Alternate Title: That time when a cab driver with a water bottle full of pee looked me in the eye and said, “f*** you” and then I cried for the third time that day
That title was a little too long but accurately sums up the experience, I think. Anyway:
I flew to Chicago this weekend to visit family for Easter and had a lay-over in LaGuardia. I sprinted through the airport to my connecting gate and must’ve just missed it so I had a brief panic attack (1) in the airport (mom sang to me until my body remembered to breathe) because I was alone, exhausted and did not want to argue my way onto a new flight. There were no more flights on my airline to Chicago that night so my options were limited already and the delta gate agent was mean. I’d never been stuck in an airport overnight before, much less by myself, and cried (2) in front of the lady trying to help me. She booked me on the next morning flight and made her computer spit out a hotel voucher for me. I found the cab stand and told the driver to take me to the LaGuardia Marriott please. He refused to move until I found the address on my dying phone (even though I could see the Marriott from where we were), and then noticed the giant water bottle half-full of a suspiciously yellow-tinged liquid (remember the alternate title? That’s now). We pulled up and I told him I was paying with a credit card to which he said, looking me straight in the eye, “fuck you.” And then I cried again (third time!).
I felt like a miserably incapable failure and cried again because I was so terrible at handling things. And yeah, I could’ve handled a lot of those things a little better but I was sad and angry and tired so I cried instead. And that’s okay, I was feeling lots of things and feelings are apart of being human – with or without mental illness-y stuff. Sometimes when you do have mental illness-y stuff, you forget how real people function. And *spoiler alert* you are a real person! You react to stuff about as well as most people, sometimes you’ll over or under-react but you’ll figure it out. If you want company, I’m walking that path too.
And if a cab driver with a water bottle full of pee ever says, “fuck you,” you should say, “fuck you too.”
The Life of a Mourning Dove 