I wasn’t sure that I was going to write about this until I felt deep down that if I kept it inside, I would surely explode.
Last week was probably the worst week of my adult life that I can remember. There are a lot of hard weeks and days when you move far away from a place you’ve called home for 22 years, but it wasn’t that kind of week. It was the kind of week that makes you long for the summer days where you didn’t have to worry about school, and where an adult had to take you to all of your obligations, and the only money you had to worry about was the $2 allowance you had and how you couldn’t wait to get to the corner store to spend it on some Big League Chew you weren’t actually allowed to eat because of your parents’ “no gum” policy.
Last week, I noticed about $350 missing from my bank accounts. I took the appropriate measures to figure out what happened, but found myself being pushed off onto someone else or another department. Until this point, I’d put about 5 hours on the phone with this company, and cried on the phone with them for the better half of that. Guys, adulting is hard! It was a “pile it on Mikki” kind of week, and I just couldn’t get out from under the anxiety and depression I was feeling. I let my room get crazy messy. I didn’t get any sleep. I don’t even remember if I ate enough last week.
Come Saturday morning, I was feeling too much. There was too much in my mind, and too much on my heart. Awake at 5:30 am, I decided to wait for the sun to peek out of the horizon and go for a walk.
I hate walking. I don’t love exercise. I get paranoid that I’m going to be approached by people while I’m concentrating on the pain in my shins. After walking a mile and a half, I decided to walk to this park near my apartment. They had just opened the gates after sunrise, and it was empty. The playground was devoid of whining children, so I hopped on a swing and just pumped my legs until I couldn’t pump them anymore.
The light was just starting to cast its light over the baseball field. I was starting to feel serene and peaceful.
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I bent down in one of the play structures because there was a piano in in, so I was plunking around, when a man walking his three Pekingese dogs walked by. He said, “Good morning,” so I waved and said the same.
I noticed the man had let his dogs off the leash and was kind of parking it near the structure, and I decided it was time for me to start acting like a 28-year-old, and not an 8-year-old and leave.
As I left, he beckoned me over. I decided to humor him, because he seemed like a nice older gentleman and harmless. He showed me a stretch that he does at the park, and I asked him if he came here every day. He said he did. I decided he seemed like a nice enough stranger to strike up a conversation with him. I obliged him and did the stretch along with him on the railing of the playground.
“You do this every day. You’re too fat. You need to be skinny.”
“Too much of you. Too fat. You need to diet.”
“Sir, that is incredibly rude.”
I turned away, the wind completely knocked out of me. What had just happened? I walk/ran away from him, hoping he wasn’t following me. In a movie moment, I spun around, looking at my surroundings, not sure where to go. I stopped at a picnic table and broke down for a solid 20 minutes. Snot spilled out of my nose, tears fell and stained the table with my heartbreak. How could anyone be so incredibly cruel to someone they didn’t even know? When the tears had subsided, I decided to walk home. At this point, many people had begun walking their dogs and I pulled my hood around my head to hide my swollen eyes and the silent tears that wouldn’t stop coming.
At the beginning of the walk, I was already at one of my lowest lows. This…this was immeasurably harder to bear than the missing $350 in my bank account. The fact that since the beginning of 2016 I had lost some weight didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t enough that anyone could actually tell by looking, but at the beginning, when that number starts to go down, that doesn’t matter. I had already been eating better, but now every time I ate a salad, it wouldn’t be my voice in my head cheering myself on. It would be the voice of this stranger who deigned to tell me that there was “too much of me”, as if we are only allotted a certain amount of space to take up in this world.
If you’re insecure about something, you don’t want someone you don’t even know to say to your face the worst things you already think about yourself.
Later that day, when I had finally licked my wounds, I decided to go to Target, just to get out of the house. Part of me wanted a little retail therapy, which I knew deep down I couldn’t afford, and the other part of me just needed to breathe some fresh air from the windows of a newly cleaned car with Hamilton blasting in the speakers. Every person I saw, I wondered what happened in their day. Did they get their hearts crushed by a stranger, or by someone they loved? Were they oblivious to the mean nature of people? Were they having the best Saturday ever?
While I was still hurting and reeling from this event, my heart felt so compelled to be nice to people I came across. I smiled at people I made eye contact with (admittedly, weakly at first). Just because this man had hurt me, and shaken me to my very core, doesn’t mean that I needed to take out that pain on other people. It shouldn’t mean that because I’ve been having a rotten week, I’m somehow allowed and vindicated in taking it out on another stranger, starting a chain reaction of cruelty.
I didn’t do much retail therapy – a bath rug, vegan probiotics, and Honey Nut Cheerios – but I’d mustered up the courage to call my mom, who had been texting me all day. What is it about the recognizable voice of someone you love asking you, “How are you today?” that speaks to the very heart of our hurt and lets it all out? By adding the simple word of “today”, the context changed. “How are you” means, to me, “generally speaking”. I’m good. I have a job. I have good friends. I have an amazing family, and roof over my head. Today, I am deeply hurt. Today, I am not okay. Today was the worst day of my life so far. And she didn’t try to heal me. She didn’t try to make it better by saying, “Don’t listen to him. You’re beautiful.” She made it all better by simply saying, “That man sucks.” And he does.
For now, I will be hurt. The tears have stopped. What’s done is done.
But 50 hours later, I still wish I had given that guy a piece of my mind. I’m 90% sure my dad was joking when he said I should have exacted my revenge by giving one of his dogs the boot, but I know that other 10% of him wasn’t kidding at all because that man hurt his daughter deeply. I would have told that man that my body is not his concern. My journey to wholeness and healthy is not his business. And frankly, that his long johns and tall socks were not a good look for him. Just kidding.
Mostly, I would have told him that too much of me is okay. That too much of me and less of cruel people like him would be better than none of me at all.
“I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.” I wasn't sure that I was going to write about this until I felt deep down that if I kept it inside, I would surely explode.
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