On Sincerity During Perplexity in the Aftermath of a NYC Emergency Event

Arbitrary choices: The most important thing you must realize in the immediate aftermath of an emergency event in New York City, is that it was entirely meaningless that this event happened to you. You must repeat that to yourself, over and over, that it was totally irrelevant to the events happening, that you were a part of it. Because it did not have to be your life that this event descended upon, and your life is one that needs meaning, you will find yourself, in the hours and days and weeks following the event, searching, desperately, for some sort of definition to affix to the words you have heard used to describe its happening. In this definitive effort, you will find yourself sorting through all available details to interpret, as you sit in the ambulance, as you talk to the police, as you fill out the endless forms that will all have the name of this event stamped in a bold and official-looking type on their header. These details of circumstance all but proclaim with a loud self-validating status that there is some sort of concrete meaning floating nebulously through this event—however, you must remember this foundational decree as I tell you: that there is only meaninglessness underpinning this events’ happening. It did not need to happen, it did not need to happen to you, it did not care that it happened to you, and in all probability it very likely would never have happened to you if any number of casual decisions had been made that day: if you had stopped for a conversation with your neighbor in the mailroom, if you had elected to buy a coffee somewhere during your commute, if you had sung one extra song during your morning shower, if you had missed your train to stop and ponder the spectacular view of the bridge from the 93rd street overlook. The direction of our lives is composed from this fluidically shifting, constantly moving symphony of arbitrary choices—choices that will only congeal into their tyrannical importance over time, whereupon a meaning will emerge entirely without your input, inaugurated into felt-reality by either our ability or inability to face it with sincerity.

Emergency room: What you must remember about being in the emergency room is that the agency of your body after an event is no longer your own. Your bodily functions and the state of your internal organs all belong to the attending physician and staff of nurses who will systematically write down everything you say, and then swiftly anesthetize, phlebotomize, lobotomize, pressurize, catheterize, defibrillate, x-ray, and cardiograph every inch of your body should they—not you—deem it necessary. The trick is to realize that they are doing these heinous and intrusive procedures based on your nebulous and queasy comments about your body, and that realization entails the fact that you know very little about everything in your body, so it might be best to pipe down with your various theories as to why your lungs feel ‘out of alignment’ or your kneecap might be ‘partially dislocated.’ You must realize that this separation of you from your body is meaningless, and that the accompanying lack of awareness, although disorienting, should not remain terrifying, as it will translate into an opportunity to be humbled by a small dose of real knowledge, such as: the heart cannot be herniated, that smoke damage if it is to be permanent appears in the thorax before it can blacken the lungs, that not all types of visual disorientation signal a concussion, and that some types of disorientation occur simply as a result of grappling with the meaninglessness underpinning any attempt to fill the void created by the life-altering timetables of the Metropolitan Transit Authority.

Father Crying: What you must learn to accept when you watch your father cry in a small hospital room, is that emotions, though appearing to be intelligible, are not in any way linked to the realm of the intellect. You must realize that your father’s tears, his great swollen red face, his unfortunately embarrassing heaving sounds and motions, are all in response to an emotional agent that is not you, and is not, really, deeply linked to you. They are in response to the accumulated weight of years of necessary parental decisions; choices like keeping a warm blanket over the screaming form of his eleven-pound infant, keeping nourishing food in the mouth of his babbling five-year-old boy, keeping a band-aid on the skinned knee of his pea–brained twelve-year-old. The amassed weight of those choices across time, alongside the sacrifices of money, time, and opportunity embedded within them, has added up to this crushing idea of potential, and its correlated squandering; the title of this New York City emergency event and its now association to you, proclaims as loud as anything in the human lexicon, ‘potential robbing.’ That is the agent. That is because, to your crying father, you and the actions of your life exist under the shadow of a pre-determinable and binary endpoint. You will either be successful or be unsuccessful; you will either have a college degree or not have one; you will either make it or not make it. When the potential of you falls under imminent risk of reaching the unfavorable ending, when your father sees your name on a hospital form underneath the litany of things that have been done to your body through the events happening, when your father sees the image of his child on a breaking news television show, he might supplant that image of violence over his understanding of you; a mistake made under the weight of the emotion attached to his conception of your potential and motivated by his own desire to find an intelligent design for why he is crying, or heaving, or shaking. This is because emotions are bafflingly complex, even to the ones having them.

