Not The Hill On Which I Want To Die

I recently had a rude encounter which led to an epiphany.

My epiphanies are not painless. They are extremely uncomfortable, one reason I never actually look forward to having one. After all, most everyone considers themselves the hero of their own story, and it’s not easy to take a step back and recognize yourself as a villain, or at the least a deeply flawed human being. I realize we are all, by and large, both heroes and villains, depending on the circumstance. But sometimes we fall into patterns that, when we’re finally forced to examine them and compare them with the people we really want to be, just don’t measure up.

For awhile now I’ve been bothered by small things, like ambient noise. Which, let’s face it, is rather a “first world problem” compared with the big things like health, food, shelter, etc., but it makes it no less real to me. When I was living in Brooklyn I found neighbors’ noise unbearable, to the point where Steve and I moved from our one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush with its upstairs DJ to a quiet 2-bedroom unit on the top floor of a house in Bensonhurst with an elderly couple downstairs as our live-in landlords. Then when that house changed ownership and the new ones were walls of noise (and got even louder after Steve and I divorced and Robin moved in), I fled again to Riverdale. For the last 16 years we’ve lived in a quiet house with quiet neighbors and that major annoyance faded, replaced by an even pettier one having to do with the express bus I now use as my commute to and from my job.

I commute to and from Manhattan via an express bus. It’s my refuge, the place where I play online games and meditate and make the mental switch from home to work (and vice versa) in peace and quiet. Most days I don’t even need my noise-cancelling headphones. Folks who take express buses, at least in my area, tend to be of a different caliber of commuter. Mind you, our ride costs more than twice the fare of regular city buses and subways, so a certain comfort level is assumed. The buses used to have signs that requested riders please be courteous of fellow passengers and refrain from using their cell phones to make calls. Even though it wasn’t a law, apparently this appeal to basic consideration was met with swift retribution, and of course when squeaky wheels (hey, there you go, a noise issue again!) complain the MTA caves, so the signs came down.

So I then decided to take matters into my own hands. And let me add that something in me probably recognized this as the wrong tactic. My first clue should have been “I’m being sarky and nasty and lying to myself that I’m being clever and witty,” but sometimes realization dawns slowly.

I started with dirty looks; when these didn’t work I confronted the talkers directly to ask them to please cut it short or lower their voices. If they still persisted I started taking their photos – then immediately deleting them, because they never came out anyway and the point was never to invade their privacy the way they invaded my ears, but to provoke them into hanging up and shutting up. One of these moves usually had the desired effect.

But you can’t count on rational reactions in our increasingly paranoid world. There’s always someone who will go ballistic, and that’s what occurred this time. It wasn’t my usual bus, I got a later one as I’d been doing a few errands. So already I was surrounded by the unfamiliar. By the time we got to the monument that separates the north and south sides of my neighborhood there were only a handful of passengers left. The woman immediately behind me (where the sound is always hardest for me to deal with) responded to my swiveling around with “Yeah, I’m talking, and I’m going to talk even louder!” so I felt justified in snapping a selfie with her in the background (again, the photo never came out, she was nonexistent and even I was blurry). At which point the loudness turned into screams. “That’s illegal!” (“No more illegal than you disturbing the driver and other passengers by talking on the phone,” I calmly and smarmily replied.) “You need to show people RESPECT!” (“Like you showed me respect by getting louder and louder?”) “YOU DON’T KNOW WHO YOU’RE MESSING WITH! YOU’D BETTER WATCH YOURSELF! I’M GOING TO TRACK YOU DOWN!” etc. etc. I mean, the full-monty crazy lady.

She gets off about a dozen blocks before the terminus (my stop), still ranting at me. The driver and I commiserate about the loss of the aforementioned courtesy sign. I get off at the terminus, where Robin always meets me, and proceeded to tell him about the lunatic. When suddenly there she was, in her car, having followed the bus to its terminus with the express purpose of continuing to harass me when I exited the bus (figuring, I guess, that I’d be alone and vulnerable). She shouted more threats at me from her car, I responded “Hey, crazy lady, I was just telling my husband about you, have a great evening!” then she turned the corner and drive off, and Rob and I continued home. As she was long gone, and we’d obviously never exchanged pleasantries like names, she has no real way of tracking me down. In fact, had I had more of my wits about me I might have snapped another photo, this time of her license plate, thus protecting myself from any further harassment.

