Fight or Flight… Or Maybe Just Cry

The meeting that terrified me to tears

The Fight or Flight response is an innate response to fear. We don’t control nor choose when it happens or to what stimulus turns on the response. It’s an instinct.

Fight or Flight engages your entire body. It turns off all major other systems (for example: when your body is in Fight or Flight mode — you will not feel an urge to use the bathroom even if you have to, your body turns that feeling off) to allow you only to feel the fear response. You do not choose between the two, your body does. You either stay and deal with the fear (fight) or you leave the situation that scares you (flight) and only after you respond to the fear you’re feeling will your regular body systems begin to normalize.

Evolution is far slower than technology, so we’re more likely to experience a true Fight or Flight response to public speaking than we are to a gun pointed right at us or to a car rushing toward us in traffic. The reactions we have to those things are learned. We’re taught to fear guns. We’re taught to look both ways before crossing a street. But those concerns are not instinctual.

Public speaking is the number one fear in the world. Why? Because way back in the early times of humanity’s beginning, being surrounded by a lot of other humans… never led to anything good. These days, being surrounded by people can be frightening for a number of reasons… but most of them are not because you believe your life is in danger. The response is counterproductive. It destroys speeches that you need to make. It turns students away from speaking up in classrooms. And for me, it made what was an already pretty nerve-wracking meeting… absolutely terrifying.

I grew up on a stage. I was a ballerina more than anything else, but I was a triple threat, so I also acted and sang. Usually in front of very large audiences, on some of the biggest stages in this country. So you would think that public speaking would be no problem for me. Old hat. No big deal. Except if you’ve ever been in an actual stage performance, you know it’s not even slightly close to the same thing at all.

When the lights go out over the audience and the spotlight and stage lights come up, the audience completely disappears from your view. You can hear them moving. You know they’re there. But you can not see them. From certain stages, you can see maybe the first two rows, but everyone else is lost in a sea of blackness.

Speeches I’ve made at weddings have been absolutely terrifying to me. Not only because I could see everyone watching me, but because there was a tone of expectation. I’ve done two such speeches. One as the maid of honor for my best friend’s wedding and one at my father’s second wedding. The former was for someone I’ve known since we were five years old. So on both occasions, nearly everyone present knew me… more than that, they knew me to be a writer. There was a strong expectation for my speeches. They’d clearly be spectacular. Elicit tears, laughter, and complete amazement over my choice of words. Pressure much?

My hands were shaking the entire time and my body went numb. My Fight or Flight response was well in effect and the adrenaline coursing through me made me completely uncomfortable with my body’s desire to run away. I only got through it by staring at my written notes and only looking up a few times to look directly at the people I was speaking about.

More recently, I had to speak in a meeting with all of the doctors at the animal hospital where I work. Along with my practice manager and my shift lead, it was just me and six other people. A small group. Nothing huge. But since we were all seated in one of the exam rooms and the topic of conversation was ME, it was beyond terrifying.

I was told that this meeting was going to take place, but until about an hour beforehand, I had no idea when. There have been issues at work I’ve been dealing with and this meeting was an attempt to begin alleviating them and give me a chance to speak about them for myself, stop the rumor mill, and hopefully take a step toward making my workplace a more friendly environment.

My writing has come under scrutiny. I use this platform to write about my life and there have been times when I’ve written about work and the hospital where I do that work and the people that I work with had searched for it, read it, and spread it around. I don’t know what other pieces of my life they’re now privy to from gaining access to this platform, but it was the pieces I’ve written about them specifically that were an issue.

Personally, I felt violated. Angry. While this platform isn’t private, I never expected it to enter my workplace. I use this platform for catharsis and sometimes I write about things I probably shouldn’t. When I was getting ready to go back to work after being out for months from an injury, no part of me wanted to go back. I wrote about it.

Since moving to Rhode Island, a LOT of bad things have happened and those things kept me out of work which meant that despite being here for several months, my co-workers really still didn’t know me and I didn’t know them but what I did know, I decided that I wasn’t crazy about. It wasn’t what I was used to and that made me uncomfortable. And the veterinarians did things differently than the vets I used to work with and that made me wonder if I should trust them with my animals.

