In the summer between high school and college, I was held up at gunpoint. I was 18 and the world’s least likely bank teller, a gawky ska kid with dyed hair and an assortment of garish fat ties, bequeathed the job by my older brother, who was the bank’s senior investment adviser. It all happened very fast: Three guys burst through the door and before anyone knew what was happening one of them had vaulted over the teller counter and was pointing a silver revolver in my face, yelling “GIVE ME ALL THE MONEY, HOMIE!” (The reason I remember this phrase so distinctly is because it was read back to me several times by prosecutors when I was on the witness stand a few years later.) I calmly handed the guy the cash, then he repeated this routine with each of the tellers, and the whole episode was over as soon as it started. The three things I remember most about it are: that silver revolver with the red wooden handle, how cartoonishly big it seemed; my brother’s eyes as we exchanged looks of concern from across the bank; and the fact that within seconds of the door closing behind the robbers, I broke out into uncontrolled laughter. This was not a response that I’m proud of—it happened as an elderly customer collapsed onto a couch, and my two fellow tellers, both women, broke into tears—but it was the response I had.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this bank robbery story over the years. When I tell it, I like to include the fact that the FBI guys who arrived on the scene that day were wearing actual Hawaiian shirts, and that my brother got both me and my other ska buddy jobs that summer—that if you walked into this particular California Federal in Long Beach during those months, you might have made your withdrawal from someone who briefly played guitar in the Aquabats. (That was my buddy, who was fired a few weeks before the robbery for accidentally cashing a forged check.) But no matter how many details I include or don’t, I always mention the part about the laughing, because the thing that tends to prompt me to tell this story in the first place is when I’m using it as an example of how I always have the wrong reaction to things, how I never know how to feel, or how to express those feelings.
The most recent instance of this was when someone asked me how I was feeling here on the eve of my kid being born, and immediately I started blathering, or that’s how it felt. Excited, nervous, fearful, bored…it’s a mix of things, but it’s hard to settle on a dominant one, and if I add it all up it doesn’t feel the way I think it should feel. The way I think it should feel is like it’s that two-week period before the Super Bowl, and I’m a diehard, lifelong, embarrassingly incorrigible Oakland Raiders fan (in this fantasy, the Raiders are still in Oakland), and it’s been decades since we’ve even made the playoffs let alone the Super Bowl, but we’re going this year and it’s all I can think about, and I spend those two weeks in this fever dream of pure excitement and anticipation, clomping around the house dressed like one of those post-apocalyptic skeleton-vikings you used to see in The Black Hole, Danielle warning me not to get facepaint on the couch as I bend the mailman’s ear about the infamous Tuck Rule Game.
Surprise: That’s not how things feel. Instead of uncontained excitement and incessant preemptive joy, we’re in this kind of emotional holding pattern, going about our days in a weird limbo, checking and rechecking our baby to-do list, and sometimes just sitting around, which in this age of striving we all live in is a bit hard to do. In short, how I’m feeling of late doesn’t seem to match the gravity of the moment, and in trying to articulate this to this person who asked me about it, I once again found myself doing what I often do when this sense of emotional incongruence arises, which is break out the bank robbery story. You see? I laughed after a bank robbery! I’m broken…
Obviously I’m not broken, but this kind of grappling with my emotional reaction to a situation is something I do, and maybe something you do, too. It’s an example of the Buddhist concept of the second arrow. As the parable goes, the Buddha once said to a student, “If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? If the person is struck by a second arrow, is it even more painful? In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional.”
I love me a good second arrow, and in fact my anxiety is largely defined by it. It’s rarely about the emotions themselves, but instead my questioning of those emotions, how I poke and prod at them throughout my day as if they were a piece of popcorn stuck in my teeth. This is not productive, but I still do it. We all do, which is why it’s good to remember: The second arrow is optional.
Perhaps when it comes time to tell my kid this story, I’ll have found a new moral. Maybe it’s this: Don’t trust ska kids to work at your bank.
A couple of announcements: Starting this week, the publishing schedule for Healings will become erratic at best because I’ll be taking time off to accommodate the arrival of our child. For a while, I thought about trying to keep things going in the midst of having a newborn to care for, because I’m proud of the modest amount of momentum this thing has built and grateful for the fledgling community we have here and worried all of that will fizzle out if I take a pause. But I’m going to put those concerns aside. The fact is, I’ve been looking forward to becoming a dad for the better part of a decade and now that it’s about to happen, I owe it to myself and my family to devote my full attention to it. I’m not always good at keeping promises to myself, but this one feels manageable.
Given that publishing will become infrequent, at least through the New Year, I’ll be pausing paid subscriptions. A side effect of this general interregnum is it’ll give me some time and space to reflect on the experiment that’s been Healings, and that will inform how this project evolves when we pick it up again in earnest, presumably in the New Year. Big thanks to Tommy Craggs for all of his encouragement and editing guidance; for the still-anonymous “Abner Clouseau” for giving Healings its visual voice; to Ayana Muwwakill for stepping in when “Abner” had to take his leave. Lastly, super-huge thanks to all you readers—to everyone who’s liked or shared a post, added a comment, or messaged me privately about how something resonated. I was nervous about starting a project like this for all kinds of reasons, but the support I’ve received from readers and friends has been invaluable, both to my cancer recovery and my writing journey. So thank you. Here’s to all of us getting better, always.
This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s usually sent out on Thursdays.
It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Today’s installment is illustrated by Ayana H. Muwwakkil.
It’s about illness and recovery, and comes with jokes.
Healings is free for all. Paid subscriptions are currently paused until future notice.
If you have a suggestion for a story, would like to contribute, or want to chat with Garrett for any reason whatsoever, reach out: healingsproject@gmail.com.
“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
I have a coworker who always laughs during major turbulence on airplanes. Your reaction seemed just as “normal” as crying. Kind of like the church giggles. And enjoy all things new baby! It’s a very special time.
When you are ready to write again, I'm here to read. Wishing "you" and Danielle an easy delivery.
Love,
Beth