Am out!
By Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - Thunder and Slick, characters in the story
The first time was not dramatic.
Columbia University, 1984. I was broke. My girlfriend, later the mother of two of my children, got me a job at a Barnes & Noble downtown. A few dollars an hour. Simple task: take a cart of books, put them back on the shelves. Alphabetically.
My alphabet fell apart after N. My English was worse. The manager gave me less than an hour before she showed me the door. Never got paid.
I took the subway back up to the dorm. Relieved.
The ones that followed were better paid. Each exit came with a severance and a jump to a higher salary somewhere else. I treated it as a system. Get fired, land higher. It worked until 2008, when the whole thing collapsed and I ended up bankrupt.
At some point I needed money badly enough to take a job in Siberia. They asked if I wanted an exploratory trip first. I said no. I knew if I saw the place I would not go.
I landed.
Novosibirsk. Six hours behind Europe. Nine with flights from Geneva when they were flights. So far from anything that the American Minuteman missiles were theoretically unable to reach it. For them it was just where their parents and grandparents had been sent to work. Or had chosen to go. The distinction mattered to them.
For me it was another planet.
A man from Vladivostok asked me, sometime in the first weeks, what I liked best about the city.
Without hesitation: the airport.
That became the joke for four years.
Siberia turned out to be a blessing. Being broken in a place that foreign to everything meant there was nothing to perform for. No context that knew the previous version of me. Just a man doing a job in a faraway city.
In Siberia people like dogs. They walk them without collecting the shit. Then it snows. The snow never melts. Passageways get carved through it, and after a while you are walking on sidewalks a meter above where they should be. Spring comes, the snow melts, and it is like a mille-feuilles of shit being revealed over days with an olfactory ≈
© Michel Heitzmann - Seriously a lot of snow
It is hard to explain minus thirty, minus forty. Minus forty is the same number on both scales. That is the only time Europeans and Americans agree on how cold it is.
I tried to reproduce the sensation at home. Stepped out of the shower, still wet, ran to the freezer and turned on a fan next to it. Close. But not the same. At minus thirty, you cry and the tears freeze.
To be fair, outside the Soviet cities, Siberia is National Geographic stuff.
I found a bottle of Evian on the supermarket shelf one afternoon. Stopped. Felt something close to home.
Then I thought about the carbon cost of shipping French spring water to western Siberia.
I kept buying it anyway. PET bottles in the trash. Every time.
The last firing was different. Retired early. No bounce. No next offer waiting. I was the one who could not understand the new stuff, apparently. Just the end of something, with no structure to absorb it. Out of Paris, back home.
That one I had to sit with.
And sitting with it I realized something uncomfortable: I had never actually processed any of the others. I had just moved. Each time I stored and jumped. Grief on a schedule. The pace protected me from noticing what I was carrying.
I was left watching the grass grow and mowing it down.
The evenings helped. Four drinks, maybe. I was never an alcoholic, I reckon. It doesn’t matter. I was looking forward to it. It made me come alive. Always the “good” stuff. Made me feel like myself.
That is worth pausing on.
If you need four drinks to feel like yourself in the evenings, there is something you are not feeling during the day.
I did not ask that question at the time.
The house was large and empty. It had been a family house. Then it was just mine.
I put a wooden bike in the living room. A rowing machine next to it. Both barely used. They look pretty. No compromises. I did what I wanted with the place. The space became what I actually wanted, not what was expected of it.
Slick came first. We are attached in the way that embarrasses people who have not had a dog. When I leave he gets angry. When I am out I rush back. He is a Belgian Malinois. This detail is relevant.
Thunder was almost not mine. Slick’s nephew, also a Malinois. My sister had reserved him from the same woman who sold me Slick — a cashier at a supermarket somewhere in Southern France who knew how to raise animals. My sister changed her mind.
I went with my daughter to collect him. We brought Slick. He met his mother again. He was surrounded by the whole litter and did not know what to do with himself. Overwhelmed. My daughter too. She wanted to take two of them home. She settled on Thunder.
The rest is history, the best part.
Both knees gave out after the dog walks. The surgeon suggested replacing both simultaneously. I said fine. Turns out nobody does that. He mentioned it in recovery, casually, that it had gone well. It was only the second time he had done both legs. The first had apparently also gone well.
Nobody under fifty understands why you would do this voluntarily. Everyone over fifty understands immediately.
I was immobile for weeks. In that stillness, I stopped drinking. No decision. No drama. I was afraid of falling. I needed my senses. So I stopped.
(I do not miss it at all.)
My teenage son moved in without announcing it. He just started being there more. A supermarket carton full of clothes at the time. Then he was just there. I did not ask why. I think I already knew.
I had become calmer. Probably more fun to be around.
That is the whole story, compressed. Not the firings. Not Siberia. Not the drinking. Not the knees. The thing underneath all of it: I got quieter, and the people I love moved closer.
There is a lot of advice about resilience. About bouncing back. About reframing.
None of it is wrong. None of it is the point either.
The only way through grief is with people who ask you the questions you are not asking yourself. During my coaching training there were tears, difficult sessions, and friendships that felt unavoidable. That is where the processing happened. The witches call it healing.
Decades late. But it happened.
Everything has its right time. Unless you are already dead. So hurry. Quietly.
What are you carrying that you have been too busy jumping to put down?
Your dogs are beautiful. You must have put n a lot of hard work to be able to live with them.
I've known a few.
10 years ago I did Shutzhund work - as a hobby & discipline - with my Berger Picard.
She was no German Shepherd or Malionis when it came to the sleeve, she would bite it then immediately let it go.
She was the best dog - she had a Zen like quality and was my heart.
I am an American living in America.
I hear you about the quiet, calm.
My husband is not quiet or calm, I am now.
Your article made it plain to see how quiet and calm allows others to be comfortable
around you, and draws them to you.
It is a much much better way to be.
I had both hips replaced - lots of dog walking, and also agility with my BP - but not at the same time.
I'm sure you are 100% glad you did it.