Trust Issues, Inherently Accurate, Aggressive Me

All of this time I have gone through life thinking that I’m way too trusting, but I am beginning to realize that I actually have some pretty big trust issues in the opposite direction. Things that I don’t trust include walk lights, bicyclists, phone alarms, clothing size charts, the post office, dogs, pollen count websites, doctors of any ilk, electronic boarding passes, people on sidewalks with clipboards, that red stool that my trainer makes me jump up and down on at the gym, and bleach wipes (I use too many, according to Mr. Typist.) I recently learned that, despite spending a fair bit of time at the range, I also don’t trust guns. 

I’ve been watching this guy on You Tube name Chris Sajnog, who is an ex-Navy SEAL sniper. He has the best videos out there on shooting by far. Since I started watching his vids, my sighting and grip have massively improved and my form has gotten a lot better. I watched one of his videos recently on trigger control, and the take-away was oddly Zen-like. He said that a pistol is “inherently accurate.” A pistol is designed to hit its target, and your only job as a shooter is to relax, get out of the way, and let it do its job. Something about that concept of inherent accuracy put my jitters to rest and greatly calmed my mind. 

Today at the range I was struggling a bit at first, but then during one of my sessions, I heard Chris’s voice in my head saying those exact words, and I got the highest accuracy and precision I ever have. I was astounded. I realized that I never fully trusted the pistol. I thought that I knew better than it somehow, that it required my intervention and help, and that I needed to do a bunch of extraneous manipulations to “make” it work correctly. Chris was totally right. The more I let go and trusted it to do its job properly, the better I did. Today, I finally made friends with the pistol.

Speaking of doing a job properly: Years ago, Key and Peele had an ongoing sketch called “Obama’s Anger Translator,” in which a menacing figure named Luther stepped in to give voice to the thunderous rage underneath Obama’s notoriously mellow expression. I was unburdening myself to Mr. Typist recently about a rash of lazy, incompetent lay-abouts I had to deal with at work (I want to stress these were outside vendors, not people I work with—I am lucky in that I work with a bunch of super-competent high-achievers.) In each instance Mr. Typist kept asking me if I pushed back and confronted the wrongdoers, to which I wanted to reply, “Have you met me?” Of course I didn’t push back and confront them. 

At that point we decided that we would deputize Mr. Typist to be Aggressive Kristen. We’d get a T-shirt made up, and I even told him he could wear a cape. He would come to work with me and just hang out until I, for example, had to make the seventh call to Big Cooler to find out why my defective water cooler that gushed three gallons of water onto the new carpet hadn’t been replaced yet. While I mildly and politely ask when I may expect it, as it hadn’t shown up during any of the last three delivery times they promised, Mr. Typist would wrestle the phone from my hand and bellow, “Look, you bungling, bush-league maladroits, get your s together and get that cooler in here stat, or I’ll have your heads on a platter, do you understand me? Now drop and give me thirty!” I’m excited about this new plan and I think it will work out really well. I’ll keep you posted. 

--Kristen McHenry