Airbn(Bummer)
The phone screen had not changed. No matter how long I stared, the bits were not forming into a message. Pulse started to rise. Thoughts started to flash. Movements became erratic. My hostess was a ghostess. I had not one response from her despite a confirmation from Airbnb. On the exact same day I was to begin my stay.
This is a story about what happens when things don’t meet our expectations. Often our expectations are rigid but vague boxes. With new experiences, it’s difficult to expect the minute details. For example, booking an Airbnb, you’d probably not have a picture of the exact personality of the host or what will happen at 6pm on a Sunday night at that location. Usually our expectations are high-level – pictures match reality, host isn’t an asshole, you don’t wake up with a knife in the middle of your chest. But when one of those high-level expectation wires is tripped, for example not knowing how to get inside my room while standing on the sidewalk a few feet from the property, that’s when a different form of ourselves emerges.
Scrolling through the Airbnb site, I felt the seconds ticking down, each one leaving a grimace of pain that homelessness was near – if I didn’t act decisively. But moving with speed I confronted the direct opposite obstacle – choices. What if I chose an Airbnb that was more expensive than it needed to be? Or if it didn’t have strong wi-fi? Or if the couple next door was particularly frisky on weekday nights? To use two cliches: time is running out but haste is waste.
Show me a person who’s expectations aren’t met and I’ll show you who that person is. In the modern world, we have desperately tried to vanquish the uncertainty in our lives. We have created measures to ensure everything is calm, tranquil. Medicine for any calamity. Social media for any boredom. Any instant urge we have is treated, again and again. This is me, we might imagine driving to the grocery store or sitting down to eat dinner. (We even perfectly set up our blinker five seconds before the turn and wipe our mouth after every bite.) But this is you only when things are sound.
One thing is clear amidst all the uncertainty around having a place to stay, I don’t know what to do. Despite searching through ten different places online, no definitive decisions have been made. I haven’t even taken a sip of water. Instead of sitting on a sofa hunched over a computer in my first month’s Airbnb I’m now over-staying in, I’m in my head determining how to calculate as much certainty into the future. It’s not going so well.
We turn into a completely different person when our expectations aren’t met. I imagine it could have something to do with our needs (on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs)– like a murderous rage over a different type of food we ordered. But from what I’ve examined it only has to do with the picture we’ve constructed in our head followed by how we act when our stress response is triggered. Anger. Dejection. Overwhelm. Despondency. All with the goal of: uncertainty -> certainty.
In my former Airbnb, my Italian “flatmates” (that’s what they call it in Europe) have been so kind, as I freak out internally. There are the two selves inside me. The calm Zach who wants to chat normally with the gals, and the one who desperately wants to solve this gaping hole of a problem of shelter. So I don’t have to feel the discomfort of uncertainty, I chat with the girls. Still I can’t escape the feeling that something is going wrong.
We oftentimes will choose other activities in an effort to escape the pain of a pressing problem. It is deemed procrastination by the Gods of Time. Changing tasks only serves to dull the pain, not remove it. The pain of facing a problem can be stronger over a shorter period of time than dragging out the problem for longer with mild discomfort.
The pressure is too great. Eyeing two options back and forth, I’m about to select an option while wincing in pain. The removal of potential great choices will likely leave me sore, as I whisper a prayer for the unknown I’m about to face. May the Gods of Time not shoot me with arrows of regret when I arrive on the doorstep – with a half-smile and dread as the room crawls with cockroaches, bedbugs, and mice. I press the (real) mouse and click!
Waiting for more information or for that matter more certainty can be helpful at times. But often it’s a trick to delay the fact we will inevitably have to cut away options. Most people err on the side of the guillotine – that deadline – to force them into action. Now we must act or we will have to deal with the certain consequences of not choosing at all.
I sit still in the kitchen of my old Airbnb with my now Italian ex-flatmates. The power of a finger pressing onto a surface to make a choice has the powerful effect of calm. Like a tornado ravaging the land, in the time after there is only quiet. I must accept my fate. I cannot undo. I pack up my bags, and say one recently-learned Italian curse word before I head out the door to the next Airbnb.
How can we judge whether A or B decision was better when we lived through A and not B? Even our assessments of what could have been could be just as flawed as our decision making process that got us into the mess in the first place. Or so we think is a mess! Perhaps B would have been much worse. But accepting a decision has the power to remove the grief around potential lost opportunities as we embrace the reality of our choice.
A day later, the trompo is staring at me. It’s a vertical facing slab of meat connected to a metal spit with the flame flickering. I watch as the seasoned cook shaves at it in a downward motion. On my left drinking from a Coca–Cola with real verified sugar is my new host, Alfredo. He took me to his favorite taco spot, 20 minutes by car. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the other choices I could have selected. I was too busy reaching for my next plate of food.
Much of going through uncertainty is knowing you’ll be okay at the end of it. When you build these walls of certainty where everything goes according to plan – what you’re implying is that uncertainty will hurt you. It’s true that uncertainty may hurt or it may just turn out better than you ever expected – with a taco in your hand.
