Are you mad at me?
I arrive at class a little late and rush to find somewhere to sit. “Hi!,” I whisper and wave to the teacher. They nod in my direction and continue their opening announcements. Looking around the room I smile at a few familiar faces. One smiles back but the others seem to look right through me.
What’s everyone’s problem? I ignore the fact that it’s only six in the morning.
I start to feel antsy. I want to get moving already. Let me channel this into exercise.
Once we are warming up, I find it hard to follow along. I can’t concentrate. My brain is constantly being pulled back to the same question: “Are they mad at me?”
Who I’m asking this about changes with each staccato beat of the blasting deep trap music. The teacher? That chick over there? The person next to me? Someone not even in the room?
Half way into the class, people seem to be softening. The sweat and movement has shattered their early morning shells, but while they are all opening up, I am clamping down, lost deep in my head.
Tears well up in my eyes during one movement. I want to pull the teacher aside and ask him if we’re cool. This veritable stranger I see for forty-five minutes once or twice a week, who owes me nothing and is taking care of a whole room of people and probably doesn't pay me any mind. I want to cry to him and apologize for what I did, but I don’t know what I did.
I just know I did something wrong. I always do something wrong.
Or rather, I always feel like I’ve done something wrong.
After class, I jet home and jump rope into the usual morning rush. Everyone is mad at me here. Except the dog. He seems neutral. I love dogs.
I drop both kids off at their respective schools where I am confronted with more uneasy social interactions. I find myself compensating by getting even more chipper, even more animated. I see a parent I am supposedly close with and they acknowledge me, but it feels bristly and rushed.
Surely, they hate me now, and I have no friends. That feeling in the pit of my stomach is like a black hole sucking my sense of self.
After drop-offs, I’m driving home and trying to pull it together. Every car that passes seems angry. Not just angry, but angry at me. I want to flip everyone off and yell at them, “Fuck you!” and bang on the steering wheel.
But I don’t. I start crying instead.
Because I am learning that the rebellious teen inside of me who wants to yell and scream at the world is actually just a hardened front for the little girl inside who walks around convinced everyone is angry with her.
And in order to acknowledge that little girl’s pain of constantly having to walk on egg shells and feeling in the wrong, I must let her experience all she is experiencing.
You see, I’ve reached a place in my healing journey where I’m allowing all the feels. “You have to feel it to heal it!,” they say.
But I forgot that in order to safely feel all those feels, I need to be moored. The adult me must be a part of the equation.
I need my feet on the ground and my present sense of self to gently whisper, “It’s okay sweetie,” when these kinds of unmoorings occur. I can’t just let the little girl and her big feelings run wild. As real as they seem.
I get out of the car and find the nearest patch of grass. Removing my shoes, I stand atop the dewy blades and place one hand on my heart and one hand on my tummy. I am trying to reset the glitch in the matrix that has allowed little girl me to run the show. I need to ground in the right now.
In the right now, adult me knows how egocentric and unlikely it is that every single person in the community is angry with me. Adult me knows how sad it is to always feel this way. And where adult me is the only one who can gently put her hand on my shoulder and say, “It’s okay sweetie. You haven’t done anything wrong.”