Tiny Revolutions №103: The Bus is Coming

+ the second arrow 🏹 🏹

Image from J. M. W. Turner’s The Channel Sketchbook (ca. 1845)

When I was in my late 20’s, I worked at a PR agency that served big clients in the tech and entertainment world. For the most part, it was a great experience: the pay and benefits were decent, the work was challenging, the people were bright, and I got to do a lot of really cool shit that impressed my friends and family. It was a time in my career where you might say I was cutting my teeth: both in the sense of learning a valuable trade, and in learning about being a human in the world. 

Our clients were paying us top dollar to make them look good in the media, so the demands were heavy and often time sensitive. We were under constant pressure to deliver positive press coverage, but, as any agency person knows, we were also there to act as a buffer between the person managing us and whoever was managing them. Which meant that we often served as a convenient entity for absorbing blame when something went wrong. 

This was a known thing. Sometimes you would do everything right to deliver a project/execute a plan/achieve a result, etc., and it would go off perfectly, but you would still in some way get fucked. Some higher up would dislike a story, say, and they would call the internal PR person and rip them a new one. But instead of taking accountability for leading the agency down the wrong path, that PR person might say whoops, the agency got it wrong, and then we’d be in trouble. Or something similar. There are a lot of ways things can go wrong when a company’s reputation is the matter at hand! 

We called it “getting thrown under the bus,” and it happened semi-regularly. The nature of the business! In order to work that job, you had to accept that this would periodically happen. But it stung every time. 

I had a boss who had a hilarious way of diffusing the tension when it started to become clear that our hardworking little team was about to get mowed down. She’d put a conference call on mute and say, “THE BUS IS COMING!” with a little cackle. We’d listen on as the voice at the other end of the line explained what went wrong, why it was actually our fault, and what would happen next. We’d defend ourselves, of course, but what can you really do when the bus comes for you? You have no choice but to get hit! 

So we’d get hit. And it would hurt! So it goes. But being reminded that the bus was coming would take some of the sting away. The world does what it does to you, and much of that is way outside of our control.

I’ve been thinking of THE BUS IS COMING lately because I’ve been hyper sensitive to people I care about saying bad shit about themselves. Some recent examples:

“I am trying really hard to alter my fat ass.” 

“My idiot mind just cannot figure this out.”

“I knew this was going to happen and I let it happen anyway.”

I winced internally in response to each one. “Hey man,” I wanted to say. “That’s my friend you’re talking about!!!”

Each one of these statements was made in regards to doing something really hard. Learning a new technology, adopting a new way of eating, and navigating office politics, respectively. Hard stuff! 

And we do these things even though we know they are hard. But then we’re somehow still really unforgiving when our sweet little selves do what they normally do when faced with hard circumstances: they experience pain. Pain that we then internalize and make our fault! It’s so silly.

I’ve gotten a lot better at not being my own worst enemy over the years, but I’m still totally guilty of this. I will find myself in a difficult situation (especially one I’ve been in before) and instead of being like, “Well, this sucks,” I’ll hear my inner voice saying, “God, this sucks and also what a loser you are that you still have not learned to avoid situations like this!!” I caught myself doing it a lot this spring in the wake of my mom’s passing, when I realized I had taken on too much and was doing a lot of things badly. It was such a clear example of a time when a large dose of self-compassion was in order, but there I was anyway berating myself for struggling. 

There’s a famous Buddhist teaching about this phenomenon called The Second Arrow (The Sallattha Sutra). The gist of it is that the thing that happens that causes the pain is the first arrow, and the way we amplify the pain is the second arrow. We can’t avoid the first arrow. Pain is inevitable! The second arrow, on the other hand, is not. We can choose to be gentle to ourselves, to have compassion for what we’re going through. We can choose to stop resisting (and thus perpetuating) the pain and simply experience it, do what it takes to heal, and move on.

As my old boss may have put it, we can choose to accept that the bus is, in fact, coming and it could get here at any time! Weeeeeee! But what we don’t have to do is blame ourselves for getting hit. I *always* need this reminder.

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Speaking of giving ourselves shit for no real reason, I’ve found myself stuck with this newsletter lately. The story above is one I dashed off yesterday afternoon after a friend uttered one of the objectionable statements above. I wrote short stories like this weekly for a long time (roughly mid 2020 - late 2021), but in the last couple of years I’ve been publishing less. Which is not exactly the same as writing less. I still write quite a lot, but I find that I censor myself a lot more.

It has to do with me being a perfectionist, sure, but it also has to do with the size of my email list. A handful of people subscribe to this newsletter every week — which is NICE, don’t get me wrong! — and it’s like every new person clams me up just a tiny bit more.

Shouldn’t I be saying something BETTER? More IMPORTANT? More PROFOUND? It’s exhausting to think about. On the one hand, probably? On the other hand, this is a free email and no one is forcing anyone to read it. Haha. So maybe it’s just not supposed to be so serious! Read it or don’t, friends!

The truth is I always feel like my writing could be better but I also always enjoy hurling something out into the void. It makes me feel less alone. And I always want to feel less alone!

All of this is a long way of saying that I might be appearing in your inbox more often. Maybe!

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On to some things I found worth sharing recently…

Newsletter: Gilded Tales

My family is lousy with writers, did you know that? My brother Joey recently launched Gilded Tales to publish stories he’s been telling his children over the years. He said of “The Shifter,” his most recent installment, that he wrote it after thinking about one of the most terrifying things that could happen to a child: realizing they couldn’t trust their parent. If your taste leans toward the dark and fantastical, these stories are for you.

The Shifter

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Newsletter: Create Me Free

We all live on a spectrum of creativity (some people see themselves as super creative and can’t live without making art, other people don’t perceive themselves as creative at all, most of us are in the middle somewhere) and we all live on a spectrum of mental health (severely mentally ill, rarely affected by mental health challenges, somewhere in the middle.) And I think that those spectrums overlap in really interesting ways. Does being on the more creative end of that spectrum make you also more likely to be further along the “illness” side of mental health? I’m not sure. There’s research to suggest yes but it’s inconclusive.

I’m glad to have stumbled across this Q&A with

Kathryn Vercillo

, who writes

Create Me Free

, about the complex relationship between mental health and art. Here’s a great post of hers to start with:

We are all artists with mental health experiences

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Tweet of the Month Goes to:

Are we still calling them tweets? X’s? I dunno. But thanks,

mel

!

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In the Clearing: a Poem by Joseph Fasano

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A More Beautiful Question

Finally, my writing collective, Foster, is hosting a new season starting next month. WTF is a season, you are now wondering? “Seasons” are month-long initiations into the magic of writing and storytelling. They are somewhere between a course, bootcamp, summer camp, accelerator, and Hogwarts, and yet, not quite any of these things. More details here. Hit me up if you have questions!

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That’s all for me this time. I’ll be back soon because I want to talk to you about how I’m obsessed with fire lately. 🔥🔥🔥

Thanks for reading, as ever.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free to read but if you’d like to support my work, please share this with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!