excuse me, where's the bus stop?
trying to catch a bus and keep my cat from drinking toilet water
“That’s not for babies or kitties – and you’re both!” is something I said to my cat this week.
When she’s doing something I don’t want her to do (usually for safety reasons), I just explain to her that the activity is not suitable for kitties. Sorry, kitties can’t eat my Trader Joe’s mini ice cream cone, they’re not supposed to drink the toilet water even when they really want to, and kitties shouldn’t be climbing unstable IKEA bookshelves either.
I only recently made the connection that I was actually echoing an idea from poet Blythe Baird that I held so dearly as a teenager. I first read the following quote on Tumblr circa 2015 and have carried it with me through the years, remembering it lives somewhere inside of me and pulling it out when a friend needs comfort.
“I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: ‘Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.’” – Blythe Baird
When I was 17, the idea really helped me through a tough breakup, and now at 23 I find myself sharing the same sentiment with my cat as she tries to climb the shelving unit in our room. I do my best to explain to her why I say no, but for the time being, we speak mostly different languages. (I say mostly because she does know a few English words, but those are limited to her name, “treat” and “food.”)
I feel like my life as of late has been a pretty solid series of “Nos” from the universe. Even as I type that, there’s a voice down in my belly yelling, “Shut up and be grateful for what you have!” Which is fair – I’m extremely grateful for the love and abundance I do have, but we all have shit we’re dealing with, and I’ve also hit my dreaded early 20s identity crisis that just so happened to coincide with a global pandemic. Great timing, universe!
I am unsure of my career, unsure of most of my relationships, unsure of what I even enjoy anymore, really. And even worse – this is totally not unique to me. I’m probably the millionth writer to spout mediocre prose about feeling lost, and I want to make sure we both know this is written with self-awareness and jest at the forefront. If you relate, my heart goes out to you. We’re figuring it out together.
But, unfortunately, I didn’t win the nepotism lottery, and I do not have the option to spend my days on a beach learning to crochet or re-reading Joan Didion’s catalog with an afternoon nap and a guava margarita waiting for me at home as I do in my daydreams. And us normals are left to figure out what there is to do to make a living that doesn’t suck our souls straight from our exhausted bodies.
If I am the dog, and the chocolate chip bagel is a sense of direction in life, it sure feels like the universe is just giving me the middle finger.
Sometimes things that don’t go our way just aren’t meant for us, and it’s maybe healthier to let them go. Other times, we have to persevere through a host of obstacles to finally arrive at what is meant for us. So how do we strike a balance between the two?
In pondering my own answer to that question I was reminded of a TikTok I saw this week that shared a tidbit from an interview with Kerry Washington. (I’ll admit I’m not caught up on things Kerry Washington related, but I did draw a portrait of her in 11th grade art class because I was obsessed with “Scandal” at the time, so you could say I’m a general fan.)
Washington used a metaphor of praying and running to catch the bus – i.e. catch success – to illustrate the varying elements that have to fit together for things to go your way.
There’s a belief system that all success is predetermined and more up to fate than anything else, and on the other end of the spectrum, there’s a competing credence that the world only grants success to those who grind for it. The latter is an easy web to get caught in.
American hyper-individualism and our toxic relationship to, and dependence on, capitalism has allowed and encouraged that second belief system to thrive. Open up any social media platform and you can find thousands of influencers, fitness bros, business “experts,” and regular Joe Schmoes spending their afternoons making content that peddles the hopeless idea that if you just work hard enough you can be like them. But success does not happen simply because you have a “grindset.” Success takes real effort and work, yes, but effort without opportunity isn’t worth as much, and opportunity is just not distributed equally.
In the middle of that spectrum between an Oedipus-level reliance on fate and a millennial pink Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss Etsy shop, Washington’s bus rolls down the street. Faith and hard work can’t survive on their own, she explains.
You have to pray to catch the bus, you have to run to catch the bus, and if you catch the bus, then it was your bus to catch. If you don’t catch the bus, you’ll catch the one that is meant for you. But if you stay in your room just thinking about catching the bus, never speaking aloud your intentions to catch the bus, and then you miss the bus – well, no shit.
Over the course of the pandemic I have witnessed myself morphing into a sitting-in-my-room-not-catching-the-bus type of person. The literal and metaphorical isolation has rotted pieces of me from the inside out. And now I spend evenings wondering why I feel so shitty all the time when one big reason is pretty obvious – we’ve been living in a dumpster fire of nightmarish tragedy for a long fucking time.
I mean, where even is the bus stop anymore?
Laughing, eating, dancing, and crying with the people (and cats) we love are some of the only things worth our time, I believe. When the pandemic prevents us from safely seeing those people, we’re faced with the uncomfortable question of what in our lives actually matters when the one thing that does suddenly vanishes.
Last week I told you this project was a new ritual for me. And this week I’m telling you that this is also me trying to catch the bus. It all feels impossible, and by “it all” I mean just living life. But somehow we have to forge ahead anyway, and I can’t move forward if I spend too much time worrying about the direction I’m heading.
So, I’m trying to be a person who runs to catch the bus. I’m trying to be a person who speaks aloud her intentions to catch the bus. And I’m trying to be a person who will one day actually catch the bus.
excuse me, where's the bus stop?
I liked this :)