9.01 | When things go wrong
Life is not going according to plan. I'm still in London, my reporting is leading me in circles, and...I got my foot run over by a car. But still, the glass! is! half! full!
I just had the best cinnamon roll of my life.
I wandered into a café in Hoxton and ordered breakfast, soft scrambled eggs on sourdough toast from a local bakery. After I finished, I kept peering over my book at the baked goods on the counter, eyeing one tray in particular: the cinnamon buns.
Cinnamon rolls/buns have been my go-to sweet treats in London. I’m averaging at least three per week. For some reason, most cafés and coffee shops I frequent offer them. And, let’s not forget the chokehold that Buns from Home has on me. The table next to me ordered two, leaving only one cinnamon roll left. As the barista transferred the lone survivor from the tray to an orange ceramic plate, I glanced at the oblivious customers around me and felt called to action. I flagged down a server and requested the swirled baked good, dusted with cinnamon sugar. And, now that I’ve enjoyed every bite, I can confirm: It was perfect. Airy, yeast-y, doughy, flaky, with a caramelized center. Simple, but elevated. Better than all the others I’ve tried.
A lot has been going “wrong,” my initial plans for this fellowship collapsing before my eyes. I’m still in grey, costly London, when I was meant to be reporting from Italy by now. My reporting here in the UK has idled; I’m overwhelmed by the information I’ve been gathering and have allowed it to consume me. At the moment, I’ve lost sight of the forest for the trees.
But my failed plans have led me to been a bunch of kismet moments I didn’t factor into my original itinerary. For one, that cinnamon roll. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to try it had I not stumbled across this coffee shop in my new temporary neighborhood in London.
Delaying my trip to Italy due to some unforeseen obstacles left me scrambling to find housing in London. I briefly rented a room in a real-life Mojo Dojo Casa House™ *Flat* (if you don’t know what that is, consider this a friendly reminder to see the Barbie movie!), complete with rotting trash, a moldy shower, bros, navy sheets, and very questionable building security. But the flat was right near Hyde Park, which I hadn’t explored since I studied abroad here, affording me the opportunity to fit in a few morning runs and evening strolls around its beautiful grounds.
Remaining in London — where the forecast has involved rain or clouds most of the time — means that I will likely not get to lounge on a beach or swim in an ocean before summer is up. But, spending more time here has allowed me to find and nurture new friendships. Last weekend, I tagged along to a music festival, where HAIM, one of my favorites, headlined.
Another unexpected treasure from the last few weeks: a self-help book I just happened to pick up as I was perusing the used section of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank. Its title made me instantly roll my eyes and set it down. But my hands soon found their way back to to the book’s worn cover. The offending title was emblazoned on its floppy spine:
Excuse Me, Your LIFE is Waiting
the astonishing power of feelings
(Cringe. I give you permission to roll your eyes, too.)
This issue of the book was published in 2000, a year I spent dancing around to Britney Spears’s latest CD with my sister and cooing over our newborn baby brother. I flipped through a few pages and stifled another eye-roll. The author, Lynn Grabhorn’s, writing was cheesier than the book’s title, full of exclamation points, italics, words in all-caps. But I soon found myself smiling at the excess, reveling in the silliness. I snapped a photo of one passage I particularly enjoyed, the sun breaking through the clouds to illuminate the page beneath my shadow.
The cool French girl at checkout didn’t see a price sticker on the book. “One euro?” she offered. I paused. I had forced myself to not pack or buy any hard copies of books while on this trip, relying on a Kindle instead to make space for other essentials. I couldn’t believe that, after that sacrifice, I was considering buying a self-help book — at this esteemed literary establishment, no less. If I was going to break my paper book fast, it should be with an award-winning novel or work of nonfiction.
I got off my high horse and tapped my card to pay.
Now, a few chapters into this book I had initially labeled as frivolous, I feel my mindset shifting. Instead of ruminating on everything I don’t have and haven’t done at this stage of my journey, I’m trying to focus on everything I will accomplish, and experience, and the progress I’ve made so far. Glass half-full, instead of half-empty. Shifting my thinking in this way has made me happier and more present, which has helped me to return to my work with renewed focus.
It sounds so obvious. Perhaps you do this already. But this way of thinking is kind of revolutionary to me. Sometimes, my anxiety makes me a glass half-empty girl by default; forcing myself to reframe what I lack as what will come has helped me — a gal who loves a plan and logistics — to just roll with the punches.
Who knows if this new knowledge will stick. But it’s helping me get through this current moment. And I wouldn’t have found the book if I was on a roll with my reporting, unable to take a break to hop on a train to meet friends in Paris.
