Disco Inferno

I learn through suffering.

I know how seatbelts and airbags work because I was in a car crash. 

We were driving out from New York to Colorado and had just left Kansas City, way early in the morning. I was snoozing in the passenger seat when I felt the car rapidly decelerating. I opened my eyes, and my little Honda Fit (RIP Blueberry) smacked right into a deer.

I felt the seatbelt yank my body so that I was pinned to my seat. The airbags didn’t deploy. We were shaken up, but unscathed. I learned later that the technology in cars is so advanced — it made a series of split-second decisions based on perceived impact. Blueberry detected it was a collision, so it wound the seatbelts back on their spools, and deployed the tiny explosive in them to lock them in place (this is why you need to replace seatbelts after a crash). It also decided that we didn’t need airbags in that particular crash, because of where and how we hit the deer.

I likely would have never looked any of this up if it hadn’t happened to me. The experience made me care enough to wonder. 

This is how I learn. 

You know the Trammps song “Disco Inferno”? Turns out “disco inferno” in Latin translates loosely to “I learn through suffering / hell.” Probably not what they had in mind — they were definitely talking about discotheque — but here we are.

I am a disco inferno learner. I don’t always heed warnings. I don’t always learn from other people’s mistakes. I learn from mine. I often don’t even care until there’s an inferno.

It’s not always the heavy stuff either.

I first drove stick shift in someone else’s Mini Cooper — I tried in a parking lot, but it wasn’t very big, or very empty. I stalled almost every time I tried to drive. I didn’t get out of first gear. Anyone backing out of a parking space freaked me out. I panicked. That very specific panic when the car jerks and you smell burning clutch and you hope no one is behind you. 

I know that life is short — really short, YOLO short — because I lost my dad and my in-laws. They all died relatively young, in their sixties and seventies, not from old age. I knew intellectually that people die young, that time is finite, that we should etc. etc. etc. I had heard the speeches. But I never truly understood it until my grief forced me to. We finally took the trip to Thailand last year — the one we’d been postponing for over a decade because “we’ll make it there eventually.”

I learned that I cannot give my entire self to a job because I’ve been laid off three times. I’m not telling you this for sympathy — I’ve written about it before, I’ve made my peace with most of it. I’m telling you because three times is a lot of times to learn the same lesson. The first time I thought it was a fluke. The second time, bad luck (the blow was softened by a generous severance, and I was there for only a few months anyway). The third time: OK… I see what’s happening here. The job was never going to love me back. Companies don’t, actually — they care about productivity, not people, and I had to get laid off three times to really believe it.I know this now. It’s lodged in my body in a way no career coach could have put it there.

There’s a part of this disco inferno realization that I keep wrestling with. 

I write. I write about the things I’ve lived through, the lessons that cost something, the patterns I finally saw after I’d already paid the tuition. I write hoping that someone reads it and maybe doesn’t have to learn it the hard way. Which is insane, right? Because I am Exhibit A of the person who needs to learn the hard way.

I spent years in program management doing the same thing professionally. Being the person who’d seen the pattern before, who’d watched a similar project collapse for the same reasons, who’d say — gently, then less gently, then really less gently — “I think we should think about XYZ”. And then watching the company have to live through XYZ anyway. And then being joylessly right about XYZ. There is no satisfaction in the “I told you so”… ok, maybe a tiny bit of satisfaction. But I would have rather they listened to me in the first place.

So what am I doing here?

I think — and I’m still working this out — I’m not actually writing so you won’t have to learn it the hard way. I’ve made my peace with the fact that you probably will. I think I’m writing so that when you’re in it — when the seatbelt catches, when the room gets quiet, when you’re shipping your company laptop back for the third time — you might remember: “someone was here before me. It was like this for them too.”

Not a warning. More like finding someone else’s handwriting in the margins.

Disco inferno. I learn through suffering. I write through the fire too, apparently. And maybe that’s the only honest thing I can offer — not the lesson in advance, but the proof that you can come out the other side of it and still think it was worth writing down… even if nobody learns a thing.