A recent work trip to San Francisco was both fun and a little enlightening about myself. It was fun because I’ve made good friends with some fellow vendors that I only end up actually seeing at shows. Two of them are even in my area, but we never manage to get together! (I blame their schedule…. they blame my men!)
I, per usual, found a cheaper hotel a few blocks away from the event hotel because I enjoy a nice walk there and back. But I’d forgotten that San Fran is mostly hills! And the hotel was the International Mark Hopkins.. which is juuuuust about on the highest peak!! I swear we looked down one street and Barb said, “OMG, I’ve SKIED smaller hills!”
So because I had a bag, I took a cab to my hotel room after I’d set up my booth that first night. Realizing my hotel was a short 8 blocks away I decided to walk the next morning. O… my… *gasping*… god! The walk was invigorating. But I was in heels! The walk back was worse! Downhill in heels… ouch!
I noticed everyone around me was hailing cabs. To a Los Angelean the concept of hailing a cab is as foreign as smoking in a restaurant now is. When I first saw a guy standing on a corner with his arm in the air I wondered what the hell he was doing? Then the light bulb hit when I saw more people doing it! I acted like a tourist seeing the “site of people hailing cabs!”
In L.A. if you need a cab you call one, unless you’re near a cab stand. And other than big hotels and airports, no one knows where cab stands might exist in L.A.! So I told the hotel, one morning when it was raining, to call me a cab. They did and it took 20 minutes. 20 minutes of standing there waiting and watching cab after cab after cab pass me by! The whole time my inner voices were having this conversation.
“Just hail one. How do I do that? Just wave at one you see empty. Which ones are empty? They’re going too fast to tell in time? Oh God, just hail one!! We’re wasting time!”
But the real voice that was more a constant low murmur over the other voice said, “I don’t know how to do it right. I’ll embarrass myself. People will laugh at me.”
So I trudged about up and down those hills in heels all the other days and didn’t hail a cab until the last day. When I checked out and needed to get to the event with my rollaway bag. As if the hills weren’t enough of a challenge the weather had begun to sprinkle. I told the hotel to call me a cab for 10 am and went in to have breakfast. Sadly thanks to a terrible waitress I missed my cab at 10 and they had to call another. While waiting I was joined by an elderly couple and engaged them in a bit of conversation.
Then a cab pulled up and that couple stole it from me! He just said, “come on, Maryann” and they popped over to it and hopped in. I just stood there flabbergasted. Rationally I knew they probably had called a cab also and assumed this was theirs. But they didn’t even ask or think I might be waiting for a cab also!
And it flat out pissed me off. I was late, they’d stole my cab and now I’d have to wait again! But who I was really pissed off at was me. So the real Heather inside kicked aside that inner whiner babbling about embarrassment; said, “That’s It!” and threw my arm in the air. Within 2 minutes a cab pulled to the curb.
The entire ride I contemplated the whole experience. It surprised me I still had these childhood fears hampering my life. Limiting my experiences and abilities. New Heather doesn’t have any issues with being bold? Why would hailing a cab terrify me? Or more importantly… why would I ALLOW such a childish small fear stop me from doing the logical or the new or the easy.
The fear came from being publicly bad at something. Which has always been my childhood terror. The revelation was… that it will never leave me just because I try new things now. And I must be diligently aware of it enough to make sure it doesn’t stop me from doing things in the future.
There’s a song… lol… of course!
Because sometimes we truly are our own worst enemies when we ignore learning about ourselves enough to conquer our fears. Or at limit their effects!