This morning started with a flashback, and not a good one.
I preemptively didn't set an alarm because of the daylight savings time shift. I thought I was giving myself a gift by preparing to sleep in, but I really wish I hadn't done that.
Mornings and I have never really got along. My struggles with sleep paralysis haven't been as big of an issue in adulthood as they were during my adolescence, though. That's pretty much why I forced myself to become a morning person and why I've even grown to love my early morning hours of solitude.
This morning, however, I slept in.
I woke up confused, feeling an overwhelming sense of dread, despair, and helplessness as I realized the moment I was reliving. I was watching a fight break out that high-school-me could have stopped, but didn't. And I was both literally and figuratively frozen while I watched it happen again.
The person who'd thrown the punch had been on the football team with me, and the person who'd been hit had a reputation for pissing people off. But they also had a learning disability and struggled to recognize social cues, so I'd been even more stunned to see that they were being cornered by someone three times their size.
Watching the crowd, I felt like my feet were stuck to the pavement.
Everyone was gathered in a circle just outside of the brick building that housed our school's library, and pushed up against the hedges that ran along the sidewalk. I desperately wanted someone to do something, but I really didn't want it to be me. I'd spent years carefully engineering a social status that was both flexible and neutral. As a very artsy kid, I'd been picked on. I'd managed to shed that persona by the time I became a high school athlete. Intervening in this fight felt like throwing away the social safety I'd collected.
And that really terrified me.
I could still feel the full weight of the predicament, laying there immobile in my bed all these years later as an adult. This fight I was reliving had taken place at an all boys school where social status relied on put-downs disguised as witty banter and sameness meant social insulation—anything that made you different was fair game to be used against you. And while I'd managed to embed myself within the jocks' social group and distance myself from the arts by then, I was very much still struggling with my queerness. I hadn't come out at that point. My closest friends didn't know. And, at times, I'd tried very hard not to know either.
So I'd watched from the edge of the circle outside of the library, panicking, while that football player raised his arm to strike. I remember thinking there was no way he was really going to do it.
This can't be happening.
But then he did; he punched the other guy directly in the center of his face.
I immediately thought he'd broken his nose. His body language had been timid in the lead-up to getting hit, but somehow his face hadn't shown how terrified he must've felt until after.
At first, none of us did a thing.
Then, suddenly, I was standing between them. Nobody tried to stop me, and it'd grown quiet immediately. The next thing I know, I'd taken him to the school nurse's office. He thanked me and hugged me, and then I left. I hadn't gone to the principal or told anyone—I just went to class. And I still regret it.
This morning, when I could finally move, I hurled myself out of bed as fast as I could. I always do that after an episode like that. It's not logical, but it feels like putting distance between myself and the quicksand of that sleep-paralysis-peril.
On my way to the kitchen, I took a deep breath and felt my bare feet striding firmly across the hardwood floor.
And I thought about how different I am now.
Do you ever think about times when you really blew it? Do they make you think twice about how you do things now?
onward.
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