Your father will not hesitate in deriving his own meaning from an emergency event such as this, and you must rush, as fast as you can, towards accepting that whatever meaning he alights on will almost assuredly be completely and utterly wrong. Though seeing your father cry, while sitting on the corner of your hospital bed, may evoke memories of similar instances of his crying, such as: after his hearing from a principal that you would not be allowed to graduate high school until post-remedial summer courses, after discovering that you had purchased a second-hand bong, after learning about your plans to drop out of college to become a ‘travel-writer-cook.’ You must realize that your father is now—as he did then—undergoing the forced binding of a poorly informed intelligent design to the binary emotional endpoint of potential met or squandered. What you must learn to accept after an emergency event, is that the decisions in your life cannot be understood by anyone, even and especially you, as anything other than an assumed-to-be correct route towards a most desired future. That there is no deeper level of comprehension—regarding your potential—available to you, in the moment that you are making those decisions. The fastest way to accept this thought is to consider that if you somehow were to stumble into grand success in your life, if you chanced upon the most correct route towards your desired future, it would almost certainly have been in (somewhat large) part accomplished through blind luck and randomness of circumstance, rather than the comparatively higher merits of those certain choices.

Hunger: What you must remember about hunger is that you can survive for between one and two months without food, and it is water that you should instead be hungry for, especially if you have been dehydrated vis-à-vis uncontrollable sobbing. The average person has around forty-two liters of water in their body in the form of intra/extracellular fluids, interstitial liquid, and blood plasma. You should know however, that when as little as a 2% loss in bodily water content occurs, your body begins the process of fatigue and confusion that leads to mortality; this includes brain fatigue. You lose approximately half a milliliter of bodily fluid per minute of crying; think the equivalent of one large green grape, liquified.

So although you are terribly thirsty, you will instead be focused on your hunger, and you must assume you can’t ask for food, since every emergency worker perpetually walks at high rates of speed into and out of rooms without pausing long enough to maintain the casual (read, superficial) tone needed to ask for something so banal as a fruit cup in the aftermath of an emergency event. However, it hasn’t escaped your notice that there is a table, down a hallway and through a break room, laden with steaming boxes of pizza and plates of cold cuts, beckoning someone, anyone, to pick at it. You may also spot the dismal, landscape-oriented paper printout that reads, “courtesy of the police union, fifth district.” Those unguarded meats and cheeses may wait, ostentatiously there, in the heat of a buzzing police precinct, daring entropy to come ruin what must be a multi-hundred dollar price tag, while you may sit, and perpetually readjust your useless bruised arms over your empty stomach surrounded by broken ribs and pin your fingers under your thighs to combat the hunger; you can’t seem to eager to undermine the authority of the event and by proxy the authority of all these policemen/women by asking for something as humdrum as a slice of pizza. Be sure to pull your fingers tight like straps around your thighs because strangulating pressure mimics the differential pressure exerted by a full stomach.

You ultimately should realize, however, in the aftermath of an emergency event, that although you will seem to be hungry for food, you will be far hungrier for a different form of sustenance, and being cradled in the arms of someone, even a stranger, even just the shirt of a stranger, is enough to call out to and ameliorate this hunger. You should recognize that when a stranger shares an ambulance with you, and is placed in the hospital bed next to yours, and sits waiting in the police interview room across from you, then they are no longer a stranger, they are a you-but-someone-else, and if they bashfully open their arms to hug you at some point, then you should take what you can get and hang on for as long as you can.

You should know, when waiting for over ten hours in any space that demands immediacy of its occupants, such as a hospital emergency room or a police precinct, you will re-engage your adrenal-nervous system every time someone rushes past, every time a loud noise goes off, every time you try to re-calibrate your mind to adjust to this new threshold set by the recent memories your arbitrary choices brought about, and every time, “we’ll get to you in about five minutes,” is called in your direction from a rushing nurse, or a busy detective, of whose head you are only acquainted with the back of, as it recedes into the next situation room. You should know this new nervous system re-engagement and recalibration of your personal threshold at the hands of any rushing, loud, or otherwise conspicuous people is not temporary, it’s here for the long haul.