My animals are my entire world. I would throw my husband in front of zombies to save them. They are all rescues from pretty awful situations and I’m protective of them to the point of being a helicopter pet parent. Being a vet tech, I should be well aware that vets are only in the profession because they want to help animals and I am… I never thought a single one of these doctors would HARM my animals. But it was more about trust. And for me and the life that I came from, trust is earned. It’s not given freely and then lost by an infraction. I have to learn how to trust someone before I can even try to do so and when it comes to someone having access to my animals, that trust is even harder to gain. I never thought they were bad people or bad doctors. I just didn’t know them. But despite being a writer and taking great pride in the fact that I express myself better in writing than in speaking… when I was writing about going back to work, the best way to describe what I was writing… was word vomit. And that piece was read by the people that I work with.

So there was a meeting. I needed to explain myself. I needed to give the doctors the opportunity to tell me how they felt about reading that. And holy hell, it was terrifying.

I actually very much so LIKE the doctors where I work. I think very highly of all of them. I trust them now that I’ve had a chance to get to know them better and there’s no part of me that doesn’t regret what I wrote before that happened. That piece has been deleted and I never EVER wanted them to see it. I honestly didn’t even remember writing it. Several of my pieces on this platform have been written while on sleeping pills and I don’t remember them come morning. So by the time it circulated at work, I didn’t know what the problem was. Why was my writing making people angry at me? When I found out, the breath was knocked out of me. I was confused, struggling to try to remember when I wrote it or even why I wrote it. And that was all happening while in an exam room surrounded by people, and then suddenly… it was my turn to speak.

I apologized a lot and promised to find the piece and remove it. I cried a lot. My tear ducts tend to respond a lot more to fear and/or anger than anything else. I’m not usually a crier. The way people know I’m upset is typically that I go quiet. I’m a talkative person. If I’m quiet, something is very wrong. But crying? Not usually. For that to happen, I’m almost always really angry… or really, really scared.

Talking in a small group (or a large group) of people that I can see watching me is absolutely terrifying for me to begin with but when I’m speaking in terms of something I don’t even remember writing and definitely do not feel anymore, it’s even worse. On top of that, now knowing that my writing world is an open exposition to my working world… with all of the extremely personal things that I write about on here… the meeting only grew more terrifying by the second.

The meeting felt productive. They listened to what I had to say and I think… I hope… it made a difference in how they viewed me. They have since treated some of my animals for various things and have been absolutely nothing but kind to me… but they were before as well. So being someone who finds it hard to trust anyone or anything, there is a part of me that wonders if they forgave me and moved on, or if my explanation and removal of that writing changed anything at all in terms of how they view me. But there’s another, larger meeting still looming. Now that I’ve said what I had to say to the doctors… I have to speak to my coworkers. And that will be much harder.

I’m not sure if the doctors like me or they don’t. If they don’t, they’re very professional in the way that they don’t show it and they go out of their way to accommodate my pets' needs, even though we’re currently vastly overbooked. My coworkers… some of them treat me the same way that they treat everyone else, while others are pretty clear in showing me that they do not like me. I’m an acquired taste and I know that. I tend to require time for people to actually like me, but then I grow on them like a fungus. I’m not a bad person, I’m just difficult to get to know. I accepted that they didn’t like me before I had any idea that they had found my writing and were passing it around and discussing it. The piece about them, I fully understand them being angry about. But everything else that they gained access to along with it, made work a pretty disquieting place for me to be. So much so that I considered not writing anymore. Many other writers on here made the suggestion that I start a new profile under a pen name and erase my public presence, but I have earned the following that I have on this platform and don’t want to build it up again. I’m honestly shocked by the number of loyal readers that I have, that read every word I throw out there and while the money isn’t my main purpose for being here, anyone on here that makes use of the partner program would be lying to say they don’t want to make money from their work.

I’m lucky in that I make enough money on here to be able to comfortably call it my side gig. It supplements my income enough to pay off at least one of my credit card balances each month (and I use my credit cards) but it took time for me to build that. I don’t want to start over to quiet the discussions about me at work. I write about it because it’s painful and because it’s never happened before.

I started writing on open writing platforms before I moved to Rhode Island. The people at my previous hospital were also aware that I was a writer on the side, but they never went searching for my work. I’ve always written under my legal name, but the two worlds never before collided. Suddenly, my innermost thoughts and feelings and my worst experiences and traumas are open season at my workplace. And as uncomfortable as that makes me, I won’t go underground to hide it. I made a mistake in writing about work before I truly got to know any of the people there, but in terms of my writing, that is my only crime. My boss has told them to stop looking for it, stop reading it, and stop discussing it. Whether or not they have or they will, I do not know and I don’t want to. Every cell in my body wanted to stop and every stubborn part of my personality refused. This is my world. They chose to visit. I have stopped writing on sleeping pills and instead, now only write on my days off… when I’m awake and not on medication. So I know what I’m writing and I remember it. I apologized to the doctors for what I said about them under poor circumstances and now that I know them, certainly regret it.

