Fight or Flight

Picking the battles

Jun 07, 2026

I don’t think I seem like someone with an edge. Someone who would punch back. Someone who, when fight/flight/freeze/fawn/flop (they recently added flop, I heard) presents itself, almost always chooses fight. Or not even chooses it. It’s just the one I get. The luck of the draw.

I’m one of those kids who would have made honor society in high school except I got suspended for fighting twice. I didn’t start either fight, but I definitely finished them.

I once slapped a man in a bar hard in the face, because he drunkenly touched my lower stomach, after he’d already touched my hair and I’d told him to leave me alone.

He clearly misjudged the circumstances and the woman in front of him.

Later, after his friends had ushered him out the door, nearly in tears, I figured that I could have just told a bouncer. I didn’t have to get violent.

But you don’t generally have an opportunity to decide what kind of person you are in an emergency or unforeseen confrontation. You just are what you are. The lizard part of your brain decides what kind of lizard you’ll be that day.

So within that context, I was kinda proud of myself at the last city council meeting. A woman came up to me in the back, trying to start an issue, and I did not choose fight. I calmly told her I knew who she was, but that I was busy, then I turned back to what I was actually there for.

She tried to force the issue, and in that moment someone else, a mom who was there to speak about the eviction of an early learning center for babies with developmental health problems and disabilities, shouted “you don’t have to talk to her!” to me, and ran the other woman off.

I asked this mom later why she intervened, as she didn’t have any idea who either of us were when she said and did that. Like what if identities were reversed and this women was there to protect the trees, while I was a firefighter’s wife and former selectwoman who had embezzled from two different dentist’s offices, plea bargained the charges down below a felony (something I felt weirdly proud of), and then dared to show my shameless face and run my rude mouth at Quincy city council meetings?

“Hit dogs are gonna holler,” the mom said. “You can tell the type.”

So whether or not I seem like a fighter, someone you best not try, at least I don’t immediately come off as an asshole or a bully, even though some, in a massive act of projection, have named me as part of a group they term “The Bully Alliance.”

We ended up chatting a bit, this mom and I. She seemed like a really caring person. In fact, afterwards I wished I’d gotten her number, as it felt like I made a new friend. I told another friend of mine this story and she said she knew her, and this mom is in fact really nice, and she would pass my number along. So maybe I did make a new friend.

Some of us are here for community. Others are here for something else.

When I went inside the chamber, taking an empty seat in the back, I found myself behind the same woman who’d confronted me. I noticed her nervous energy increase at finding me there, and I was fine with it.

Because honestly you should feel nervous if you’re a shitstarter and a liar and a thief and you’re hanging out in a place where local lawmaking takes place, misbehaving there.

You may not get to choose your fight/flight/freeze/fawn/flop response, or even what you’ve done in your past (if I want to be charitable), but you do get to choose your ethics, your morals, and your belief in what it means to be a functional human being today.

As someone who actually puts some thought into the long term impact of such things, I spoke my piece about the trees, which seemed to be fairly well received by everybody, and then left to go home to my babies. After I had exited, a friend texted me and told me the hit dog had hollered again. The firefighter’s wife had brought my name up at the microphone, claiming that I was part of a group that was vile, that I had bullied her and her husband, and then she looked back to where I’d sat, to see how her punch had landed.

I imagine she was disappointed at the empty seat, and that I only watched her testimony later, from the comfort of my cozy bed.

My bed has been calling me more lately because I’ve been having flare ups of endometriosis. The same thing happened when my son was about the age my baby is now, so much so that I had a second surgery when he was 10 mos old. As my last baby now nears a year old, breastfeeds less and the hormones return more, the fact that I need a third excision surgery, this one abdominal, looms.

I’ve had a few epidurals that perhaps gave me a sense of how the other half lives. Getting in a cold pool or a hot sauna also disrupts the pain receptors. As does an electric blanket.

I go to the Y for water aerobics and steam room/sauna three or four times a week. I have an electric blanket in every room of my house but the kitchen and the bathroom.

But I live with some level of pain nearly all the time.

I’m one of those endo girls with their endo belly and their heating pads and their yellow hearts.

But its not all that I am, even though I am sure my chronic health issues affect my chosen priorities, as well as my fight or flight responses.

It often means that I’m not really seeking the type of peace that comes with immediate physical comforts, but something greater that I care about. I am often motivated by concepts that transcend pain, go beyond struggle, get us to tangible societal improvements.

It would nonetheless be both ableist and untrue to say that I’m stronger than the pain, or that I make sure my pain is not other people’s problem, because I have certainly failed to do both many many times.

I lost a first marriage and a few jobs over the effects of endo, in the 20 years I went undiagnosed, while doctors lectured me on diet and exercise as my quality of life worsened, prescribing me birth control while the nodules tightened around my ureters, my stomach adhered to the sidewall of my abdomen, and my ovaries became a mass of endometriotic scar tissue, stuck together with other organs.

Cutting out the diseased fibrotic tissue saved my life and my fertility, and once you’ve woken up from a surgery learning you’re missing an organ (in my case, an ovary), but got a new lease on life from something that could have silently killed you, it puts certain things in perspective.

It’s hard to explain what it means to five years later be waking up from another surgery with a chest tube, away from your second little baby who is still nursing, and told that the exploratory procedure you signed up for, which involved collapsing your lung to look around, was a success, that they found and removed thoracic endometriosis.

Then, two years after that, with a third baby, start thinking about scheduling a long-awaited third surgery to remove endo left behind on your bowels and directly under your heart.

What am I afraid of anymore, after being ravaged by extrapelvic endometriosis? Only of not living life to the fullest, not leaving my children a better world and a safer home.

So it is my experience that there is some pain in life that cannot be avoided, some of us get more of it doled out to us than others, but I am much more afraid of needless cruelty, needless inflicted suffering running the show. Unchecked greed taking over.

And to me this firefighter’s wife and her friends represent all of that so well. I am utterly disgusted at their behavior and what they stand for and their treatment of nearly everybody who isn’t themselves.

But I am proud that I did not let that disgust get the better of me or take my eye off the prize. That I was able to took one look at her, say not today, and get back to the job at hand, which was saving the trees.

After my speech the city council received a letter from the DNR commissioner letting them know that there were no specific plans to not save those portions of the arboretum (which frankly, although that’s certainly a good thing, isn’t the reassurance about actively saving them that we need), and later, on a podcast with the mayor they both agreed that the city buying ENC would be the only way to save it.

While I believe the Commissioner loves it and wants to protect it, I suspect that without community involvement, pressure from the mayor and his developer friends might be too strong. His letter saying it would be dependent on RFP’s, and that only important trees would be saved, indicates as much.

So I’ll be back up there, asking them to declare the whole listed arboretum as important, ahead of any purchase or RFP process.

I imagine that someday, when I am long gone, those trees may still be there, and my kids can walk among them and not primarily remember how much pain their mother lived with, or which fights she picked or let go, but what she accomplished with what she had. Perhaps they can sit on a bench with a loved one and say “my Mom helped save these trees,” and “my Mom demanded the city include people like us.”

A proud legacy that thieves would no doubt like to snatch, if given the opportunity.

But it was best to hold onto my purse and walk away.