
When I was in my late 20โs, 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.ย
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.ย
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 weโd be in trouble. Or something similar. There are a lot of ways things can go wrong when a companyโs reputation is the matter at hand!ย
We called it โgetting thrown under the bus,โ 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.ย
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. Sheโd put a conference call on mute and say, โTHE BUS IS COMING!โ with a little cackle. Weโd 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. Weโd defend ourselves, of course, but what can you really do when the bus comes for you? You have no choice but to get hit!ย
So weโd 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.
Iโve been thinking of THE BUS IS COMING lately because Iโve been hyper sensitive to people I care about saying bad shit about themselves. Some recent examples:
โI am trying really hard to alter my fat ass.โย
โMy idiot mind just cannot figure this out.โ
โI knew this was going to happen and I let it happen anyway.โ
I winced internally in response to each one. โHey man,โ I wanted to say. โThatโs my friend youโre talking about!!!โ
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!ย
And we do these things even though we know they are hard. But then weโre 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! Itโs so silly.
Iโve gotten a lot better at not being my own worst enemy over the years, but Iโm still totally guilty of this. I will find myself in a difficult situation (especially one Iโve been in before) and instead of being like, โWell, this sucks,โ Iโll hear my inner voice saying, โGod, this sucks and also what a loser you are that you still have not learned to avoid situations like this!!โ I caught myself doing it a lot this spring in the wake of my momโs 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.ย
Thereโs 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 canโt 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 weโre 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 donโt have to do is blame ourselves for getting hit.ย I *always* need this reminder.
***
Speaking of giving ourselves shit for no real reason, Iโve 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 Iโve 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 โ which is NICE, donโt get me wrong! โ and itโs like every new person clams me up just a tiny bit more.
Shouldnโt I be saying something BETTER? More IMPORTANT? More PROFOUND? Itโs 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 itโs just not supposed to be so serious! Read it or donโt, 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!
On to some things I found worth sharing recentlyโฆ
Newsletter: Gilded Tales
My family is lousy with writers, did you know that? My brother Joey recently launched Gilded Tales to publish stories heโs been telling his children over the years. He said of โThe Shifter,โ 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 couldnโt trust their parent. If your taste leans toward the dark and fantastical, these stories are for you.
Newsletter: Create Me Free
We all live on a spectrum of creativity (some people see themselves as super creative and canโt live without making art, other people donโt 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 โillnessโ side of mental health? Iโm not sure. Thereโs research to suggest yes but itโs inconclusive.
Iโm glad to have stumbled across this Q&A with
, who writes , about the complex relationship between mental health and art. Hereโs a great post of hers to start with:Tweet of the Month Goes to:
Are we still calling them tweets? Xโs? I dunno. But thanks,
!In the Clearing: a Poem by Joseph Fasano
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? โSeasonsโ 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.ย More details here. Hit me up if you have questions!
Thatโs all for me this time. Iโll be back soon because I want to talk to you about how Iโm obsessed with fire lately. ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ฅ
Thanks for reading, as ever.
๐
Sara
p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free to read but if youโd like to support my work, please share this with someone whoโd appreciate it, or just like this post!
No matter how often you post, I always enjoy reading it. :).
A great read and I loved the story about your boss and the conference calls. A nice blend of humanity and humour. The phrase "the bus is coming" is etched on my memory in a completely different context - standing by the side of the road with no shelter in the Devon countryside, waiting for an ancient vehicle of dubious pedigree to shudder into view. To hear that the bus was coming meant an end to standing out in the sleet or rain, which was good, but also the beginning of the school day, which was not so good.