Unstable Tables
Wobbles and reflections from my 20s: how emotional it is to live as both the unstable table and its stabilizer!
April, a month that felt like balancing on an unstable table, marked the end of my 20s. This piece is a compilation of stories and reflections on the dual role one plays while living in a human body: both the unstable table and its stabilizer.
Russian Concussion
My little sister, my whole world, is turning 17 this weekend. Right on time, she fell on her head. She now is suffering from, what I am titling, a Russian Concussion.
Rachel fell on her head during her high school musical theater production of "How to Succeed in Business." She was dancing in heels on an Unstable Table.
Fun fact - Daniel Radcliffe starred in this Broadway musical. I don't believe he danced on tables while wearing heels, but I haven't seen the show.
The good news is my little sister is a super star(e). IYKYK.
We have a significant age difference, and unrelated to that, I desire almost no attention ever while she craves everyone's undivided attention at all times. Thus, when she fell off a table in front of an auditorium of 800 middle schoolers, she single-headedly stopped the show. Even better, when she got up and continued dancing, she received a monstrous applause.
News travels quickly. "Everybody heard I fell. Everyone is asking if I'm okay. Everybody cares."
Dancing queen, only seventeen
A week prior, I was sitting at my work table when both the chair and table started to feel unstable.
When the furniture in my apartment continued shaking, I realized it was more than just the usual instability of my vintage, curb-side finds.
This was my second NYC earthquake.
First earthquake 🫨
During the 2011 earthquake, at the age of 17, I was employed at the Jewish Museum, where I conducted archival work focused on the Holocaust. I briefly left my desk to go to the bathroom. When I returned, I found a sticky note on my computer from my manager that read,
Are you okay? I cannot believe we had an earthquake! You should head home.
Before finding the note, I felt no fear. I was warming my hands in the bathroom because the basement was quite cold, and felt absolutely nothing strange. However, the note about a potential earthquake in NYC unnerved me. I rushed upstairs from the basement, where there was no service, and received a flood of messages all at once.
I recall asking people if it was safe to take the subway home. I'm still unsure if it was safe, but I must have made it home.
In the summer of 2011, I was a dancing queen, only seventeen. It seems to be a rite of passage for sisters in my family to experience an NYC earthquake just as the weather turns warm in the 11th grade.
Second earthquake 🫨
Just as in 2011, during the second earthquake in 2024, my much older friends were once again frightened. We were texting and calling each other. This event felt much more terrifying than the one that occurred 13 years prior.
Many tables were unstable during the NYC earthquake!
Now that I'm older and wiser, I've started questioning what one should do during an earthquake. I'm still unsure, as we don't learn about these things in NYC. Certainly, sitting and texting friends can't be the best response. Where are our survival skills???
On April 5, I looked around the apartment to see what I should be ducking under.
Everything was shaking. I only saw Unstable Tables.
Before I could make a decision, the shaking stopped.
Dancing (e)Queen(ox), only almost 30… (yikes)
On the night of the earthquake, I celebrated by dancing to the original music of my friend Kacie's band. I felt a wave of pride for Kacie and was relieved that NYC had emerged from the quake more energetic than ever.
After sleeping for a few hours, I woke up to attend a dance class.
It was a wonderful night, followed by a delightful afternoon. However, I then made an unwelcome discovery - turning 30 can make dancing alone a strain on my back.
I don’t even need to be dancing in heels on unstable tables! The injury can happen at an easy gym dance class!
Every movement hurt for a week, and I was in a pretty terrible mood. Did I ruin my back and will I undo months of progress in strength training?
I was concerned about my aching matured back and my sister's still-developing teenage concussed brain.
The earthquakes and the eclipse left me feeling shaky.
Despite my attempts, I couldn't shake off my gloom. Although I still did all the things I had built a practice on, none of my usual strategies for lifting my spirits worked. Both physically and mentally, I felt like an Unstable Table.
How the turntables..
Upon reflection, I can revisit the above events, comparing my initial feelings with the outcomes.
This is an exercise that aids in managing my worries. It involves recording on a scale of 1-10 how bad I anticipate something will be versus how bad it actually turns out to be:
An unexpected earthquake occurred in NYC.
My friends initially assumed it was due to reasons like an unstable old building collapsing or a car crashing into the building, demonstrating our trust in NYC's infrastructure.
The second shock was equally unexpected!
Initially, we all thought we were imagining things.
Everyone is okay. During the moment, it felt 4/10 bad. Now, it feels 2/10 bad that it happened. In the grand scheme of things, multiple earthquakes occurring is more concerning than one old building collapsing.
My sister fell off a table during a theater show and sustained a Russian Concussion.
The incident occurred because the adults in charge instructed her to dance on a table, despite the complaints from her and her dance friends about the table's instability.
The adults mistakenly reassured the children that nothing bad would happen.
Unfortunately, despite many hours of successful rehearsals and shows, the table proved too unstable, causing her to fall and hit her head.
Everyone was alarmed and feared the worst.
She suffered from a few bruises and a mild concussion. She’s fine now!
Rachel falling was 9/10 bad when it happened. She is singing and dancing again. It is maybe 2/10 bad, because she has to make up lots of school and she missed the rest of her performances. No big deal. She will catch up.
I hurt my back.
This occurred while I was dancing too energetically.
