Several times Tessa had walked past the poster on the kiosk without really taking it all in, most recently last week, the day of her thirty-third birthday. Each time it had made her smile. The words said: “Pissed off at your boss?” then there was a picture of someone lying on an office floor. In spandex. Somewhere in there was a blurb about the corpse pose in yoga. Tessa took it to mean that you could get back at your boss by appearing to die. That would teach them. One day she stopped to read the poster more carefully, and she realized that her interpretation might have been coincidental. The poster seemed to suggest that a yoga class would relax a person who had been pissed off at their boss. It wasn’t about feigning death. Another West End communications genius, thought Tessa. Still, her original interpretation gave her the chuckles when she walked past the fading poster.
Then it happened. She came to, with the concerned faces of her colleagues hovering over her in a waterfall of hair backed by the obscene fluorescent lights of the boardroom. She was fine, she told them. Laughing, and in an unguarded state, she added, “I think I just blacked out from boredom.” A few voices croaked “Well, that was weird” quietly to each other. “No offense.” Tessa added, trying to lighten the mood as she crawled back into her chair. “Really, I’m fine,” she assured them, and the meeting carried on. Tessa tried to focus on the agenda. The problem was that they were boring. All of them, all the meetings, everything on the agendas, the people, the posturing, the place, their so-called mission, all of it. She got through it without another blackout, and one of her colleagues walked her to the bus stop after work.
That evening, Tessa wondered what was going on. She’d had routine blood work and all her other tests recently and was confident she was healthy physically. She did some web searching and ended up on Reddit. She had felt bad for speaking her truth about boredom, and she wondered if maybe she was the asshole in the situation. She decided to post in an “Am I The Asshole?” topic on Reddit, where you could inquire if others agree you might be at fault in a situation. Replies came almost immediately. Most sided with her that work was boring, and though her reaction might have been extreme, she wasn’t the asshole. As the thread gathered steam, more people voiced support, and several people shared similar experiences. At one point, someone came into the discussion to authoritatively state that Tessa simply had Boredom Induced Trance Disorder, or BIT, and that there was not only a Reddit topic about it, but that there were in-person BIT-ter support groups, and Vancouver was blessed to have a certified practitioner also. “I’ll bring you to a group with me,” offered the person.
BIT was really a thing, Tessa soon found out. The Reddit gang was a well of support, and all the stories resonated. People were blacking out in one form or another all over the place. Many agreed it was just a symptom of late-or-end-stage capitalism, and that shit really was that boring. Tessa went to her first support meeting at the community center a few weeks later and got a chuckle from its AA-like rituals, such as the introductions: “Hi, I’m Tessa, and I’m BIT-ter.” “Hi, Tessa,” would come back the collective chanted response. There was the sharing of stories too, and this activity did move manyalmost to tears at several points, Tessa included. Tessa finally got the courage to share at her third meeting, outlining her childhood mandate to be a good girl, and not give herself airs, despite being surrounded by visionless dullards. It was all “We have to be nice to Uncle Jimmy because he’s lonely” kind of bullshit. It was never “He’s lonely because he’s stupid,” as Tessa had wanted to say. University had offered some relief, but even that paled over time as conversations would inevitably drift to kids, cars and houses, three things Tessa had sworn to banish from her life forever.
As she shared, everyone sighed, shook their heads, nodded and made big, sad eyes at Tessa. They got it. They totally did. She felt like she had found her tribe. In hearing the sharing from others, she thought back over her life, and how she’d probably always had BIT; it’s just that she’d never had a full-on, fall-down episode before, at least not one she’d been made aware of. She remembered long, prosaic conversations about the usual boring shit that had made her fix her “Yes, I’m listening” gaze on the other person, nodding like a drummer in rhythm while her birdlike transparent eye covering shuttered down and she went to her happy places, places of stories, places of interest. She had always been considered a good conversationalist as a result of these skills, to the point where perfect strangers would stop and regale her with stories of their visits to doctors and other trivia. She could see now that her sublimation of a growing rage inside herself had likely led to her boardroom episode. She resolved to get better. To recover.
