To the lovely city of Baltimore:
It was Thursday afternoon when you towed my car. I’ll admit, finding the street I parked on empty after it had been lined with parked cars like my own just a few hours prior was not a great feeling. OK, it was a really sh*tty feeling. I actually refused to believe it at first. "No, it must just be down the street farther, I must’ve parked that way," I thought in denial. “This can’t be happening to me; how could this happen to me?”
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But it could happen to me and it did happen to me. And it could happen to you or your roommate or your sister. It could happen to your professor and maybe it did happen to that dude who rudely let the door shut in your face that time, not holding it open like the gentleman he should have been to you. It could happen to anyone yet when things like these happen, a lot of us have this default mode of thinking in which we are the center of the universe. It’s understandable, of course, because we’re trapped inside our own heads all day every day. We forget that the same shitty experiences, the “lemons” that life gives us or rather pelts at us, actually happen to other people just as often if not more often as us. And most likely they feel equally alone because they are trapped inside their own head just like you are trapped in yours.
So, Baltimore, I don’t want to say thank you for towing my car because that was seriously not cool. But I do want to say that you taught me something, even if your lesson was $280 more than I’d like to pay. You taught me to try to consciously stop thinking I am the center of the universe. Grudgingly walking into the stuffy, overcrowded office downtown to retrieve my car I was met by several extremely different people yet all with one thing in common: their day was ruined by one of your stupid tow trucks.
When I saw the spot my car had been empty I wanted to scream and cry and kick things. I was mad at the world and I felt sorry for myself. For whatever reason I felt that this was the worst thing ever and I was the only one ever to experience a fate so unfortunate. And then, standing in a room filled with strangers who had the same thing happen to them and probably felt the same way I did, I felt this weird community. In a way, it made me feel small.
I’ve always hated when people say you shouldn’t complain about whatever’s bothering you because someone out there has it worse. The truth is we all have issues and to rate them on a scale of “whose life is most inconvenient” is bogus because comparing gets us nowhere. Our problems will always feel more real, more testing, because they’re our problems. Not to say we lack compassion, but we’re selfish creatures, us humans. But we need not to compare our problems to others’, but instead, remember just that: others have problems too. And a lot of the time, we’re more alike than we think.
A sign taped on the dirty glass window in the impound lot office read “Be kind, we are not the ones who tow your car.” The two women working behind the counter seemed sweet enough, yet the nature of their job made it so a sign like that was necessary to put up. Every day, those women wake up and go to work to deal with dozens of people whose days had been ruined just like mine was. It's my hope that those they deal with realize, even if just in the slightest, that they have more in common with the people in that overcrowded room than they'd might think.
