I don’t like the late January sun in Minnesota. Shocking, I know. Who wouldn’t love being blinded by a low-hanging death star while the snow mocks you by reflecting it right back into your corneas? Personally, I’ll take a cloudy day—the kind where the sky matches the snow on the ground and everything looks delightfully blah. Call it seasonal ambiance.
This irrational hatred of the sun stems from one particularly catastrophic day, around 10 years ago, in my professional career. I had a mid-day flight to Los Angeles for the biggest event of the year. This year’s version of that event just happened last week. I wasn’t there, I don’t work for that job anymore. But picture this… It’s a sunny late January day, no weather drama, no rush hour traffic to worry about. Piece of cake getting to the airport, right? Wrong. I got stuck on I-35, where traffic was at a dead stop for hours. Three hours of sitting there, contemplating my life choices, and by the time I broke free, my flight had already taken off without me.
Missing that flight was just the appetizer. The main course? A buffet of angry phone calls from my coworkers, who seemed to think I could’ve magically teleported myself to LA if I’d just tried harder. They of course also flew out that day from Minnesota as well and were like “how did you miss a flight in the middle of that pleasant day?”
In their eyes, everything going wrong at the event—and I mean everything—suddenly became my fault. Some of it surely may have been my own terrible handling of anxiety, guilt, pride, self-esteem, etc.
The cherry on this stress sundae was an audio file fiasco. Apparently, the file was “wrong,” even though I’d sent the exact one they’d given me… multiple times. No, really, I could’ve tattooed the waveform on my forehead at that point. But the guy in charge of the audio test was on an ego trip. We’d clashed in a meeting recently—I dared to suggest he might not be the god of sound engineering—and he was now on a mission to make my life miserable. You know the type: the guy who’s just smart enough in one area to justify being a total jerk. Everyone else kissed his butt while whispering about his arrogance behind his back. Except for me, and now I had to pay for it. Or, at least in my anxious mind that day, I was paying for it.
So there I was, stuck in a sun-drenched room, juggling calls, fixing imaginary problems, and fuming at the absurdity of it all. The sun’s rays poured through the windows like some cruel spotlight, illuminating my misery. Honestly, I half-expected a heavenly choir to chime in, just to mock me further.
Now, every late January, when that same blinding sun pierces through the sky, I’m transported back to that hellish day. The sun reminds me of the trauma so vividly. It’s like the universe’s way of saying, “Hey, remember when everything went wrong at once that one time? Good times!” And that, my friends, is why I’ll take a gray, overcast day any time. At least clouds don’t judge me. I haven’t worked at that job for some time, I was an anxious wreck the whole time in that job mostly because that was the culture and everyone was an alcoholic to deal with it. I moved on and am in a more reasonable place nowadays. And I’ve worked on putting boundaries around things and dealing with stress a bit better.
Today is one of those piercing sunny days and this is around that time of day. So I’m dealing with it by writing about it. Now I can move on to the rest of my day, with all the curtains closed.