As it was, I was shaken to the core. How dare she follow me!? She had compounded her rudeness by talking on the phone, then shouting, then stalking! I couldn’t eat, I lay in bed wide awake, my mind started racing, I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.

And then I got it. I make so much talk about “leading with kindness,” but how is asking people to please hang up an act of kindness, no matter how courteous you might think you are when you ask? How are they actually hurting me by talking on their phones? Should annoying behavior really be responded to in the same way as actual violence or bigotry or other dangerous situations? What if she was right? What if I was the villain here?

If I ever see that woman again, the first thing I’m going to do is apologize, and the second thing I’m going to do is thank her for spurring me to, once again, become a better person than I am. She may have responded disproportionately, but I was the one seeking to shame her, and I have no way of knowing what’s going on in her life. So what if she was nasty and loud? What was her day like? How was she triggered by the idea that I might have taken her picture? Maybe she’s in the country illegally and paranoid that the INS might be onto her. Again, I have no way of knowing. Whatever happened to empathy for my fellow human being?

My patience seems to be in short supply lately. I’m told I’ve been taking taking a less than cordial tone with some work colleagues who have escalated complaints against me. I’ve looked through all my sent email and can’t figure out what I’ve written that’s set them off to this extent. As a writer I should be able to pinpoint what I’ve done wrong. But it’s clear I’m not practicing what I preach any more. I’m not leading with kindness.

Is it too late for me to change? It can’t be. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t in the case of a coworker toward whom I acted rudely. Even though I thought I was in the right at the time, I took things too far, and then was too stubborn to apologize immediately, which would have saved me weeks of remorseful stomach churning. It felt like such a release, such a burden lifted, when I finally apologized sincerely and profusely, admitting to her and myself that I was completely and utterly in the wrong, and she mercifully and generously forgave me.

But the over arcing issue remains. This is not what I want my reputation to be. This is not how I want to be remembered. This dilemma is all of my own making. I need to stop being the villain, and I don’t have a cunning and foolproof plan on how to do that.

So I’m flailing. All the aforementioned incidents compound in my head to the point where I’m emotionally paralyzed. Doubtless this is another manifestation of my “mountains of molehills” tendencies, but I do feel like I need to be constantly vigilant now simply to remember what should be second nature to me: To always be patient and understanding. To never assume malicious intent on the part of anyone with whom I’m conversing or corresponding. To stop constantly taking offense and fighting battles on behalf of others. To remember that not everyone is revved the way I am, that people’s brains and sensibilities are all wired differently. To accept the pain (after all, it’s not physical) that comes with acknowledging it’s more than likely that I’m at fault, even if I sincerely believe I’m not.

This should be easy in as pluralistic and multicultural a city as New York. We pride ourselves on tolerance, which usually applies where groups are involved. Despite our gruff reputation, by and large we believe love trumps hate, and this shines through in everything from how we help individuals in distress to how we vote.

Individuals are trickier. Folks not looking up from their cell phones as they walk along the street and almost bump into me (the villain in me shouting at them “Heads up!” as I swerve to narrowly avoid them). The magpies who get on the express bus and do not stop talking for the entire journey until one of them exits (the villain in me confronting the more egregious magpie and receiving the response “If you don’t like it, move to the back of the bus!” prompting my incredulous volley “I’m not the one disturbing the driver and fellow passengers, you are!”). Other people seemingly so self-involved that they appear completely oblivious to their surroundings and how their actions affect others.

I acknowledge that common courtesy is a first-world issue. We have the luxury to be able to contemplate stuff like this. I also acknowledge that me being kind and courteous is not contingent upon others being courteous and kind to me first. In an ideal world respect is a two-way street. I cannot edit this world to make it so, no matter how often I shout at the TV or admonish other drivers from my car with the windows closed or mutter zinging barbs at shoppers who wander off and abandon their carts in supermarket aisle. They can’t hear me, and probably wouldn’t amend their ways even if they could. So I need to realize I do these things to make myself feel better (although never “superior”), to get frustration off my chest, and I need to concentrate more on praising things that are good – thank-you waves to courteous drivers, praiseful and cheerful emails to colleagues – while keeping myself to myself while in public spaces (even enclosed ones). And to save my cleverness and sarcasm for where it will do the most good – somewhere in my writing, not aimed at specific real-world individuals out of a sense of wrongheaded idea of malicious revenge (like some silent film baddie rubbing his hands together in glee). That does not cleanse the soul, and that is not the hill I want to die on.