Your slice of the cataclysm

Some words of advice that really helped me this week. And maybe they'll help you.

I was planning on writing a longer piece this week, in advance of Valentine’s Day, about how I ended up owning a flower shop when I know almost nothing about flowers, but that didn’t happen.

On Monday at about 3:15 p.m., a 56-year-old man named Victor Scott was shot and killed in a road rage incident that happened across the street from our South Tacoma Way shop.

Monday’s crime scene, with our shop (the far white brick building) in the backdrop. Image courtesy the Tacoma Police Department via the Tacoma News Tribune.

I wasn’t there when it happened. The two people who were working heard gun shots, then confirmed via the Citizen app that shots were fired and police had been dispatched. Then they called me, and because this isn’t the first time we’ve heard shots fired in the neighborhood, I told them what we “normally” do in this situation is lock the doors, stay inside, and wait for police.

Because we live in Tacoma, this isn’t an out-of-the-ordinary situation, and everyone felt safe enough to leave work in the normal way and get home. Everyone in our shop was safe, and we are grateful for that.

But the whole thing was complicated by the fact that, while the two people in our shop who witnessed it waited inside trying to understand how to respond, they used the Citizen app to live stream the events across the street.

I don’t use Citizen, but I understand its usefulness as an accountability tool in monitoring police activity, and I understand why people use social media as a way to process violent events as a community in an effort to minimize personal trauma.

We didn’t know if anyone had been hurt. Both cars involved in the incident fled the scene and only police remained. So while this wasn’t normal, it wasn’t gravely concerning. It was only through the use of Citizen that our staff became aware that someone involved in the incident had died, and they found themselves in the unfortunate position of being the de facto hosts of that news as it unfolded via the live stream they were hosting. We live in weird times.

To add to that weirdness, someone watching their live stream got upset that the tone didn’t match the gravity of what was unfolding. It probably didn’t—many commenters were asking about the plants—but again: our staff didn’t know someone had died until they learned it via the comments. This person was so upset that not only did they call both shops to complain about it, they messaged our Instagram, my personal Instagram, and then started a public take-down campaign of our shop via some plant-related Facebook groups, all within the span of about an hour.

Since opening the shop I’ve handled a few high-stress situations (a pandemic, wildfires, a blizzard on Valentine’s Day, high staff turnover, a break-in), but this somehow felt like it could finally be my breaking point. Someone was murdered outside our shop while two people were working inside. That in itself is enough to process, but now I have a team of people worried that we’ve deeply offended our community as a result of how two frightened people processed that trauma. I found myself less upset about the violence than I was about the harsh reaction. I wished our staff had been given the grace to process the events in any way that made them feel safe and normal—including live streaming—and they weren’t. Now instead of helping everyone process what happened and feel safe, I’m doing reputation management, and that feels grossly inappropriate to the situation.

The next day I just happened to have a call scheduled with someone who acts as kind of a mentor to me.

“How am I supposed to handle this?” I asked her. “I can do hard things! But this, on top of everything else that’s already happening, feels far beyond what I thought I had the capacity to deal with when I opened a plant shop.”

She didn’t mean to answer in any sort of profound way, but she’s got a practiced, grounded spirituality, so maybe this stuff just pours out of her.

Here’s what she told me.

1. This is your slice of the cataclysm. We all get a slice, and this is yours. You got yourself to a position where you are the one in charge, because at some point you felt you were capable of handling things. And maybe it wasn’t this, exactly, but you’re capable. So handle it.

2. These things that happen aren’t in the way, they are the way. In the course of your day, your week, the past year, you’ve had to deal with things you couldn’t possibly anticipate. Those things aren’t blocking you from doing the work you need to do, they are the work you need to do. So don’t treat this like an obstacle to your real work. This is your work. So do it.

3. You don’t have to have all the answers. All you have to do is show up with the tools and knowledge you have, and your humanity, and approach these events in the best way you know how. You’re helping people, and yourself, navigate through this, not fixing it. So navigate through it.

This was just what I needed to hear in the moment to be able to put one foot in front of the other and just show up. I don’t think I would have shared about these events at all in this newsletter if I didn’t also have those words of advice (and hope, really) that come with it.

I hope that if you’re facing something that feels impossibly hard in addition to doing things that are already impossibly hard—and I think we all are right now—that those three things help you navigate the path forward in the way they helped me. But that’s all it is: a path forward, and not, necessarily, the answer.

That’s all I have in me this week. Thank you for letting me use this dispatch as a way to process my own feelings about this event. I appreciate all of you.