See the Bus

There were two miner birds, and they beat at the bus door maniacally, abuzz with fury and squeaking wrath. I was the only one who watched them, strolling down Pulteny Street in Adelaide. It was raining, the water wicking on my outer layers and greening the Forest of Dreams with mist. No one was there to observe this little scene of madness but me. One of the reasons I enjoy walking out in my galoshes.

They were, of course, attacking their own reflections in the bus door. The driver, in a moment of provocation, parked his bus on an unassuming sidewalk, must have felt the thin branches of the gum scrape against the side, thought nothing of it. Not much more than a saproling, the tree was all gangly teenager, just big enough to house two tiny creatures and their nest. Thus the two intruders appeared, uninvited, on this cold and rainy day. I passed by and watched them attack the window with their beaks and claws, on my way to visit Himeji Garden across Adelaide’s ring road.

I passed back the same way ninety minutes later and they were still there. I thought of all I’d done in the interrum - honestly, not much, merely meandering around the little Zen garden and reading under a shelter, pondering an imponderable - and realised that whole time these little birds were still attacking entities that didn’t exist. They were completely, utterly at the mercy of a threat that wasn’t there - ghosts entirely of their own devising, yet obviously real.

***

I am used to people liking me. Like all good people-pleasers and pugs, my chief self-defense mechanism is ensuring I’m charming and in people’s good graces to maintain a sense of security and order. Despite making progress on first seeking self-approval, it’s also who I am; I crave harmony, create connections by being likable, and grow uncomfortable when someone seems disagreeable or ambivalent.

In past jobs, I have quickly risen through the ranks through said agreeableness. In one instance, it was just as much because the people I worked with were profoundly incompetent and lazy, and so displaying even a mild work ethic and willingness to try things was enough to ensure my professional advance. My manager commenced the second week in my new role by sitting me down in his office and asking me “how do you deal with change culture?” Four people were fired or reassigned the next day, and a couple months later I got promoted. Dealt with it pretty well, I thought.

Fast forward several years, a new manager started, and I acted the same, ingratiating performance that had fired me up the ladder. She didn’t respond, let alone seem impressed. I was baffled. Then I got insecure. Why didn’t she respond to my jokes, my self-deprecating humor, or my incisive reporting and work ethic? Why, come to think of it, does she hate me? What did I do wrong? These thoughts thrashed through my mind more and more obsessively, each interaction merely proving another opportunity for her not to validate my desire for harmony. Our relationship wasn’t quite an obsession, but I had built up a method for working with people that relied on them liking me. I was floundering, and trying to figure out what to do became a normal part of my day-to-day work.

The answer is obvious, obviously. We’d call her ‘results-oriented’ in the business world; she probably had it on her resume. It wasn’t even that she didn’t like me; her feelings just didn’t present the way I thought they would. In fact, I had constructed an entire edifice of my manager in my brain, and began projecting it upon her like a movie on a blank wall. I invented reasons, which were actually just thoughts in my head, that sought to make sense of this strange impasse. I read the text in her emails as inscrutable criticisms of my conduct, her aloofness as evidence I was disappointing her. My wings beat frantically against the surface.

Then one day I was presenting some numbers back to her and she suddenly smiled and nodded. “I’ve been very impressed with your diligence and this is a great start,” she said approvingly, and suddenly the whole veil was lifted. I hadn’t merely misjudged her; it wasn’t even her that I was judging. Her suddden approval all at once revealed it was a thought of her that this corner of my reality hinged on. It was an ephemeral conjuring by my insecure self. It didn’t even exist, yet bent my behavior in the real world. I played a trick on myself I wasn’t even aware of.

***

The psychologist Robert Adler posited something profound about suffering; all of it stems from our relationships with people. He also posited something controversial; that trauma does not exist. He wrote the bulk of his work in the first half of the twentieth century, the work of Bessel van der Kolk coming later that argued trauma makes physical homes in the body. I think what he meant was that trauma isn’t an event, but a story, and stories are thoughts we play back to ourselves. They’re also, as I found out, stories we cast out into the world. They don’t exist, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

The miner birds of Adelaide had a bus pull up in front of their home and spent an afternoon attacking an illusion. They wrapped their world around the intruders like a dog tied to a pole, running in circles. That’s what thoughts do, and when you see your thoughts in real time, exactly as they are, you see the bus for what it is.