Humbled is too gentle a word
First written on April 4th, 2024. Edited and published a little later.
At the bar last night my friend asked about my most humbling experience. I considered whether I wanted to go there, in this casual beachside setting, and decided what the hell.
“Adopting Scout.”
He raised his eyebrows. Really? He’s met our cattle dog, of course — asked for tricks, played fetch, watched her sleep under the table out at restaurants.
Really, I launched in.
I told him how I thought I knew things about dogs before bringing home one all my own. How I believed we could shape our companions if we were just good enough owners — how I took to heart phrases like “it’s all how you raise them” and “your dog is your mirror” and then collapsed under the pressure, sometimes directly onto the sidewalk, watching the creature who was supposed to be my best friend lose her mind barking at a distant dog down the street. How for the first year we lived together I think Scout made me cry significantly more than she made me laugh.
Humbled is too gentle a word. Try devastated.
Ari himself told me about a lovely girl he dated in college. She was an “incredible partner” — she gave so much of herself — and in contrast he realized his own shortcomings as a friend. It was a sweet story from a sweet man, the kind of wholesome thing I’ve come to expect from him over our years of shenanigans in Florida. (The first time I met Ari, it was because my car had broken down in the parking lot of our apartment building and he came to help Sean push it back into a space while we waited for a tow truck. We ended up standing around for almost an hour just talking in the evening light.)
Perhaps his answer is really the story of my life with Scout too. She has been an incredible partner — and I’ve had to face my own shortcomings.
This heeler has never not tried for me. Even before we’d built any semblance of a solid relationship, she was willing to meet me where I offered. She has her own mind, certainly, and she is not some upstanding moral citizen from a Disney movie, but she has always given so much of herself to me. All.
No one could argue that I haven’t given her some in return. But I’ve also handed parts of myself out to critics on the street and internet… to my own past opinions… to voices that weren’t hers.
Scout humbled me by not being easy. By having her own strong preferences, her own deep insecurities, her own rich experience of the world. She humbled me by throwing my meager canine knowledge out the third-story window of our apartment (then kicking it around for good measure after using the bathroom on the spot).
But she also humbled me by being the better end of the leash, in the ways that matter most to me now. It was never about my opposable thumbs and control of abstract language and robust access to resources. It was always about her heart.
Bringing a cattle dog into my first post-college apartment is not the only time I’ve been humbled. It’s a regular occurrence (and despite its discomfort, I hope that doesn’t change). But the other part of my friend’s question was which experience taught you the most. What’s a time you’ve felt totally humbled — and learned big things from it?
Here is the paradox of my challenges with Scout: I would never wish upon another owner the sleepless nights and stressful walks and to-this-day pit of poison in my stomach when something, even the tiniest little twinge, starts to maybe possibly go wrong after putting in all this work. But I would also never change what we’ve shared.
Welcoming another creature into my life — leaping in hopes of a deep bond, not even trying to keep my feet on the ground, to hell with temperance — is the highest risk highest reward investment I’ve ever made.
I would make it again and again and again.