Author Matthew Heneghan

You ever look back on your life and wonder—how the hell have I made it this far alive? I have. That is to say that I do…often.

I wake up most mornings and try on my best Buddha impersonation—not just in the sit on the edge of the bed and look fat sense—but rather I do the best I can to reflect on gratitude. Taking virtual inventory of my life and its many blessings. I find this helps me stay the course when life’s little challenges arise.

…But I wasn’t always this…enlightened.

…Or fat.

There was a time when I was much less likely to recognize good in my life, and far more likely to engage in a monologue laden with obscenities and other colourful epithets.

Just ask the lady that had boss level Karen energy at the Starbucks in downtown Port Credit.

Oops! Looks like I’ve walked myself right into another story worth sharing.

For this one we are going to have to hobble backward a bit—to 2018, mere weeks removed from rehab. I was stone cold sober. The world was loud as hell, and my therapist—a woman with the serene smile of someone who has never had to pick human teeth out of a steering wheel, but has heard almost every story there is about trauma, about murder, about all the darkness that hides in the corners of our beat-up little Catherine Wheel.

During one of our sessions, she decided I needed to throw myself into a little something called “exposure therapy.” That’s what she called it, anyway. Exposure therapy. Like I was a pale Victorian boy being shown sunlight for the first time; bit-by-bit, removing myself from the protective shadows of isolation so as not to burn too quickly.

“Public spaces,” she said, tapping her pen like it was a metronome for my nervous system. “Lines. Coffee shops. Small talk. Normal life bullshit.” Yeah, she swore. She was cool like that.

Normal life. I used to be a soldier, a paramedic—I couldn’t remember what life was like outside of a uniform, let alone mimic its normalcy.  

I’d just stumbled out of rehab three weeks, twenty-two days and five hours prior with a fragile chip in my pocket and the emotional stability of a fawn running on an icy highway at rush hour. Alcohol had been my favorite little mute button for years—take one shot, turn down the volume on the sirens in my head, the screams too. The problem is, eventually the mute button becomes the only button you press. You stop going out. You stop standing in lines. You stop being a person and start being a ghost in jeans and a t-shirt. You float from one bar to the next, and when the well runs dry, you find your way back home to a shitty apartment in a rundown part of the city and you drink yourself blind.

At least, that’s what I did. For a long god damn time.

So here I was, several hellacious weeks out of rehab, obeying orders like a good little former paramedic soldier with PTSD—because nothing announces “recovered” like willingly walking into a place designed to overwhelm you with smells, noises, and an obscene number of choices no one can pronounce…Starbucks.

I chose a Starbucks because the universe loves irony. I used to save lives in fluorescent chaos; well, try, anyway. Now I was being asked to survive a menu written in aromatic code that needed deciphering more than it did a casual scroll.

The second I walked in; my body did that thing it always does—tense up and scan.

Exit points. Corners. Hands. Shoes. Faces. The guy by the window with the backpack that looked too heavy. The woman on the phone who was laughing too loud. The espresso machine hissing like a snake made of metal and moving parts. Every sound had a sharp edge. Every movement had a potential threat to it. It’s exhausting. And born anew into sobriety—it was hell.

But I stayed.

Part because I had to, and part because I wanted to see if I could. Not sure if that makes me brave or an idiot. Hard to tell on most days. Probably the latter.

The line was long. Of course it was. It’s always long. If there’s one constant in this world, it’s death, taxes, and a line of people waiting to pay eight dollars for something that tastes like overpriced foam and oat milk.

How do you milk an oat anyways?

Never mind.

I stood there, awkward and rigid like penis with sneakers, trying to look casual—which is hard when your nervous system is doing lines of hypervigilant cocaine.

I remembered what my therapist said: Name five things you can see.

Okay. Five things.

A tip jar with a handwritten label: Tips Appreciated.

A chalkboard that said Try Our New Holiday Bliss Foam—which, let’s be honest, sounded more naughty than delicious.

A woman in yoga pants—bless her—staring at the menu, unsure if she was going to fight it, fuck it, or leave it.

A guy in a beanie typing on a laptop, no doubt writing his memoirs.

A display case full of sandwiches and pastries behind glass, lit like museum artifacts. Behold… The Ancient Stale Croissant.

I breathed in through my nose like a responsible adult and out through my mouth like I wasn’t quietly unraveling. I did this several times, waiting for the relief that was promised—but each cycle just brought with it a dated inhale of pastry, espresso, and some lady’s ten-dollar-perfume.

The line shuffled forward. My pulse bounded out of sync.

Behind me, someone sighed—that dramatic, wounded sigh of a person who believes their inconvenience should be handled as national news. Or a Greek tragedy.

I told myself: It’s fine. You’re fine. You’re in a coffee shop, not an emergency scene, no life and death.

My body replied contemptuously: “Disagree.”

We moved again. I was three people away from the counter, which might as well have been the summit of Everest, or from there to Kalamazoo.

Which is in Michigan, if you didn’t already know.

That’s when it happened.

I felt it before I was able to make sense of it: a sudden pressure against my back. Not hard, not aggressive—just enough. A hand. A weight. A person leaning on me like I was a goddamn railing with glasses.

And in the same instant, an arm appeared in front of me—a pale forearm with bangles that jingled as if to be a theme song—reaching across my body into the display case area like she was capturing the last known sandwich on earth.

My nervous system didn’t think. It reacted. As it often does.

There was a moment—a fleeting hiccup—where my brain flashed through a highlight reel of every call I’d ever run: the screaming, the grabbing, the sudden movements from panicked people who didn’t understand what they were doing. Hands on my shoulders. People pulling at my uniform. Somebody behind me in a cramped hallway. Someone reaching over me in an ambulance for equipment. Someone trying to strangle me from behind for not saving their person.

