But Were They Right?

Some things just stick with you, whether you want them to or not. And sometimes, you're better for it.

You may not realize it in the moment, but every interaction has the potential to be catalogued in your beautiful brain as a traumatic event or change your perspective of the world around you for the better and so much of how these moments are processed comes down to the timing and circumstances surrounding them. 

Someone said something to me in 2011 that I would come to think about regularly for years to come. I didn’t know it at the time, but that exchange would shift the way I move through the world permanently. 

But first, some context…

I was 21. A highly motivated college dropout driven by blind ambition and an endless need to prove everyone wrong about me (aka, to prove myself) and I’d just taken on a new job with a massive corporation where I was tasked with fielding hundreds of complaints from across the region. At the Atlanta location, we were the main hub for the southeast and nearly every part that would end up in any of our warehouses and ultimately, to body shops across the country, would touch the hands of someone in our location at some point. That meant that the responsibility fell on us to correct any issues that came about. 

I actually posted a selfie in my Black 2000 Ford Ranger my very first day of work at LKQ! So I present to you to really set the tone, 21 year old Shannon, very serious and ready to do very serious work 🤣

Before I got there, the system was basically “get it done by whatever means necessary before someone starts to complain.” There wasn’t a dedicated person for this job, so it fell on literally whoever had an extra few minutes to check the inbox - spoilers: everyone was overworked, so a LOT of stuff was falling to the wayside, a lot of people were complaining and the location was losing money because they were just eating the cost of everything without doing any research. So, while I was hired as the “receptionist” of the location, I quickly created a role for myself and honed an actual system for keeping track of, and resolving any and all shipping errors daily. 

Needless to say, it was like drinking from a firehose at first, and honestly, for better or worse, I thrive in that sort of environment. But again, like it or not, I can be very Southern in my ways, so there was an expectation of decorum at the beginning that had to be massaged out of me. I was getting bombarded with emails from dock workers, managers, sales reps and whoever else had access to a computer at the various locations at all hours of the day (including overnight, so I would log in at 7am to no less than 50 emails from the night crew) who were usually upset about a missing or damaged part or a part that had been improperly routed to a different location and it was my job to fix it and it really depended on the personality of the sender what the tone was. I can honestly say that, for the most part, folks were just relaying information. They at least somewhat understood the process and the volume and didn’t take it personally. Most of them were just thrilled to learn that there was now a dedicated person handling the “RDDRs” (I actually don’t remember what that stands for now; maybe Receiving Damage & Discrepancy Report?) and were grateful for my responsiveness. 

Occasionally though, there would be that one guy (or gal) who just needed someone to be on the receiving end of their wrath; they were getting shit on by their boss or customer and they needed someone to blame. I understand now that it was never about me - I could have been anyone in the world. And they would send their super aggressive “how dare you” email as if we’d personally targeted them with our error despite the THOUSANDS of pieces that moved through our facility daily (side note: about a year into this role, I’d done such a stellar job tracking these movements that we discovered that our error rate was a fraction of that of the best & largest logistics company in the country at the time. So yeah, I understand being frustrated when it affects you, but the numbers don’t lie, we were really fucking good at our jobs). 

One day, fairly early into my overtaking of this role, I received one of these emails and I walked into my boss’ office and asked him “What’s their problem???”

His response was “Were they right?”

Me: “Well, yeah, but they didn’t have to be a dick about it.”

Him: “But were they right?”

Me: “Yes”

Him: “Then just fix it and move on with your day.”

Woof. 

I’m going to be honest, I hated it. But that’s how I started handling every one of those situations. It didn’t matter if they were absolute trolls. If they were right, I’d just fix it and move on. It got easier over time, but what I didn’t expect was how that would stick with me and how it would evolve in my mind. It would take years for me to fully hone the lesson I was meant to learn here, and if I know anything about life, it will likely continue to morph as necessary, so I’ll just share what it means to me now. 

Where I see this come up most for me in this present iteration of my life is as a white woman actively participating in anti-racism work. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have and hasn’t had other applications throughout the years. It’s just to say that when I think about the places where defensiveness naturally wants to show itself, this is a place where humility and de-centering self is crucial and because I am actively in the work and because I feel chronically misunderstood and have a deep care for the humans around me, the urge to explain myself shows up a lot. 

What I’m not saying here is that you have to take abuse lying down. 

