When Life Feels Small

[This essay was originally sent as part of our “Words for Your Wednesday” weekly email series. If you’d like to get reads like this one sent straight to your inbox, you can join the Windrose email community here.]

I hit a car in a parking garage once.

Nothing bad, really, just a ding in the door from a turn cut just a little too tight.

Truthfully, my car suffered the brunt of the bunt. But the other car was a nice one. I don’t remember the make or model—I’m not really a car person—but I do remember it was a convertible. Someone dropped a lotta dollars on this depreciating piece of metal, and I had just chipped paint off the gleaming door. Big yikes. 

All because I was in a rush to get to my doctor’s appointment.

This was a time in my life when I worked a part-time job on the weekends and evenings, in addition to working a full-time job in the refugee services department of Catholic Charities. I was young, just 24, and I was learning how to live in the world as a grown-up, and how to love other people, and how to love myself. It was a doozy of a year, full of late nights, plane tickets, Bon Iver albums, and healing. 

And in the middle of it, I had just hit a car in a parking garage.

I called my dad in a panic, left a note with my phone number on the convertible’s windshield, and then hustled upstairs—late—to my appointment.

The technician drawing my blood was a gentle, older lady. Not quite grey-haired grandma, but certainly wiser and kinder than I was.

She asked me how I was; instead of following the “I’m good, how are you?” script, I told her the truth.

I just hit a car in the parking lot, and I’m stressed out, and what if the car’s owner calls me and let looses an angry assault on my entire worth as a person? She could probably tell I was one word away from a full-on breakdown.

She put down the needle, took my hand in hers, and started talking to God on behalf of my frazzled, thinly-holding-it-together self. 

I’ll never forget it.

***

A couple weeks ago, I got my second COVID vaccine.

Because we basically live in a dystopian novel these days, my city’s convention center has been converted into a public vaccination site. What once—prior to The Great Pandemic of 2020—housed masses of unmasked folks for major biz conventions now serves up shots for locals, buffet-style. The health department is efficient; they must’ve consulted with a Chick-fil-a on how to move this many people through a line in mere minutes.

The nurse administering my shot was, again, an older lady. On her table were a pile of bandaids, each one with a hand-drawn smiley face in the center.

I pointed to the bandaids. “I like the smiley faces.”

“I spent all morning doing those,” she said.

All morning, this woman drew smiling ink faces on bandages, in a small effort to poke a tiny hole of hope into a stranger’s day.

I’ll never forget it.

***

I haven’t written much in the past couple of years—an essay every few months, maybe. “Nothing has happened to me,” I’ve reasoned. What is there to write about when life is clunking along without much in the way of change? What stories are there to tell when my life is pretty much the same as it was two years ago?

But you know what?

I’ve got it all wrong.

I’ve been waiting for some sweeping life epiphany to fuel my writing. I’ve been sitting comfy in this me-me-me bubble, thinking my world, my life as it is right now, is too small for any real storytelling.

But maybe the reason my life has felt so small is because I’m looking downward, at my own two feet.

I’ve been dismissing these daily stories as ordinary in their appearance, without realizing these are the stories that make up life: two women, pausing in their day to show up for a stranger.

How can I show up for others, just like these two women showed up for me?

What might life look like if I widen my world beyond my own thin ambitions?

What stories will I notice simply by looking up from my own two feet? 

[Cover photo by Allison Wopata via Unsplash]

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