The Starbucks blurred into that same old hallway in my mind, the same old smell of adrenaline and sweat, blood, must, and piss.

I spun around.

My heart was a jackhammer. My skin went cold. My eyes tore into hers.

She was a woman in her forties, maybe; wearing a scarf like she had a HOA meeting and a small army to command later. She was smiling—smiling—because she had successfully acquired a sandwich. Like she’d just won a prize at a carnival. Completely oblivious to the fact that she had engaged in unwanted touching—that sort of thing didn’t exist on her side of the fence.

I opened my mouth to say something reasonable. Something indicating polite confusion. Something like, “Hey, could you not touch me, please?”

But my mouth, loyal only to itself, spoke something else.

Boisterously.

Very un-surreptitious.

“I— YOU FUCKING CUNT!”

It hit the room like a wet fart in a library.

Every head turned. Every conversation stopped. The dude in the beanie stopped typing. Even the air lost its breath. The only thing that kept moving was the espresso machine, still humming and hissing, blissfully ignoring what I felt to be my forthcoming public execution.

The woman’s smile died on her face in stages. Confusion. Offense. Shock. Like a building collapse caught in slow-motion, from brow to chin her face changed. The lines on her face informed me that it was unlikely that she had ever been called anything ruder than, “ma’am.”

I wanted to say something else. Anything else to try and assuage the tension. But I fell mute.

Someone behind her made a noise—half gasp, half laugh that strangled itself in their sinuses—and immediately tried to swallow it like it was an illegal substance.

A barista blinked slowly. Like a deer that had seen too many cars and now suffered from Post Fluorescent Stress Disorder.

And me? I stood there in the middle of my own disaster, feeling the hot pang of shame climb like damp fingers along the back of my neck.

I was horribly embarrassed. Because I wasn’t angry at her, not really.

I was startled. Frightened. My body had mistaken a hasty sandwich heist for a threat, and my mouth had responded with a word that would make most sailors file a restraining order here in North America.

For a brief second, I considered explaining myself. Yes, that fantasy fully entered my arena of thought.

“Hi, sorry. Fresh out of rehab. PTSD. Former paramedic. My brain thinks your wrist bangles are a weapon and your turkey panini is a crack head waiting to attack me after I give him some Narcan and take his high away.”

But there’s something about trying to justify yourself after you’ve just detonated a profanity nuke in public; it doesn’t land the way one may hope. For me, formulating any other speakable words felt impossible.

Instead, I did the only thing my nervous system knows how to do when it realizes it’s overreacted: I fled. Turned and got the hell out of there.

A sheepish retreat when your head tried to burry itself in-between your shoulders—the kind of retreat you do when you realize you’ve become “that guy.” The headline. The story people post on social media like: “You won’t believe what happened at Starbucks today…” Yeah, I was somebody’s Facebook status, for sure.

I took one small step backward. Then another. Like I was backing away from a crime scene I’d created with my own troglodytic orations.

The woman sputtered something—probably a sentence that began with “Excuse me?” and ended with “manager.” Remember, boss level Karen energy.

A few other people murmured something as well, but by that time it was all just noise to me. And I didn’t care to stick around to find out what people’s thoughts were of me—I just continued for the door as if completely oblivious to their emerging castigations.

Outside, the air was cold, it felt honest. No foam. No holiday bliss. No fake personas. Just the damp street and the overcast sky and me. I stood there on a patch of sidewalk several blocks removed from the Starbucks, hands shaking, staring at rippling reflection of me in a puddle beside the curb. I felt trapped within myself for a moment or two.

I hadn’t wanted to call some lady cunt. It’s not as if that’s how I went about planning my days, it just happened.

A therapist might call this an “overstim moment.”

I called it a goddamn catastrophe. One with comedic punchline if told right.

See, I was newly reintegrated into the world as a man of sobriety, and as the shame rolled over me in waves, I realized something.

I hadn’t run to a bar for a drink. My typical M.O. prior to rehab was to numb any and all personal discomforts with a stiff whiskey followed by several more.

But not that day.

I hadn’t gone home and cracked a bottle to shut it all down. I hadn’t spiraled into the old familiar numbness.

I’d just… walked away.

Humiliated, sure. No doubt. Socially murdered, absolutely. But still sober.

Which meant, in the weirdest possible way, I’d done the assignment. Got an “A” plus for effort, and an “F” in vocabulary.

The “F” can stand for failure or funny, that’s entirely up to you.

I pulled out my phone and typed a message to my therapist. It was written in an odd combination of defeat and victory that somehow managed to find each other.

“Went to coffee shop. Got triggered. Said something unforgivable. Left immediately. Did not drink. Please advise on how to become a person again without verbally committing war crimes.”

She responded: “Pardon? War crimes??”

“…called some lady a cunt. Fucking cunt, actually.”

“I see. We can talk about it during next session. Did you still get a coffee?”

For whatever reason, her asking me about coffee and not lambasting me for my vulgar usage of a word beginning with “C” made me laugh in a state of relief and disbelief.

Look, life is messy. Shit happens. People say things. Lady still got her sandwich—maybe even at a discount, so her day wasn’t a total bust because of me. Point is, none of us are perfect. We are each at one time or another going to have moments where we are less than stellar. The trick is…own it. Don’t be unapologetic—circumstances depending, of course—but own it and understand that it happens to all of us.

Me.

Boss level Karen’s.

All of us.

I still challenge myself in public spaces. It’s part of my ongoing personal growth and trauma therapy modalities.

And to traverse further in honesty? Some days I’d rather be back in an ambulance.