What I am saying is that a lot of important growth can happen when you realize that you can’t control most things, but you can almost always control how you respond (I say almost because sometimes your nervous does what it’s going to do, whether you like it or not). 

What this looks like for me is taking a step back in the moment, removing myself from the situation and looking at it objectively. This isn’t the same as ignoring your feelings, which is what I had to do when working for LKQ/Keystone Atlanta. It took some time for me to learn how to feel my feelings without allowing them to direct my movements. I don’t get it right all the time, but there’s at least an awareness there now that hasn’t always been present.

In trying to think of an example of this, I’m reminded of a time back in 2020. I remember this specifically because of the climate online in my corner of the internet at the time - there was a LOT of tumult around conversations involving race, rightfully so. And if I’m honest, I was in my feelings a lot during that period for a lot of reasons, not least of all because I was one of the only white women I knew who had begun doing anti-racism work prior to the murder of George Floyd. This is not meant as a humble brag though there’s no avoiding that perception and I hate it. It’s meant to provide context.

I felt attacked in a lot of places because I was being grouped in with the tidal wave of white women activists taking to the streets of the internet in protest. Because I’d started my online business just months before in 2019 and actually had a presence on social media for really the first time ever, we all sort of looked the same. It makes sense. There was no sure way of separating those who had been doing the work from those just leaving the nest - and for the record, I’m not knocking them either - we all started when we started for a reason; what’s important is that we started and that we keep going. 

The main reasons I had a “head start” were 1) I grew up poor in the North Georgia mountains and most of the adults around me were outwardly racist and that was always at odds with what I felt in my soul and was being taught by the educated adults around me 2) My first real relationship was with a Black man so I saw the racism hurled at him regularly firsthand in subtle and sometimes, blatant ways and 3) For my first semester of college I chose a Sociology course and a course called Intersections of Diversity intuitively and some of the lessons from those courses moved me in ways I can’t fully put into words (shocking, I know). If not for those experiences, I likely would have been one of the women called to action in 2020 and that would have been perfectly okay too, but that wasn’t my reality. My reality is that this work started for me in my teens and has been a foundation of my entire adult life - my reality is that I’ve embedded this work into my children’s lives so that they don’t know that there’s another way to be. And for a minute, I let my desire to feel seen and understood overshadow the reason I've been doing this work in the first place - it's not about me at all.

One day, I was having a conversation in the comments section of a friend who knew me relatively well prior to all this. The conversation was about how Black boys are often perceived as Black men, and are routinely targeted by authority figures who are meant to protect them. The friend was another white woman with a Black son and I was expressing how terrifying and frustrating it is knowing that I have to worry about my friends’ kids being the victim of a hate crime, and a stranger, a Black woman, swooped in to berate me (I’m not being dramatic here; she laid into me. I don't know if I deserved it, but I clearly needed it). I immediately felt ashamed and defensive like “If she only KNEW me, she would know my intention here; she would know that I didn’t mean that only MY FRIENDS and their kids matter in this fight.”. I wanted this stranger to give me the benefit of the doubt, like I deserved that, and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect of “She knows me; she knows what I mean.” and the stranger responded something like “You should be more concerned about the impact of what you’re saying than what you meant.” I’m positive none of those were our exact words, but the lesson I was meant to take from this, and eventually did, once I cried it out and got over myself was: The intention does not matter if the Impact is harmful. 

Sure, your intention absolutely does matter to some extent, AND, we have to be able to remove ourselves from an environment, take a breather, and recognize that we are not the center of the universe. Most people are not going to deeply know and understand our perspective. Most people aren’t going to want to. And honestly, that’s not even the most important thing. We all deeply desire to be understood, and for some of us, that desire is and will remain the cause of much despair. AND - it’s not required. What is going to matter for most people is the output. The end result. The Impact. 

I’m not saying everyone has to move through the world the way that I do. I’m not saying you need to receive every piece of feedback - I personally have a whole criteria list to filter out who I’m interested in feedback from and when. What I am saying is that if you automatically close yourself off to external feedback based on how it comes to you, you’re going to potentially miss out on a lot of really important growth opportunities. So for me, I’m going to continue taking the time to pause and ask myself “But were they right?” and if the answer is “Yes.”, there is no “but…”. Just the opportunity to learn and expand. 

And with that, I’m almost positive I’m going to get force fed an “opportunity” for growth in the near future and I’m going to fucking hate it when I’m eating my words with a side of humble pie, but I’m gonna do anyway.