Things going “wrong” just means my expectations were off. They’re actually going right, in line with some greater plan in the universe that supersedes the strict Excel spreadsheet schedule I outlined for myself before leaving New York.
So how does that positive thinking help the foot-being-run-over-by-a-car situation?
I’m not sure it does. So instead I’ll use my other favorite coping mechanism: Humor!
And, spoiler alert: my foot and I are perfectly fine.
I was rushing home from dinner one evening a few weeks back, chatting away on the phone to a friend. I’m a jaywalking New Yorker by nature, so it’s been a challenge to force myself to obey traffic signals here — but I do, partly because everyone else does, but mostly because half the time I don’t know which way the cars are coming (yes, it says so on the sidewalk, but I sometimes don’t look).
Anyway, I’m at a small, two-way, traffic light-less intersection, and I’m waiting on the curb to cross. Except the curb in this case is just more street; it’s not elevated or anything. I’m looking left and don’t see the SUV approaching at my right. By the time its shiny doors are too close to me, I can’t move. I feel something solid squish over my foot. I look down in disbelief, then up at the car, which has already turned onto the busy main street. “Kacy, I have to go…I think my foot just got run over by a car?” I tell my friend, shrugging it off with a laugh before I hang up.
I feel fine! Is this just adrenaline blocking the pain? I think as I speed-walk home. I’m wearing a pair of black Mary Jane flats (which are, by the way, both comfortable and affordable; those of you shopping for fall should buy them). I glance down at my feet as I walk, imagining the worst, like the toe of the shoe filling with blood or something. I’m also annoyed that my cute shoe might be ruined.
Still in no pain, I return to my flat and gingerly remove the shoe. My foot looks fine. There’s some dirt on the top of my foot, pressed in the pattern of the tire’s tread, but I brush it off easily with my hand. Why am I being so chill? I wonder. I pull up Google.
And that’s when the hypochondria kicks in. I learn that the bones in my foot might be crushed, which could require surgery. Left untreated, this sort of injury has led to death in several cases, a random website tells me. I start freaking out, so much that I don’t involve my doctor parents. Strep throat, a cold, an eye infection — they’re my first call. But in the rare instances when I’m really worried and paranoid, I keep my often inaccurate diagnoses to myself so as to not induce panic in them, too. (Editor’s note: Sorry, Mom and Dad. It’s for your own good.)
Instead, I tell my flatmate, whose horrified reaction only fuels my anxiety. I convince myself my foot has gone numb. I call an Uber to the nearest emergency unit, known here as A&E (accident and emergency). I’m dropped off at the wrong entrance, so I have a ways to walk. I start limping from the imaginary numbness. I push open the doors of the A&E unit, which is packed with people. A lovely nurse greets me with a most British “Hello darling, are you all right?” and I instantly burst into tears from her kindness.
I wait in silence for several hours among people puking into bins, wrapped in blankets, or moaning in pain. One guy in a wheelchair has a foot injury, too. But his foot, which is elevated and messily bandaged, starts dripping blood onto the linoleum. It takes a few minutes for a nurse to come over and mop it up.
I finally get an X-ray, and then wait some more for my name to be called. A physician assistant guides me to a room, and we sit before a monitor displaying my foot skeleton.
Bones look the same in real life as they do in cartoons, I observe, thinking back to an episode of The Magic School Bus.
“Nothing broken or fractured!” the PA chirps, sliding on a pair of latex gloves. I hold out my dirty foot and he gently maneuvers it, asking if I feel any pain or tingling sensations. I shake my head. “I think I was feeling numbness before, but it feels ok now,” I admit.
“Right,” he nods and sits back. “Everything looks perfect. Just rest and ice for a few days out of precaution, but you’re fine to resume normal activity next week.”
I squint in disbelief. What about the bone crushing? The permanent nerve damage? The surgery? The risk of death?
“The vast majority of people who get their foot run over by the tyre [note British spelling xx] of a car end up completely fine,” he says, going on about how the bones in the foot can withstand extreme pressure that other bones in the body can’t due to their compressive nature, or something like that. I never took physics.
I thank him and accept a generic handout with instructions on how to care for a foot or ankle injury. I emerge from A&E with no limp, no numbness, and most significantly: no bill.
So that’s how I’ve been dealing with all of this chaos and uncertainty: by laughing at myself, and reading hippie books on positive thinking. How do you deal with things going “wrong” in your life? How do you pick yourself up when you’re down? I’d love to know.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading!
In health, and in happiness,
Your quirky, clumsy girl,
Chloe