If I had to guess what would cause my back injury that week, I would have thought it would be the lifting session scheduled after my dance class.
Ironically, I got hurt before I even had a chance to lift.
Initially, I anticipated a lengthy recovery period. The pain was intense and constant.
Thankfully, it only took a week to heal.
A few days later, I felt slightly worse. "Oh no! Did I injure it further?!" I was worried.
Surprise~ I was able to lift heavier than ever during my first session after recovery.
By the time I reached 30, I felt healthy enough to dance for hours without any pain at my birthday party!
My back & mood felt 9/10 bad during the moment. It is 0/10 bad right now.
This thought flow is designed to help future Katya reduce her worries and improve her future predictions. I've typed it out in case it could be useful to you as well.
Situations often appear more intimidating than they actually are. Predictions can frequently be incorrect. When outcomes don't match our predictions, which is a common occurrence, it can be disorienting and cause further inaccurate predictions.
Emotions are not reactions, they are predictions.
Reflecting on the past month, a series of unexpected events took me by surprise, leaving me in a constant state of anticipation that proved exhausting. Despite having adapted to unpredictability for 30 years (as I am a human and a refugee), the relentless guessing game was draining. Unknowingly, I began to anticipate an escalation of misfortunes.
Nevertheless, life continued. I worked, socialized, and even dated.
I wrote a lot, this post and future posts ahead of time, but was hesitant to publish, fearing it might somehow impede my recovery. Could being funny about bad things make bad things less funny???
The same fear almost led me to cancel a week's worth of exciting activities around my 30th birthday. Could making fun plans ahead of time to celebrate my life make my life worse? Fortunately, my supportive friends were there to listen and ensure that my birthday week was filled with joy.
As things have improved, I feel able to publish again.
I've set two goals for my 30s:
Don't let anxiety stop you from publishing.
Now is always a good time to laugh.
The thing is, a bad feeling doesn't always mean something is wrong. It just means you're taxing your body budget.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
I have taxed my body budget and managed to repair it after a few breaks.
When I was feeling unwell, my body would signal whether to take action or rest, predicting what would be most beneficial at any given moment.
Your brain is always predicting, and its most important mission is predicting your body’s energy needs, so you can stay alive and well.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
How does the brain know? The brain does not! The brain is guessing!
The brain cannot get out and enjoy the world’s marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via the scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals, that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.
Through prediction, your brain constructs the world you experience. It combines bits and pieces of your past and estimates how likely each bit applies in your current situation.
- Lisa Feldman Barrett
When I felt like an unstable table, I constructed a gloomy world where bad things might happen at any minute and last a lifetime. Bad things did happen, but good things happened too. When I was celebrating my birthday, with things happening better than expected left and right, I started constructing a brighter world once more.
Repeat after me:
I am the architect of my world.
Emotions are part of the world that I construct.
I am not at the mercy of my emotions.
I am the architect of my emotions.
I have more control than it sometimes feels.
We are all unstable tables.
We might appear like a really solid wooden table, a table my friend Kiely would marvel at and say, "That's real wood!" We might be standing up and even holding the weight of others (depending on who has what back pain). But external life events will always find a way to expose the shakiness.
When our brain fixates on a problem, trying to solve it without knowing how, it can be taxing. We might construct more negative emotions than usual.
Eventually, getting annoyed and upset at a shaky table becomes tiresome, and we decide to fix it.
Here’s what I did to stabilize myself:
I collected extensive information about back pain, which I fortunately hadn't experienced much before, and took care to rest my back while exercising the rest of my body.
I also researched concussions and took every measure to aid in my sister's speedy recovery.
I stopped the earth from shaking New York further, all credit to me!
I expressed my concerns about my birthday, but went ahead with my festive plans, trusting that people that I know well, would come through. They did (🧡).
I used the "How We Feel" app to track my emotions, enhancing my understanding of them.
I continued to read my neuroscience books (wow! look at all those quotes!) to better understand and trust my own brain.
What I discovered in my twenties, particularly in the last month, is that achieving stability requires assisting our bodies in making more accurate predictions. This process involves knowledge and trust.
How can we trust our bodies when we don't understand them fully? How can we trust people, or the world, when we don't know enough about them? Without trust, we become stuck in a loop, aiming to understand and predict, without feeling resolution.
Knowledge fosters trust, improves our prediction ability, and aids the brain in moving forward and creating further realities.
I share this because the common advice I hear when I’m having a bad week is "move on!", "stop worrying!", "focus on the positive!", or "stop imagining negative outcomes!". This never helps me, someone prone to looping. I just feel stuck and shaky for longer. April was no exception.
At my old age, no longer dancing queen only seventeen, I have learned that ignoring an unstable table doesn't solve the problem, and it may cause you to fall, hit your head, and create a new problem. The better response to an unstable table is to investigate the instability, educate yourself about tables, and take an action to stabilize the table.
We are all unstable tables, but by confronting our wobbliness, we can find balance and stability.
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The wonderful aspect of turning 30 is gaining a deeper understanding of myself. I look forward to learning more about myself, the brain, and the world, creating numerous safe and joyful experiences for years to come.
My learning process includes reading, writing, and participating in related discussions. I appreciate the stability you've provided as readers and plan to return to regular publishing soon. Be on the lookout for a survey!
With care,
Katya, now 30 years old