what it feels like to choke

How do you know when to cut your losses? Games are designed to have winning outcomes, not stalemates. And I often hear this pacifying language that there are ‘no real losers, only winners’ type talk. The kind we tell our children to make them feel better, to soften the blow, to teach them that there’s always something to learn even when we miss or lose. Softening the blow is that lazy phenomenon of coddling egos while violently tearing down our threshold for bearing the truth. Our inconspicuous villain smiles as they meander the same lane as Debbie Downer and the sore losers who are expected to bounce back or make the best out of shitty things. Our language is teeming with words that attack our ability to just f*cking sit in our shit. We are dodging bullets right, left and center trying to avoid catching strays while ultimately getting hit with the most lethal shot. He choked, his epitaph would reveal.

Who actually sets out to lose? No one strives for last place or even second. The L doesn’t sedate as much as it riles. Stoking rage and fanning the flame of shame, red-faced not stoney-eyed. It’s a kind of humiliation that makes you immediately want to cool it down and put it out. We have actually become quite sophisticated in elevating the L. We might even tout ourselves as alchemists capable of transmuting our crap into gold. Seemingly out of thin air. Goldbricks don’t lie, but they sound nice. The alchemy of rage is enraging, but eloquently articulated. More aesthetic. Much more palatable. It goes down smoother.

I once ate an onigiri that nearly suffocated me. Onigiris are the type of cute rice sandwiches that roll up into itself and make eating sushi on-the-go not only possible, but aesthetic. The rice was so artisanally compressed that they molded into indestructible bullets that lodged into my esophagus and chest. Taking a hit like that disarms you immediately and I cursed the cute sandwich for turning on me so viciously. Pressing my fingers hard into my sternum was my ambitious but feeble attempt at prying it out from underneath the layers of skin and bone. I could feel my chest beginning to burn and stiffen; the rice, I assume, beginning to coagulate as it marinated with my body fluids. My mind was sprinting against my body’s closing air passage. I needed to act fast and debated between chugging water to force it down or gagging to force it up. It’s a tale of two terrors: blunt force in either direction that ironically allows me to escape blacking out. The decision to pound my chest in a Gorilla-style Heimlich maneuver to gag really does happen in a split second, certainly not in drawn out sentences on Substack to be weighed and considered.

Gagging an onigiri looks like a slow release of rice-fluid, akin to spoon-feeding an infant if it were moving backwards in painful slow motion. Choking comes with public humiliation. Also slow. Also painful. You might catch someone muting their pity with a palm sealing their mouth, as if their gesture wasn’t loud enough. You might catch someone looking away with their neck, but stealing glances with their side eye. The mess is so hot and horrific, you’re compelled to stare.

There’s such a collective aversion to the mess of failure that we’ve created an entire aesthetic around it. I think this is how we got to become all a bit beige. Pantone announced their 2026 Color of the Year: Cloud Dancer. Our compulsion towards beautifying ‘meh’ is codified in the cloud dancer. Let’s call it what it is: white. Though not an exact shadematch, the tone feels the same. The cloud dancer mantra doubles down: A whisper of tranquility and peace in a noisy world. Their website calls out their own bullshit and (I quote) they call it “a lofty white”. We are no longer attempting to hide our vanity project and putting it on full display. The pedestal stands tall and proud, despite being a hackjob and we proudly peddle peace and serenity like Birkins on Canal Street.

I recently caught myself in a cloud dance. My reputation matters deeply to me and earning the respect of others is something I do not take lightly. I take a lot of pride in what I do and how I show up for others. It’s a blessing and a curse because there’s implicitly an assumption, or hope rather, that others will show up the same. My cloud dance was choreographed like a cat and mouse chasing respect. New to a business relationship, I entered the role eager to begin and quick to please. I was ready to apply my brain to the tasks at hand with my usual fervor and excitement. Like I imagine many new relationships, ours began with a lot of passionate conversations and plotting big plans for the future. Diving in and getting my feet wet and hands dirty, I noticed a slowing down of communications. It wasn’t quite a ghost, but more like breadcrumbing. I wasn’t expecting to feel like a needy girlfriend in this context, but I found myself struggling to deliver what was asked of me without a direct line of communication to the one who brought me on.

My pleasing nature has been so sophisticated, it’s deceptive at its core. So much so that I couldn’t quite clock it until now, and perhaps, too late. The way I was mislabeling it read like templatized requirements on a job description: proactive, problem solver, team player. I didn’t realize how much I had been programmed to operate as a pleaser. Was it the decades of corporate bootcamp or did I always have this handicap? Needless to say, the ghostlike breadcrumbing activated the pleaser-masked-as-proactive-problem-solver in me and I quickly jumped into action. I made introductions with team members linked to the project, all of them noticeably eager to connect with someone equally eager to move things forward. I pulled reports and conducted my own research that supported a well-informed plan. I shared weekly updates along the way, offering times to discuss, but never demanding. I was staying true to what I thought was most helpful: being easy to work with and ‘handling it’. My competence and empathy were betraying me.

Our language is really quite slick and I’m now realizing how it brainwashed myself into thinking I was handling this well. Being easy to work with mistakenly equates to making the client’s life easier. It’s easy then to see how being proactive or resourceful becomes reinforced as redeeming qualities over time. What’s overlooked, or the deception in fact, is my own complicity in the chaos. That the ease at which I made everything feel for the client, was actually a sophisticated way to mask my own unease with confronting them and asserting what was truly required of them, even as a client, to show up and own their part of the work. That I would, for months, delay confronting them for failing to pay me for these months of work, says it all. I finally did though, today.

I still gag knowing I could have done better. When you expect excellence from yourself, but choke. That burns. Slowly. There is nothing worse than choking. Although, trying to make it look cute does come close.