A few weeks ago I was leaving the parking garage of the grocery store near my house when I saw a flash of a neon yellow safety vest out of the corner of my eye. Before I could react, the man wearing it stopped himself from dashing out in front of me. I kept on rolling past him. As he resumed his dash across the drive behind me, he smacked my car. I felt it like an electric punch to my heart. Physically felt it.
I immediately went into trying to forgive him—who knows what kind of day he had had, what kind of life. It wasn’t doing a thing to release that adrenaline that had flooded my body. Of course not. But an assaultive energy had just been launched at me. And I was struggling to sort through it, to make sense of it instead of just feeling it. I felt the questioning punch of shame. Had I been in the wrong, not stopped when I should have? Had I taken something from him?
Perhaps all that didn’t even matter—and truth was, there was no cross walk in that area . . . and I could go on working out that I had done nothing to deserve his reaction. How hard it can be to sort through our right to exist after such a minor incident. But that is the order of magnitude that slap elicited in me.
Finally, I remembered to turn my attention to my own experience, to affirm that I had in essence just been assaulted, to ask myself what I needed. Things began to shift as I was able to be there in that moment, to acknowledge that I was experiencing something significant, to emotionally hold that my response made sense, and to feel it in connection with myself instead of trying to escape it.
It took me several days to completely release that energy from my body and to move on. Every time it resurfaced, I turned to myself and checked in, gave myself a little love and reassurance. I was okay. There is room for me to be in the world. There are people who may not agree with that. But I am the one that is responsible for knowing that truth. I am the one responsible for tending to my needs. And I get to whenever I need to.
Interestingly, a few days after that, I was pulling out of my friend’s driveway. It was already dark out. I looked left then right—but not right behind me. As I was swinging into the road, I saw movement behind me and realized that a woman was hopping out of the way. I had almost hit her as she was walking down the road. I felt that same twinge of shame, that I had done something wrong. Much lighter this time, but still there.
