Irritating behavior

Have you ever made a phone call, full of righteous fire, ready to tell someone how their …incompetence, tardiness, error, etc., ruined your life (read – was an inconvenience) only to discover that actually, that person was doing their very best and really hard things had happened to them, making your inconvenience seem… ludicrous?

No, me neither.

Just kidding. To be completely clear, it doesn’t happen often to me, because generally I’m pretty good at asking “what might have happened that makes this behavior make sense?” but not always. And when I’m more stressed, it’s much more likely to happen.

Well, I did it today, picked up the phone and called someone to express my irritation, only to find that someone had had a serious medical problem that impacted their work. Which led to my inconvenience.

Now, to be fair to myself, I’ve had a lot of small irritations lately. Nothing life threatening or anything like that, but even small irritations have a cumulative load. And when that happens, any one of us might find ourselves expressing that irritation, perhaps unfairly.

What do I do when that happens? I try to own my own irritation, which hopefully provides some safety for the person on the other end – I’m not here to ruin their lives. Something like, “I have been having a tough week so it really surprised/upset me to learn…”

I express concern as honestly as I can – “oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that” which hopefully allows for some connection, in the “I see you and what you are going through” kind of way.

And finally I try to find a way to create a sense of agency…for me, for them, for whomever I can manage. In my life, usually these things happen with people who are providing a service to me (calling comcast for my mother-in-law, calling insurance companies about benefits) so there isn’t always a way for me to offer that person agency, but I can try. Sometimes I say, “I understand and just wondering if there is a better way for me to (fill in the blank – to get what I need)?”

Maybe I offer one of these:

Should I email?

Is there a better email address?

Is it better if I call?

Is there a better person to contact about issues like this?

I think this also increases a sense of safety for the other person, maybe it helps them understand I am not irritated at them personally and I am looking for solutions. AND it gives me a little bit of agency, because it might give me other options if it happens again.

What do y’all do if you discover there is a really good reason behind someone else’s “irritating” behavior?

But Why?

I taught a kiddo during her third and fourth-grade years who, when asked to do something, would ask, nine out of ten times, “But WHY?”
This wasn’t always rooted in avoidance, although she is human and we were at school, so at times, it understandably was. But at other times, it was legitimate curiosity. Honest bafflement as to why I was asking her to do something which may have seemed, to her, ludicrous, repetitive, tedious, stressful … you pick the adjective. And, I mean, can you blame her? I often wonder why school asks kids to do the many things it asks them to do, in the precise way it insists they must do it.

As I mentioned in some of my Leader Dog posts, working on mobility as a thirty-something made me ask that same “But why?” question from my youth, but with added adult wisdom. And exasperation. And frustration, too, because seriously? WHY!?
I know blind folks personally who really enjoy mobility. Now, to be clear, I do feel like a handful of blind people exaggerate their skills, fake their joy, and subsequently pontificate about the importance and beauty of relentlessly independent travel to put myself and other blind mobility strugglers down. I’m not here for that. But I do actually know and believe the blind folks who cite, with genuine (and charmingly nerdy) enthusiasm, the empowerment and self-determination they enjoy when they puzzle out a new route, city, or trip in a way that feels good to them. Some folks really seem to love jetting out their front door, wandering around with their mobility tools and skills, and seeing (heh) what happens.
I get this. I don’t relate, but I understand. I can imagine that it feels awesome. I believe in that. It’s just so far from my own truth that I’m promptly brought back to my “why” question.
If it doesn’t serve me to struggle my way through a route I don’t know — to use “structured discovery,” as some call it — then why, WHY, would I put myself through it? If I could just as easily take a cab with my Para-Stranded discount, carve out the time to Para-Stranded itself and do work on the way, take Uber or Waymo, ride with a friend and buy them lunch to make up for their driving … why would I not?
I do acknowledge that I have a ton of privilege in this arena. I live in San Francisco, where Para-Transit, though always on its own timeline, is reliable and equitable, charging a flat fare (the same price as the MUNI buses) no matter where in the city you’re going. We’re offered discounted cab fares. Ubers and Waymos are plentiful. I have a sighted partner with a car who often drives and accompanies me places. These are privileges that many blind folks don’t have. Many blind folks, faced with the choice between “wing it” or “don’t go,” are caught between a rock and a hard place, and God do I feel for them. I know how lucky I am. I do. If that were my choice — if I couldn’t get rides and navigate myself to wherever I need to be in a way that works for me — I would feel horribly, terrifyingly stuck. And trapped. And bored. Because, though I’m becoming more and more introverted in my old age, and often stay home rather than go out and socialize, especially in groups or at big, noisy events, I still very much want and need to get out and do things. I often tag along with Martha on errands that have nothing to do with me, just because I like to be out and about … and to be with her, obviously. But I digress, as usual.
Let’s leave out the one very valid answer to my “But why” whining, which is the “You’ll have to do spontaneous, unplanned mobility, because someday, you might be in an area without affordable, feasible access to support, and then you’ll have to figure things out.” Very real, but not applicable to my current situation.
So, as I asked my therapist the other day, I still don’t understand: why would I, Caitlin, force myself to, essentially, self-inflict a dropoff? If, for example, an Uber driver dumps me in the wrong place and is incapable of giving me any useful information (which has happened, several times), what would I gain from pushing myself to conquer the impromptu mission independently, when I’m already in a heightened state of anxiety about the uncertainty of the situation?
When faced with this theoretical situation, I do typically walk around and try to get my bearings. But let’s be real: if someone asks me if I’d like help, I tell them where I’m trying to go and accept a guiding arm, if offered. Let’s also be real: most sighted people aren’t too great at giving clear, calm, informative, relevant verbal directions. And, I’m now learning, crossing a street in San Francisco can land you in a place you didn’t even know existed until that moment. It’s often not as simple as “cross the street at the corner,” and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the many ways street crossings can be so much more complex.
Now, might I flex and ultimately bulk up my proverbial mobility muscles by acclimating myself to the anxiety of wandering around blindly for a few extra minutes? Sure … probably. But again … WHY?
Why is it so often deemed “failure” to accept help? Why is asking for guidance not seen as a valuable tool?
Hannah and Jeffrey give me hope that this is changing. They assured me that asking for information, taking and relying heavily upon my own notes, using my phone, even getting a sighted guide out in the world are all pieces of mobility. Mobility can be, for me, whatever I want or need it to be, in any given situation. Their goal wasn’t independence; it was equipping me with skills and confidence, so I can get myself out of jams. They did that well, and I love that.
I feel more excited and hopeful about working on mobility than I ever have, in my whole life. And yet, I still don’t have a good answer to my multi-faceted “why” question.
For me — just for me, because, of course, mileage will vary for other blind folks — mobility often just feels so … hard. And scary. Tiptoeing, sometimes, toward painful, upsetting, and isolating. For me, it magnifies blindness, pun intended, if and when I think about it too much, or work at it for too long.