Her timing was excellent, because the city’s own certified practitioner was going to be leading a seminar on coping skills, and it was much more affordable than seeing the practitioner one-on-one would have been. Tessa signed up right away. A couple of weeks later, the practitioner, Silvie, began the day by sharing the notion that people with BIT were not the weird ones, that the world had indeed become more boring, less sensitive, that people’s listening and interactivity skills were at an all-time low, and that BIT-ters were the casualties of that, not the cause. Silvie then led the group on an exercise to share stories about the pain of BIT, and then the topic switched to coping skills, leading with assertiveness. They paired off and practiced saying “That’s boring.” and other phrases that let them jump in and take charge of the situation, rather than just take it and risk blacking out. In short order, the whole room was alive with short, sharp interjections like “Stop it. You’re losing me. That’s boring. Interest me! Can I get in here?” It was a rousing session, and people’s eyes lit up. Silvie capped it by saying the only people you risk alienating and losing are the bores.
The afternoon kicked off with a gift for each participant. It was a deck of cards that on one side said “Hello. I have Boredom Induced Trance Disorder (BIT) and would greatly appreciate your help by asking me the question on the reverse side of this card and listening for my response.” On the reverse of each card were questions like: “Where did you go to school? What do you dream about? What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you? What are you passionate about? What would you do if you could do anything?” and more, fifty-two cards in all. Tessa was delighted. What a simple idea. She wondered why she had suffered all those years. As the day wound down, friendships and alliances were cemented, contacts exchanged, and they had made the decision as a group to meet up again in a week on a casual basis. Tessa walked and talked with a couple of the participants as they headed homeward, and she left them on a high note as she headed toward her building.
That night, Tessa was alive with possibility and fired up to make changes. She enjoyed flipping through the deck of cards and seeing all the questions a person could be asked. It struck her as funny that she had routinely asked these questions of others all her life. How had she ended up as some kind of conversational dumpster for one-sided bores? She practiced getting assertive at the TV, blasting out the phrases they had practiced that day, using the remote pause to stop the offender in their conversational tracks. She felt good. Thinking back to her AITA query on Reddit, she wondered if maybe she had been contributing to the situation a little by being nice in the face of conversational boorishness. But fuck that, she reasoned. Now was different. She’d be getting reciprocity or getting out. She looked forward to heading out the next day and practicing her new talents.
It went well. Remarkably so. Rather than scare people away, being more assertive actually made the conversations she had more lively, and more confrontational, but in mostly a good way. Many people did drift off permanently when they realized they could no longer dump on her, but that just meant fewer bores in her life. It was as if she was lifting a film or veil off herself and letting herself be seen. And heard. She kept in touch with several people she had met at the BIT workshop, and she was starting to feel like she was part of a movement, that she had a cause. She wanted to go beyond herself. She had noticed street stickers out there in the city, especially in the alleys, and she began to craft some stickers of her own, with sayings like “Listen!” with an ear drawn on it. She was shy about slapping these up, but over time her confidence grew.
Tessa eventually fell in with an East Side art collective that gave her a sense of community and an exchange of ideas. A mutual exchange. As her guerrilla art activities ramped up, her art began to attract attention, and people wanted to know who was behind Listen!”, Ask me something! and other campaigns. Her mystery was a treat for her, and she reveled in people wondering about her.
She still went to work, as before, but the vibe was totally different. She was now content to be seen as difficult or whatever-the-fuck as needed, and to express her thoughts, expecting to be heard. The situation was aided immensely by her secret life as a street artist, which was exhilarating, even frightening at times, but never boring.
^^^
Robert David Duncan is a Vancouver-based writer, filmmaker and actor. His writing last appeared in Oblivioni Magazine in November, last year.
Image by Kalyee Srithnam.