The Story of Your Life™: What you must realize, in the aftermath of an emergency event, is that there will be conflicts in your story. This will be a difficult thing for you to accept, as the culture you were raised and indoctrinated into engenders a level of veneration onto your ‘personal story’ (the ubiquitous assimilation of sloganed embroidered pillowcases and Target-art that have become quoted instagram stories, the saccharine hallmark cards that pop-up in tiktok lyrics, are all punching-down examples of what I mean—but simply go stand in line at any concert, bar, or coffee shop where the median age is sub-25 and and you will find a more tragic rendition of proof) that will be in conflict with the gritty and logistical needs of those who are asking you the question that is not really a question in the same way that you know it as an invitation, but rather here as the imperative, “tell me your story.” What you must realize before, during, or shortly after the instance of this conflict, is that at some point in your life you will notice that time is speeding up. This noticing may have happened to you already—if you are lucky—at some arbitrary point in your life, perhaps during or after a breakup, or after telling your parents the most heinous truth of your life and receiving career advice as a response, or perhaps simply on the sixth night in a row of feet blistering, lower-back thrashing, morning-to-evening-double shifts at some restaurant that barely pays you a livable wage; you will notice that time, as you experience it, is speeding up, and that the time itself is meaningless, that what you fill the time with is how you mark its passing, and thus some discrete chunks of time are longer than others, or wider and deeper than others, or more contributing to the meaning of your life than others.

Or, this realization may have happened in interrogation room 3 at the 72nd New York police precinct. You should also concurrently realize that you are not alone in this phenomenon, that time moves along like this for most people—the speeding up. Though you should realize what is different here, now, in your case, in the specific aftermath of an emergency event, as it relates to the telling of your specific story; you may notice how time also seems to fall back on itself and collapse. This will most likely happen during moments of forced recollection. “What did he look like?” or “What did you think about during the gunfire?” or “where are your clothes now?” or “Did you know it was a bomb that went off, or did you think it was fireworks?” are all examples of this forced recollection you might encounter, that causes the falling back and collapsing of your experience of time. In moments such as this, the initial felt reality is akin to a nauseating form of nostalgia—a known quality that you did not consent to knowing. The falling back generates the idea of reminiscence, of finding memory, but anyone who has had a memory they do not want in their heads nor consent to being given in their lifetimes will understand this with an exacting capacity. However, the collapse that occurs next instills the idea of radical conflict and reformation—you would be wise to realize this is the most rarefied of air. Though unfortunately, the transformational quality asserted by this collapse will only become clear to you much, much later, when you realize through accumulated self-loathing and self-condemnation (of lost opportunity, of lost time, of loss) that time in those moments was not merely falling back, it was instead falling back and through—falling apart on its way to somewhere—else—essentially. That destination of arriving at somewhere (read, someone) else, entails the rarified air mentioned earlier. You will hear questions projected at you that create this imperative to reminisce, and you will oblige, and feel a rush of emotion entirely un-identifiable; old emotions are being attached to new extrapolations of meaning that are occurring faster than you can account for or organize around. Under the weight of this operation, you feel an unknown layer in your stomach begin to quiver. A layer—importantly—that you could not feasibly point towards on a biological chart of the human body, nor identify on an x-ray or CAT scan, such that you might sit, aghast, next to a doctor, speculating as to whether that part of the stomach really even exists; surely it must, it exists exclusively in these moments when it is making itself known. What this stomach quivering and rush of emotion and falling back and collapse really signifies, what it truly creates for you beyond what I’ve asserted is a transformational quality, is still several interpretive pathways away, sitting occluded in the dark.

During those moments of falling back and through, during the inciting of conflict within your story, the entire course of your life will become open to interpretation, and because of this aforementioned rarified air brought about by collapse, meanings will also become subject to change. Here is a simple example—did you help out or did you somehow contribute to your own disaster? Did you want it?

Where you had been, what you have thought about what you have seen, the actions you took to find safety, the actions you didn’t take in order to remain safe, all become imbued with a paralyzing idea of both right-ness and wrong-ness. Right because these thoughts and actions presumably were significant to your continued existence, and were in reaction to an emergency event which is by its nature emergent from unpredictability; yet they are also wrong in that, shouldn’t you then know, definitively, which meaning you must derive from them? However, to do so implies that there is some bedrock of understandable meaning underpinning an emergency event’s occurrence, and that is in conflict with the thesis of this essay, and conflict with the meaning you are now extrapolating for yourself, this line of defense you are constructing to live with your own actions and thoughts—that it was entirely meaningless that this event happened to you, that it did not have to be your life that this event descended upon.

Your explanation holds at its core a cognitive dissonance that makes you feel wrong, that it is indefensible, the meaninglessness of this emergency event. This conflict then proceeds, in an accelerated circularity: for this event to occur requires a non-understandable agent, a meaningless being of chaos, but he is understandable, he is a human being; to defend your line of thoughts and actions is to assume meaning; in order to extrapolate meaning from the parts, you must create meaning at the events core, the meaning you create is in conflict with the self-serving meaning you are attempting to extrapolate; this paradoxical cycle continues without end. Wrong too in that you cannot be sure why that bottom fleshy layer of your stomach is thrashing and balling itself up into a knot if you were (are, might be) trying to do the right thing. What does it mean, the ball, the bedrock, the knot in the stomach, the fact that this layer of stomach even exists for you? While for most others and all of scientific literature it does not exist.