In rehashing the drop-off activity with my therapist, I explained that it wasn’t just the scenario itself that rattled me. It was the actual, visceral feeling the setup evoked: that close-to-tears, better-not-stand-still, tight-throated, dry-mouthed, tense-bodied, panicked feeling.
I hadn’t experienced that precise feeling since I’d done drop-offs in my youth … and the horror attached to being mired in that feeling for the first time in so long only exacerbated the feeling.
When asked about how I navigated college as a blind person, I self-deprecatingly explain that I never went anywhere alone … and I didn’t. Disability vans, classmates, a cappella friends, house-mates, sighted guides employed by the campus’s Disability Resource Center, RA’S and TA’S, student proctors and workers … you name it, I found and leaned on them.
In grad school, my dad drilled the routes to my classes with me, as well as the area of campus where I lived for a semester. I navigated independently that semester and got a great confidence boost from it. But living on-campus was too expensive, which pushed me to take Para-Transit. Negotiating their pick-ups and drop-offs on a sprawling college campus was challenging and frustrating, but I adapted.
I’ve always framed these practices as weaknesses, although, of late, I do demand, often defensively, to know why people can’t see the resourcefulness and tenacity behind them. Planning your whole life around how you’re going to get from point A to point B, perhaps especially if point A and point B are so close together that anyone would be going significantly out of their way to support you, can feel embarrassing, pathetic, and shameful. But my people were, are, and continue to be kind and understanding, by and large. I find other ways to give back and to be a good, supportive friend so that, most of the time, I don’t feel overly burdensome.
My therapist surprised me by pointing out that all my planning and scheduling and thinking ahead served a crucial purpose, albeit, perhaps, a subconscious one. It protected me from that anxiety-riddled, claustrophobic “mobility drop-off” feeling.
I had a lot of other things to be anxious about during college and grad school, even if I couldn’t have put names to all of them. On some level, maybe I knew that stacking mobility on top of that preexisting, precarious pile of struggles would have been too much. So I just … didn’t.
And now that I have some more bandwidth, and I’m working on mobility … but in my own way. And not to project independence. If perceived independence for the sighted gaze is the answer to the “why” — and, sadly, I believe it is, for many people — then it’s not MY answer.
I’m working on fostering a little more mobility confidence in service of myself, whatever that looks or feels like for me … full stop.
I appreciated my therapist so much when she pointed out, “The drop-off was just pretend, and you got through it, even if you felt that it didn’t go well. But in real life, you’ve created a system that works for you. You’ve made structures for yourself that feel good. And in real life, you’re doing well.”
I’ll be keeping that reminder close when mobility, as it inevitably does, starts to feel like too much.

Snobs?

Y’all. Someone recently said that Caitlin and I are choir snobs, and in the moment I kind of laughed but also I had a moment where I was like, What? I’m no snob! Then I thought about it for another few seconds and I realized that, if I’m honest, it might be true. Or anyway, it might be true that I’m a choir director snob.

I spent a good 15 years with 3 directors that I really, really liked. Were they objectively better than other directors? I don’t know, because my opinion can only be subjective. But I can tell you this: I sang better with those 3 directors than with any of the other directors I’ve sung with.

