Every Sunday, Jenn and I head over to the Farmer’s Market for our weekly provisions. Then we’re off to the local thrift store and an estate sale or two. Sunday is our time together. We have complete opposite work schedules, and this is the only day they intersect and we get to hang out.
The thrift store is a particularly good one. They get new stuff every week, and the neighborhood clearly has its share of well-off contributors. The quality of the donations leaning into designer clothes and high-end everything else. Jenn really likes this store, and can easily spend an hour there. I, on the other hand, can get in and out in twenty minutes (like how long does it take to go through the black clothing?). But instead of bugging Jenn to hurry up, I just slip into the backroom, where there’s furniture for sale, sit in a soft recliner, and attack the New York Times crossword puzzle.
DO NOT SIT ON THE FURNITURE! signs are posted throughout the room. Being an entitled fuck, I ignore them. Apparently after years of doing this, the manager of the store, unbeknownst to me, has been holding a smoldering resentment.
“I know you can read,” he said, hovering over me, clearly angry. “Don’t sit on our furniture.”
“Oh,” I say, as if I didn’t know the signs were there. And instead of apologizing, I stand up and say, “my wife buys a lot of shit here, I’m just waitin…”
He doesn’t let me finish, “Oh, so we sell shit here, is that right? You don’t respect the store. You don’t respect us, or our rules.”
This exchange is going south, rapidly. The man is seething. I should have led with some sort of an apology, but I didn’t, and now, seemingly insulted on top of everything else, he goes off on a raging tirade. Telling me to grow up (I’m def older than he is), and to have some respect for other people’s rules.
I am not a big “follow-the-rules” kind of person, hence the “entitled fuck” from earlier. I also have issues with authority, no matter how small the authority, I resent them. Yet instead of going up against this petty totalitarian. I try to disengage myself from being cornered in the furniture section by this man’s angry outburst. Only, he follows me across the store, while he continues to yell.
“Why are you so angry?” I say.
This does not have my desired effect of hopefully defusing the situation into a discussion. It just makes him angrier, his face bulging red, and his insults more direct. Finally, with an exhaustive huff, he storms out the back room, to a rear door, and slams it behind him.
I find Jenn, tell her the abridged version of what just happened, and leave, “I’ll be out in the car.”
Outside on the street, a wave of shame slaps me in the face. It’s not guilt, I did something wrong. It’s shame, I am wrong. “Fuck.” I’m not exactly sure what just transpired. Yeah, I was breaking the store’s “handwritten” rules. But did it warrant a ten-minute diatribe insulting my very being? If this guy was so upset, why has he walked by me for years and not said a word.
For the rest of the day, I can’t shake this feeling. I keep seeing the store manager’s snarling face. More than once I ask myself why it bothers me so much. My recent prolonged and difficult quest to obtain an antidepressant that works, has left me a little vulnerable, but what I’m feeling is way over the top to what actually happened. There’s a familiarity to it that feels deep-rooted in something else. I feel like I’m reliving childhood trauma, a wrong that has never left me.
Later that evening, I’m at a literary event for my publisher’s fourteenth anniversary. I’m walking through the lobby and make eye contact with a woman. She smiles. I think I recognize her. Walk over, give her a hug, she goes stiff, and I realize she’s not who I think she is. To be fair, the person I mistook her for is one of those people that changes their looks on a fairly frequent basis. Dyed hair, varying wardrobe, different make-up, etc. But I’ve gotten overly familiar with someone I don’t even know, crossed a boundary this woman clearly resents. I feel like a lecherous scumbag. The shame from the morning returns like a freight train through my brain. I mumble a short apology and meander off to lick my wounds.
Uncomfortable and awkward incidents and interactions like these have more impact on me than just misunderstandings and disputes. The ones that affect me the most, have their origins in my past trauma. A PTSD response to similar feelings of said trauma. Nothing hits me as hard as shame. It’s at the root of most of my issues. My depression, anxiety, and my former perchance to self-medicate. It manifests itself in my low self-esteem, self-loathing, and despair. It stops me from utilizing the compassion I have for others, to not criticize myself.
In my repertoire of core beliefs, somewhere, growing up, or within my life’s experiences, I have garnered some pretty detrimental ideas of who I think I am. Unintelligent, unlovable, unwanted, and undeserving. It was something someone said, I either took to be my truth or cataloged it as more evidence to bolster my already negative view of myself. Failure, fraud, forgotten, and flawed. Never really taking into consideration the source of this information. Like why it was said to me, and the circumstances around the incident. Only who said it and the power their words have over me.
For the most part it was a person of authority, someone who held sway over my life in some way. An authoritarian figure I wanted to please or appease. Wanting approval and never feeling like I could get it. Most of this happened over fifty years ago. Childhood memories haunt me. My M.I.T. professor dad, calling me stupid, when I couldn’t pass math in the 7th grade. Yet twenty years later, getting diagnosed with dyslexia, one would think I’d let that go, but continued to think of myself as unintelligent. It didn’t help that a plethora of teachers chimed in, “he doesn’t apply himself,” and “he could do better if he really wanted to,” and me just piling all that on as more evidence.
A narcissistic mother, who could never take responsibility for her mistakes, always laying the blame at the feet of others, and confusing the hell out of me as a kid. “I couldn’t possibly have done that,” she’d say. Implying I had somehow been responsible, when I knew I wasn’t. Ultimately questioning my ability and seeing myself as an incompetent failure. Carrying that with me well into adulthood. And then, bam, those same feelings of shame arise out of the incongruities of daily human life. A mistake, that’s devastatingly nothing, but at the same time, demoralizing as it shows the world who I am. That stupid kid that can’t do anything right.
It doesn’t help that I’m also arrogant—fuck you and your bullshit I know better—but I desperately want you to like me. It doesn’t help that I have a huge ego, when I also have extremely low self-esteem. These juxtaposing ideologies clash in my brain, and I’m left holding the pieces, trying to put it all back together.
Over time my memories of the store manager will fade in my head. If I see him again, I’ll apologize for sitting on his furniture for all those years, and leave it at that. But then I’ll probably never go in that store again. So basically that concession is a moot point at best. The woman, she’s a friend of a friend, I’m sure our paths will eventually cross. I’ll feel awkward. But what else am I supposed to do? I no doubt will continue to entangle myself in other people’s lives, but I’m going to work on how I let those interactions affect me. I’m too old to relive childhood trauma. Someday I just have to put that all to bed.