I Still Count the Exits

I walk into a room and I have it mapped before I find the coffee.

Two doors. One of them propped. Where the tables sit between me and the near one. Who is behind me. Who got to the wall first.

Nobody in that room means me any harm. I know that. I knew it before I finished counting.

The counting does not ask permission.

Where it came from

You learn it in a place where the room actually matters. Where knowing the exits is not paranoia, it is arithmetic.

Then the place ends and the arithmetic does not.

That is the part nobody warns you about when you come home. There is no switch. The wiring that kept you steady in the worst room you were ever in walks into the best one with you. It follows you into a kitchen with your kids in it.

The mistake I made for years

I tried to kill it.

I treated it like a defect. Get rid of the scanning and I would be normal again. That was the wrong goal, and it made everything worse, because every time I caught myself counting doors I stacked a second problem on top of the first one.

Now I was wound up, and I was failing at not being wound up.

Here is what I actually believe now.

The instinct is not the enemy. That same wiring is why I am useful in a flooded street at two in the morning. It is why I can walk into a scene that is coming apart and see the order inside it. I have made a living off it. I have pulled people out of water with it.

The alarm was never the problem.

The problem was the alarm had no off ramp.

The small thing that works

I let it run. I let it count the doors. Then I say one sentence, out loud if I am by myself.

Nothing here needs you.

That is it. Not a technique with a brand name. Not a breathing pattern out of a pamphlet. Just an honest fact, said on purpose, to a body still running an old brief.

Some days I say it once. Some days I say it eleven times before lunch.

Eleven is not failure. Eleven is eleven repetitions of telling the truth.

Why I am writing it down

Because somebody reading this is doing math on the exits at a birthday party and thinks he is the only one. He is not. There are more of us in that fellowship hall than anybody counts.

And because I spent a long time believing the goal was to become a man who does not notice.

That is not the goal.

The goal is to become a man who notices, and then puts it down.

Genesis 50:20 does not say the years did not happen. It says God meant them for good. Meant for good is not the same as erased. The wiring stays. What it gets used for is the part I get a say in.

I still count the exits.

I just do not have to walk out of any of them.

If you are further down in this than a hard week, talk to a person. Not the internet. A person.