I have been singing in a choir since I was about 11 years old. I started in church choirs (once someone called me a choir hopper – I didn’t really have a spiritual home at that time so used to attend churches that were singing music I liked – until they weren’t) and did that for MANY years.

At one church we sang Carmina Burana and the director taught us how to get to the right pitch – there are a lot of moving parts in that piece. He also did a great job of having us all pronounce the words the same way. The text is written in Latin, Middle High German and Old French, so I’m not saying that we sounded like native speakers of any of those languages, but I do know that we had a generally agreed upon way to say all the words. I learned a lot from him about phrasing and dynamics, too.

(Also ran: I’d be remiss if I left out the director of my mom’s choir, Miss Joanie. I didn’t live there so only joined when I was in town, but she had exacting standards delivered with such dry humor I often found myself laughing even if it was my section getting the reprimand.

“Now beloveds,” she would say, “are you making a joyful noise to the Lord? Because when I look at your faces I am just seeing foreheads. I need y’all to look at me and I want y’all to smile like you are praising Jesus with this song.”)

Eventually I discovered community choirs and I discovered that there were ways that singing fed my soul – even without the trappings of religion.

I was lucky enough to start with a director that poured her whole heart and soul into each song, each performance. Sometimes she danced around the room to give us a feel for the song, sometimes she scolded, sometimes she made us put down our music even though we didn’t think we were ready. Her warm-ups were directly related to the music we were about to sing – buzzy lip trills before songs that required that sound – soaring high notes to prep first sopranos – quick tongue twisters for fast lyrics. We had learning tracks and sectionals to figure out the tricky parts.

Beyond the way we sang – she helped us feel like a community. She told us stories we could relate to and encouraged us to help each other. Sometimes in a “ask your neighbor” kind of way, but also sometimes in a “listen to the altos at this part of the song” kind of way. I learned to not just learn my notes but learn how they fit in with the whole song. We once sang a version of Ave Maria that was extremely complicated – I’m not saying I was 100% correct every time – but I was closer that I imagined I could be because I learned to listen to the other parts.

My next community choir had a snarky director who also expected us to lean on each other. To learn when to come in even if he didn’t give us the cue. Not to say that he didn’t – he did when he could – but he wanted us to function not as individual singers dependent on him, but more as a group that supported each other.

Once he divided us up by section and asked us to go and listen to the learning track together.

“Just play it 3 times in a row and come back,” he said.

We did – and I have to say not everyone in my section thought it was a good use of our time – but when we came back, the whole choir sounded better.

He would sometimes have us listen to the different tracks as a group, too, and point out what basses were doing while sopranos were doing something else. Sometimes we listened and then sang it back in short segments. Rather than feeling deficient for needing those audio learning tracks, I started feeling like this was just one of many tools I could use to improve my singing.

Am I a choir snob? I don’t think so. I have enjoyed lots of group singing projects. But it very well might be true that I am a choir director snob. If y’all have favorite choir director habits, feel free to drop us a comment!

Relationships are Complicated

Since being diagnosed with breast cancer, I’ve had a hard time trusting my body. To be clear, it’s not as though before I was diagnosed I loved my body deeply. Like all relationships, my relationship with my body is complicated. There’s a whole mix of love, despair, admiration, frustration, caring and neglect.

I generally feel – or felt – that I understood my body, that I knew what it needed even if I didn’t always manage to give it what I needed. I trusted that if I gave it what it needed, it would give me what I needed.

I had a motorcycle accident years ago that the doctors said would leave me with a limp and constant pain. I walked out of the hospital after just 9 days, against doctor’s orders and “treated” myself with the things I believed my body needed. And guess what? No limp. No persistent pain (except that I started having migraines after that accident – but even those have diminished to just one or maybe 2 a month).

Even the migraines responded to my personal regimen of massages and CBD and regular hot tubbing!

Then I went in for my first mammogram (on my way to top surgery) and they discovered cancer.

Here I was, doing all the right things, working out in ways I enjoyed, eating food I liked, working at something that really mattered to me, giving back to the community and being in a flourishing, loving relationship. How could I have cancer? Even a little one?!

I know, I know. Anyone can get sick. There’s no way to protect ourselves completely from cancer or any host of body ailments. And yet I could not shake the feeling that my body had betrayed me. That I had taken care of it, and it had forsaken me.

I have been running for literal decades. When I was training for a marathon, I would feel a little nervous before the long run on the weekend, but otherwise I feel good and strong when I run. In fact it’s been a go-to method for improving my mood for a long time. But these days, every time I set out, I feel a little more than just nervous. These days I’m not sure I can trust my body to do even this simple thing, putting one foot in front of the other, over and over. While my body feels more like me than ever before (remember all this started with potential top surgery), it also feels less like my own, somehow. It feels like I don’t know my body. Like I’m not sure how it will respond, or what it will do.

I’m glad to be recovered from surgery and revisions (just so you know, I had a TERRIBLE experience with multiple surgeons at UCSF – I’ll tell you the story if you ask). I’m glad I had health insurance and a partner who loved me through all of that. And I’m glad to be cancer free. And at the same time, I’m worried every time I go to run or work out.

Relationships are complicated. Guess I will have to make peace with that.