But holy hell was it one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do on purpose.

Most of the most terrifying moments of my life have happened against my will. I don’t tend to put myself in situations where I’m frightened. I don’t ride roller coasters (fear of heights and speeds that I’m not controlling). I don’t speak in public. I don’t get anywhere near a spider without a cat in my hands aimed at the thing to dispatch it for me. I don’t go to parties where people are under the influence of anything because of what was done to me by someone under the influence of many things. I avoid situations that scare me. I’m no adrenaline junkie searching for adventure. I seek a quiet life. I’ve had a lot of trauma in my lifetime and I don’t need to feel a rush. I need to feel calm.

But the meeting that already happened and the larger meeting that will happen at some point (I do not know when), are necessary. Even though the first one elicited tears and shaking of pure fear and the second only stands to bring on more… I have to face this. I have to put a stop to the things that the people I work with think they know and understand because, in reality, they really don’t.

I can only hope that it will erase their presence from my writing world and allow me to continue to live my duality. Out in the real world, I’m just a regular person. Someone who has moved many times to escape the past that lives inside me, so it goes where I go… but only the people I choose to tell about it get to know about it. I choose to write about it to get it out of my body and work through the trauma. But I don’t openly discuss it. I don’t invite people to this platform to see it. And I never thought it would invade my job.

There’s only one piece that I have to discuss in an open meeting. A piece that I wrote on sleeping pills discussing my discomfort about returning to work at a place where no one really knew me that no longer even exists because I deleted it. I am sorry that I wrote it. Mostly because it focussed on the fact that they didn’t know me and never really took into account that I didn’t know them either. I made snap judgments based on that lack of knowledge and extreme protectiveness of my pets. I shouldn’t have. And now I’m up against one of my greatest fears to attempt to turn this hospital into a place that is more than just a paycheck and make it a place I actually WANT to work.

Working with animals is all my career has ever been about for me. I do not tend to care about making friends at work. I’ve worked for literally my entire life and the vast majority of that was in the cutthroat ballet world where your friends were most definitely NOT your friends. I have friends. I have a family. I don’t need the people that I work with to be my friends. But I do need them not to completely hate me. So while I loathe public speaking, I got through the smaller meeting with the doctors and my bosses. And I will get through the larger meeting with my coworkers.

I don’t know what I expect to come out of it or even what I think might come out of it. I just know that I want them off of this platform and to understand why I said the things that I said once upon a few months ago when I was riddled with medication and vomiting words about my baseless concerns. Do I miss my old hospital and the people there? Yes. Does that mean I can’t make my current hospital a place that I want to be? No. But I can’t do it alone. And I can’t do it with this held over my head.

I guess I’m seeking forgiveness for writing about them while also seeking understanding that writing is what I do to let my brain rest when something is poking at it. Adjusting to new environments has never been my strong suit. Trusting new people is not something I’m capable of. Writing is how I voice these things publically without all the tears and shaky hands.

Writing put me in a position where I have to do something that frightens me and defend myself publically. In some ways, I don’t blame them for being upset about it. In other ways, I am so angry that they invaded this world. When they did so, they had no idea that they’d find something about them. And they get to be angry that they did. But I get to be angry at what else they uncovered about me to get to that piece. Things they didn’t need to know. Things that should have been my choice. And maybe I should have always written under a pen name and avoided this possibility completely. But that conclusion is way too forgone to go back now.

Now, I have to face my fears and deal with it. Whatever they know, they know. Closing down this profile, writing under a pseudonym, making my writing world harder to find, or not writing anymore, doesn’t change that. They already know. And should they choose to keep reading about it… well… so be it, I suppose. The only explanation I owe them is in regards to what I wrote about them. Everything else I plan to tell them is the reason I feel violated by them infiltrating my writing world and all I can do is hope that they understand and back away.

Will it change anything? I don’t know. I have to get through it first. Catharsis in an open speaking forum. That is totally new to me and seriously, truly, terrifying. In this case, it’s necessary.

I just really wish it wasn’t.

Thank you, Ellie Jacobson for the push prompt about fears. It came at a very interesting time in my life. Thank you to Flint and Steel for a place to house it.