On Wednesday, I showed up to the airport in Mesa, Arizona to find a line of people all the way out the door. I trudged along, lugging two bags for an hour before arriving in the other side of TSA. While unpleasant, this incident wasn't the worst possible outcome for me since I'm a rule-follower and made sure my dad got me to the airport 2 hours before departure as instructed. Other passengers weren't so lucky. At 6:00 am, dozens of people stood in the seemingly never-ending line while watching the screen flash "boarding" by their flight number. Panic ensued. It was one of those moments when you saw the true character of complete strangers. A girl behind me began to bawl and physically shake. She kept repeating over and over that she couldn't miss this flight. Another couple began to take out their frustration on employees, blaming them for messing up their entire day. The anxiety in that line was palpable.
The truth is all of these people had made a mistake. They had showed up less than an hour before their planes left. It is a simple miscalculation. They probably had no idea how long the line would be. I sure didn't. But instead of problem solving, they broke down. Instead of owning up to this mistake, they blamed others.
We have all been these panicked people in the line with no end in sight. Maybe not literally, but we have all made an error, miscalculation, slip-up, or really big mistake and feel stuck in it. My parents used to always say "It's not the end of the world," but we all know that in that moment it feels like it. You made a decision, something went wrong, and you feel trapped. I started off this year reading the book Rising Strong by Brene Brown and she talks about how we often skip over this "middle" point when telling stories. We talk about the decisions we make and we talk about the results, but we glaze over the feelings/actions of the middle.
For example, I recently wrote a blog about how meaningful it was for one student to show they cared about the book I gave her, but I never shared how awful I felt last year when students threw handwritten notes in the trash without more than a glance. I write blogs all the time about things I learned at work or meaningful moments, but I rarely share the tears shed in the car after all the terrible days or the days that I snapped a student who did nothing wrong because I was frustrated with how things were going. Those things have to happen. They are part of the process of growing up and learning, but for some reason we only share the "perfect" moments, setting ourselves and others up for impossible expectations.
This "middle of the line" sharing doesn't just work with bad decisions. In fact, it can be a huge problem when sharing good stories. After I lost a lot of weight last year, many people asked me what I had done differently. All weight-loss stories have a before, a decision to change, and an after. We rarely talk about those moments in the middle when we are desperately craving a cookie or when we feel left out when everyone is going out to dinner or when we super hangry and sore and tired. We don't talk about those 3 months when we didn't lose a single pound. Those are realities though. Those are the moments when we are stuck in the line without sight of the end.
I meant to start my first blog post talking about resolutions, but I was looking at last years and feeling pretty bad about not accomplishing any of them. But I'm determined not to make let the bad decisions I made last year end the goals I set out to accomplish. I'm still standing in the line and it isn't really the end of the world. I am going to catch that flight. I am not going to blame others or break down. I'll keep working my way through the line, even if it moves very, very slowly.
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