That is to say, reflecting on its meaning is less important than reflecting on its existence.

Imposter Syndrome: You should know, the conflicting nature of your story will affect an imposter syndrome the likes of which you have never known and hopefully will never again know. You should also know, that it is this imposter syndrome that compels you towards extrapolating an incredible guilt, sadness, and self-contempt as a dominant personal feature of your story; you will feel these three emotions on behalf of yourself, on behalf of your story, on behalf of the event’s occurrence, on behalf of others you do not know, on behalf of the fact that the conceptualization of imposter syndrome as a condition that is capable of descending onto anyone even exists in the world.

You will feel this when realizing that these moments giving your statement to officials performing their duty are going to be the last ones as official continuation-of-the-event. When they release you, the event will be officially over; though you will realize that does not mean that you will return to your life the way it was before the event. You will then realize that there is now a before and an after in your life, one wholly different from the colorized, cheerful ones that you see mythologized on the USA-Today show about someone who lost 100 pounds or joined the marines and saved a child trapped in a burning building—that is—a before and after wherein the person becomes the hero they thought they would be. You must prepare yourself, because you will have dreams in which you acted differently in the midst of the event, and you will remember (through possible fabrication) dreams from your childhood in which a similar emergency event happened and you acted differently; you will wonder how your childhood self could have predicted, with such earnest accuracy, this inverted depiction of your adult failings. You will realize that the self-actualization we all dream about is not the meaning that is to be found in the aftermath of an emergency event; remember what I have told you: there is only meaninglessness underpinning this event’s happening. The fact that you must learn to accept is that this period of your life after an event will be a forced reinvention. Cite: the aforementioned uncontrollable and embarrassing sobbing into a stranger's torso that is not really sobbing and not really a stranger but rather a union of beginning and end, the noticing of a father’s red-faced heaving as signal to the chasm between intellect and emotion and similarity between all people, the imposter who with guilt, sadness, and self-contempt ushers movement between the death of your solipsistic individuality and the birth of your access to a shared humanity. Though here the sensitive reader may cautiously raise their hand and question, “what if you don’t quite want to go on this journey of self-discovery… just right now?” To this fair and tender question, I answer equally fairly and tenderly, the timing of emergency events in your life is empty and meaningless, and it is empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless.

Police Interview: What you must remember when being interviewed by the police, is that every detail you do not or will not or cannot take seriously, are frankly all the details that they will consider to be the most serious. Policemen in an interview setting will interpret everything you say as literal, with the utmost in stony-faced, serious contemplation. When you say, “I came from such-and-such street at perhaps such-and-such time, though it might have been later or earlier,” they will ask why you don’t know the timing of your own life, as though you should be living in a group home for invalids. When you say, “I usually walk this way to work, but on that day for some reason I walked on the other side of the street,” they will immediately ask why you walked on the other side of the street, as though you were hiding a story on that side of the street. They will ask you these questions as though they were all deliberate choices made by you with a conscious understanding of what they entailed at their present moment of occurrence and continuing into the future, and that you are thus responsible for. You may think this is a fine contention, until you stop following along with their line of reasoning and begin to strike out to find your own point of view, and to do this requires sincerity. What is sincerity in this context of meaninglessness? It is acceptance of your own fundamental inability to understand the future implications of the majority of your daily decisions. This process may begin for you by understanding this error in the stony-faced implication being made by the interviewing police. That implication being: all choices should be as intimately known and available to be understood by you, as your daily act of choosing socks in the morning—an essentially arbitrary choice made in the span of less than a second. Consider how this meaningful decision is plucked innately and unconsciously out of the ether of options presented before your extremely limited perspective. It is done with a reconciliation of the end of other sock possibilities (boarding a different train) and an acceptance of the birth of a future self (cited again: the uncontrollable sobbing) later in the day wearing those specific socks. To wear those socks, later, requires responsibility within alternative selection structures—if there are holes in the socks and it rains later, you must accept the responsibility of the present burden of your earlier choice.

