My changing routes doesn’t mean I’ll somehow fail to get to mine. What it does mean, though, is that I won’t break the law, get a ticket, and tear my car up trying to do it the wrong way.

That means two things…

Featured Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash