What to Do When the Plan Falls Apart

The night before I drove to get her, I mapped the whole thing out, the route and the rest stops and the exact exit where I would pull off for coffee, because mapping is how I talk my own nervous system down off the ledge. I knew where I would stop if I needed to breathe, and what I would do if I arrived early, and which door I would carry her through. I had thought of everything, and thinking of everything is the closest I get to feeling safe.

Her name was Xia Bao then. She was a small white Jindo mix from a rescue in Korea, and I had been following the thread toward her for longer than I understood.

Years ago I was sitting in my best friend's living room while she showed me an Instagram account for a Korean rescue that flew dogs out of Korea and into new lives, and something in me stood straight up, some knowing that this was a doorway I was meant to walk through. And then I read the fine print, you had to live within a tight radius of the city to adopt, and I was too far, and I was genuinely crushed, the way you are crushed when a yes in your body meets a no in the world.

A year and a half later Delphi found us, so synchronistically that I still get quiet when I tell it. And now Delphi is a year and a half old herself, and once we finally got the news that the thing we had been worried about would not need surgery, everything in me came alive again in the same old way, that low hum that says it is time, go, this is the next breadcrumb.

So I did the research, I found the organization, I filled out the application, I sat for the video interview, I sent photographs of every room in my home. They were so careful about the match, which dog would do well with Delphi, who would soften whom, and we chose her, and then we waited for a flight volunteer to carry her from Seoul to the closest airport, which for me was DC.

I planned the pickup like a woman who believed the plan would hold.

And then I signed for her at the gate, her name still marked on the side of the crate, Xia Bao, next to a little sticker from the rescue, a dog who did not know yet that she was already home, and we exchanged the paperwork, and roughly four seconds after she was officially mine, everything went to shit.

There were police at the door I had chosen so carefully, telling all of us we could not leave that way, move to the far end of the airport, no explanation, which I understood and also could not do a single thing with. I waited twenty minutes at the far end for something to change and nothing changed. The exits were two doors and the entrance was only one door and her crate would not fit through the one door, and it was hot, and her handle broke, and I have a small car and no earthly idea how I was going to fold a kenneled dog into it, and outside the rain was coming down in sheets that caught up with us again every forty minutes the whole way home, like we were driving inside the storm instead of away from it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that I felt myself come undone. My body was dysregulated and loud, the Compassionate Healer in me was wide open and feeling every ounce of Suri's fear stacked on top of my own, and I got right up to the edge of crying in a hot airport with a frightened dog I had waited two years for.

And then I paused. I just stopped, and let myself feel it, and drank some water, because I was overheating and a body cannot make one good decision while it is overheating and convinced it is alone.

And in that pause I heard my own voice change. It went from "I don't know what to do, what are we going to do," to "I can figure this out, I'm going to get her to the car and I'm going to take her home." Nothing outside of me had changed, the doors were still wrong and the rain was still coming. What changed was that I came back to the part of me that knows how to ask a clear question, follow the next intuition, and ask for help out loud, which is how I ended up asking a bus driver to help me lift the rolling cart on board, because there was no world in which I was carrying that crate alone. Everyone helped, they always help more than the panicked story says they will.

We got her in the car, broken handle and all, and we drove home inside the rain, and I was so proud of us I could have cried for an entirely different reason.

This is what I keep turning over, days later, with a puppy finally asleep in the next room.

Have the plan. Map the rest stops, find the coffee, know which door you mean to walk through. And then hold it loosely enough that when the door is wrong, and the door is so often wrong, you can set the map down and drop into the part of you that was never the plan to begin with, the part that is resilient as fuck and figures it out in real time. You are more resilient than your plan, the plan is only ever a comfort and you are the actual capacity underneath it.

And give yourself the twenty four hours after. You get to come all the way back to center before you are anything for anyone, and that is not weakness, that is how you stay someone worth coming home to.

Her name is Suri now. Tonight she climbed into my lap on the couch and pressed her whole face into my chin, this fiercely independent little Jindo who a few days ago would not come out of her kennel, and I sat very still and let her decide.

May you make the plan and then trust yourself more than the plan, and may you remember to pause in the hot airport, drink the water, and give yourself the full twenty four hours before you decide you are alone.