Consider why you chose those socks. There is no reason! Well, certainly you chose them, primarily, because they are the socks that you chose; because the lack of emotionality surrounding sock choosing is so obvious, so benevolent, that the circularity of meaning and generation of assumption is neither as rigidly deterministic nor as starkly horrifying as the circular paradox inherent to the meaning-making you will undertake in the aftermath of an emergency event. Learn from that discrepancy. That is also to say, the quotidian act of sock choosing by you, or stopping for a conversation or a coffee on your commute, or choosing which side of the street you walk on, are all decisions whose responsibilities should be as acceptable as the ones leading to an emergency event, that is, ones whose meanings are only abstractly understood as you make them, and whose derivation processes are not definitely nor specifically understood as they occur, as the life-altering and consequential outcomes that they really, terrifyingly will be. However, that is only provided you first accept the thesis of this essay: that there is only meaninglessness underpinning an events’ happening.

Sketch Artist: What you must remember, when talking to a police sketch artist, is to mirror their stony-faced sobriety and to take their questions as a sincere invitation for both you and them to retroactively discover what you actually saw during the event; because you will find that sometimes what you think you saw is not actually what you did, in fact, see. You must remember to keep loose elbows and a straight back. Why is this? Because there will be dozens and dozens of boxes of mug shots to sort through. There will be more mug shots of real people sitting there in those heavy boxes on your lap, than all the people you have ever met in your life. There will be thousands and thousands of mug shots; and those are just the boxes that they happened to bring out of one back room to show you, that correlate to this district and this time period and this racial profile, and each and every photo must be picked up, looked at, and considered. You must realize how this last element, the consideration, requires the most effort to be sincere; that is why the aforementioned loose elbows and straight back are essential. You will want to save all your physical energy for this process of sincere consideration. Consideration, you will find, is as much a physical act as a mental one. It is physical in that you must physically find a way to avoid letting perplexity overwhelm your body, as your body conforms to the moment. You might deflate, as the next photo looks exactly like the previous one; you will find that the shoulders slump, the brow furrows, and the gut lurches under this perplexity of not knowing what you are trying to find, despite having attested to the fact that you did see what you saw, and that you should know what you experienced, and thus know what you’re looking for. This moment of gut-lurching perplexity is when you must re-insist on your bodies' collaboration in the project of sincere consideration. What does fighting this state of perplexity look like you might ask? While sorting through photos, it is the initial reflexive proprioceptive impulse of comporting your brow into a deeply contemplative hmm, and pursing your lips into a speculative tsk tsk, in order to continually show yourself as aligned with the half dozen officers of justice sitting in front of you, examining your process of examination. If you are to be successful however, the flailing accompanying perplexity must eventually fall away as you search for sincerity.

This searching and finding of sincerity will not be on purpose, it will come out of real exhaustion, nervous sweats, and cranial cramping, as you realize with slow mounting horror and resignation that recognizing a photo of the briefly seen and unremarkable which now turns out to be remarkably important, is not an exercise that you can take for granted.

What you thought would be an undertaking as easy and practiced as spotting a picture depicting your life in a box of other peoples’ pictures, becomes a physical feat virtually impossible to perform while also allowing the state of perplexity to persist. You might wonder, how can this be so perplexing if the event happened during the story of your life? It is your life after all, so why do all the parts feel foreign, why are all the players and the details and the photos as slippery to grasp as an eel? You must resist the urge, when struck with this lightning bolt, to fill the silence after their questions with convenient or probable answers, as they will not dispel the stomach lurching and profuse sweating and cranial cramping that accompanies perplexity. Yes, you have been staring at one photo for three minutes, yes, you have already looked at hundreds of photos and there are still thousands more photos to get to, but that does not mean that this particular photo holds the key to unlocking a level of understanding about this event, or that their questions to that effect must be answered. In your not answering, you are quietly asserting that you have committed to sincerity, to the physical exhaustion, to the nervous sweats, and to the cranial cramping, to the idea that a story of your life is not as easily nailed down as others may want for convenience, and that you will not lie in order to acquiesce to a more expedient and usable rendition of events.

You will find at last, that sincerity occurs in the moment of physical hesitation, when you physically remove yourself from any automatic response, that allows the entrance of real consideration—it does not matter if that moment of hesitation is due to physical exhaustion, resignation, or mental confusion. In hesitating, you are advocating for sincerity, for the fact that a life cannot be as conveniently shown or contained as a picture in a box, and you must remember that a resistance to answering reductionist questions is not an opposition to the system of justice, it is a testament to the desire to find real understanding despite any perplexity inherent to this act of engagement. To pause, to consider a moment after an emergency event with sincerity, is to accept the validity of your existence, your flawed, difficult, sad, paradoxical existence, as a meaning-making-machine, free finally, in the face of the gaping horrific maw of meaninglessness, to create your own meaning.