Tripping towards growth

Transformation in unexpected places

Being self-conscious is a normal part of the human experience.

It also sucks.

It’s not difficult to see where my seeds of self-consciousness were planted, eventually growing into an unruly pile of weeds. For example, there was my first-grade teacher who humiliated me over my Korean middle name (경훈) at circle time, leaving me self-conscious about my “weird” middle name, which I then couldn’t bear to share outside my family of origin until decades later. Or the teacher who pulled me aside to ask me to change my clothes more often given that I often wore the same outfit to school a week at a time (money was always tight and our washing machine was almost always broken), making a clear statement that what I wore mattered.

And so forth.

Brief yet formative shaming moments like this stacked up to make me so self conscious that as an adult, even in minor and dumb moments like spilling ice cream down my shirt, I would get really fucking upset, worried that people were going to make fun of me.

And then a couple of weeks ago, I experienced a moment of transformation in an unexpected place.

I was on my way to pick up CSA vegetables at the first pickup of the season. As I was waving hello to a friend, I stepped funny at the entrance of the CSA pickup area, tripped, and went down in a heap. There were many people there, both staffing the pickup and choosing produce. A few people came over to ask if I was OK (thank you, compassionate humans).

I experienced a split second of, "well that's annoying!" and then got up, dusted myself off, and resumed conversation with my friend. I got distracted mingling and it took me maybe 20 minutes to get around to picking up my veggies. I made a joke in my head about the small tear in the right knee of my jeans from the fall, since I was wearing distressed jeans ripped along the left knee.

After I finished chatting, I tossed my vegetables in the car and began to drive home. And all of a sudden I was like, WHOA, what just happened? A past iteration of myself would have moved lightning quick to get my veggies and get the hell out of there. It is very possible that I would have cried in the car.

Instead, I didn't give a shit. It was so liberating! Here is a good representation of my mood in that moment:

I have reflected on the gifts of aging countless times this year, and I’m thrilled that part of this process involves an increasing sense of gives zero fucks when it comes to potential self-conscious moments. I am so here for it.

The only bummer was that I tweaked my hamstring. I didn’t sleep well that night because of the pain and was hobbling the next day, though just two days following I was able to walk four miles in the woods with a friend and our pups.

Two weeks from my trip and fall, I’m still nursing the injury and it’s been a good reminder—at many levels as I deal with a multidimensional array of challenging things—to keep my feet grounded on my path, embrace that healing takes time, and that all I need to do is keep moving forward, one step at a time.