Red Lights Are A Mirror | Shu Dong Talk

{ “title”: “Red Lights Are A Mirror (And I Can’t Stop Crying at Them)”, “slug”: “red-lights-are-a-mirror”, “metaDescription”: “I used to think red lights were about traffic. Took me 34 years to realize they’re about me. A late-night essay on burnout, anxiety, and what waits for you in the 90 seconds you can’t skip.”, “category”: “Emotional”, “targetKeyword”: “red lights mirror”, “tags”: [“Burnout”, “Late Night Anxiety”, “Commute”, “San Francisco”, “Knowledge Worker”], “content”: “

It’s 9:47 PM on a Tuesday and I’m sitting at the intersection of Mission and 24th, the seventh red light in a row. My Uber driver — no, scratch that — I cancelled the Uber three minutes ago. I’m in my own car now, a 2019 Toyota Corolla with 87,000 miles on it and a check engine light that’s been glowing since March. The light is red. I can see the bus stop across the street, the guy scrolling TikTok with one hand, the woman arguing on the phone, the bodega cat sitting on a stack of water cases. I used to think red lights were about traffic. Took me 34 years to realize red lights are about me. Every single one.

What Red Lights Actually Do To Me

Last Wednesday at 2am, standing outside a convenience store on Mission Street — yeah I was standing outside, couldn’t sit in the apartment, the walls were closing in and the heater was making that clicking noise again — I watched three cars stop at a red light, sit there for ninety seconds, and then go. Three strangers. Three ninety-second windows. None of them looking up from their phones.

I was thinking about my own ninety-second windows. The ones I waste doomscrolling Slack at 11pm because I’m too wired to sleep. The ones I spend re-reading the same email from my manager, trying to decode whether ‘let’s circle back’ means I’m getting fired. The ones where I just stare at the ceiling fan and try to remember what I used to be excited about, before I had a job title and a 401k and a therapist and a reason to set an alarm every morning at 6:45am.

My girlfriend asked me once, ‘why do you drive so slow on the way home?’ And I told her, ‘because the apartment is worse.’ She didn’t laugh. I didn’t either. She just reached over and held my hand at the next red light and we sat there for ninety seconds and neither of us said a word. That’s the most loved I’ve felt in months. At a red light. On the 280 freeway. Going 11mph. Two strangers to ourselves holding hands at a stupid intersection.

The 90 Seconds You Can’t Skip

Here’s the thing about red lights. They don’t negotiate. You can’t pay them off. You can’t email them. You can’t push them to next quarter. You can’t put them in a Notion doc. You sit there and you sit there and you sit there. The light doesn’t care that you have a 9am standup. The light doesn’t care about your Q3 OKRs. The light doesn’t care that you’re late to pick up the dry cleaning. The light is just a light and it’s red.

Last month I tried to outrun one. Made it through the yellow and a cop pulled me over on Folsom. $187 ticket. He asked if I was in a hurry. I said no. He looked at me like I was lying. I was lying. I am always lying when I say I’m not in a hurry. I’m in a hurry to get to the next thing that won’t fix anything — the next meeting, the next milestone, the next distraction, the next email I’ll regret sending at 11:50pm. I’m in a hurry because stopping still is scarier.

My therapist — yeah I have one now, started in January after I couldn’t stop crying on the BART between 16th and 24th — she calls this ‘productive discomfort.’ She says the red lights are training me. I told her I didn’t want to be trained. She said that’s exactly the problem. She said people pay $220 a session to learn how to sit still and I have twelve a day for free. I told her the red lights don’t take cash and don’t change anything. She told me change is the thing I keep refusing. We both went quiet for the rest of the session.

What I See in the Mirror

The mirror is the worst part. Not the rear-view mirror, the windshield. The thing you can’t look away from. The thing that catches your face at every red light, in the pause between two lanes of strangers who are also tired, also pretending, also doing the math on whether they can afford to quit this year.

I look up at red lights and I see:

The Slack message I didn’t answer at 9pm and now it’s10:23pm and I’m still thinking about it
The doctor I haven’t called since 2024 because I keep telling myself I’ll do it next week
The friend in Austin I keep saying I’ll visit and have rebooked the flight four times
The book on my nightstand bookmarked at page 34 since March and I don’t even remember what page 34 was about
The fact that I’m 34 and still don’t know what I want to do
The gym membership I pay $79 a month for and haven’t used since June
The voice in my head that sounds suspiciously like my manager’s voice when I’m making pasta

Last Thursday I was at a red light on Cesar Chavez and this woman in a Honda Civic started crying. Like sobbing, hands on the wheel, full-on, the kind of cry you can’t fake. She was alone. I wanted to roll down my window and say ‘me too’ but I didn’t. I just sat there and cried with her from across the lane. Two strangers crying at a red light at 8:15 on a Thursday. When the light turned green she drove off. I drove off. We never made eye contact again. I think about her all the time now.

What Nobody Wrote About Burnout

I read the burnout books. The podcasts. The essays on Substack. They all say the same thing: ‘set boundaries,’ ‘take a vacation,’ ‘say no more,’ ‘quiet quitting,’ ‘loud quitting,’ ‘bare minimum Mondays.’ Easy to write in an essay. Hard to do when your manager pings you at 9pm and your rent is $3,200 a month and your student loans are $480 a month and your dog needs allergy meds that cost $84 a month after the coupon expired.

I took a vacation in April. Five days in Joshua Tree. Spent three of them answering emails from the airbnb because I ‘just wanted to check in real quick’ and then three hours disappeared. Spent one of them crying in a hot tub because the stars were too bright and I realized I’d been looking at a phone screen for six years straight. Spent one of them writing a resignation letter I never sent, folded it into a paper airplane, and threw it at a cactus. The cactus won. I picked it up and put it back in my pocket and flew home the next morning.

The burnout doesn’t go away on vacation. The burnout waits at the red light with you. The burnout is sitting in your passenger seat eating your pad thai. The burnout is the third email you answer before breakfast. The burnout is the check engine light you ignore because you don’t have time to deal with one more thing. The burnout is the way you say ‘I’m fine’ when your coworker asks how you’re doing in the kitchen. The burnout is the Sunday scaries that started on Wednesday this week.

The Body Keeps Score Even When You Don’t

I didn’t used to be a body person. I was a brain person. A ‘I’ll think my way out of it’ person. A ‘let’s optimize the morning routine’ person. Then January happened and I started getting this thing in my chest — not pain exactly, more like pressure, like a fist made of cold air sitting behind my sternum. My doctor ran the EKG. Came back clean. She said ‘this is anxiety.’ I said ‘I don’t have anxiety, I have deadlines.’ She didn’t laugh. She wrote me a referral.

The palms sweating started in March. The stomach tightening started in April. The jaw-clenching at 3am started in May. I’m 34 years old and my body is doing things my brain refuses to admit are happening. I clench my teeth so hard I cracked a molar in February — $1,400 at the dentist, no insurance coverage because apparently grinding your teeth is a ‘pre-existing condition.’ My jaw hurts right now. My shoulders hurt right now. The 9:47pm red light is making my hands tighter on the wheel.

I keep telling myself this is normal. That everybody is like this. That the chest tightness is just coffee. That the jaw clenching is just stress. That the crying in the car is just traffic. That the11pm Slack scroll is just ‘catching up.’ Not actually resting. Not actually ever stopping.

I’m Such a Mess But

Here’s what I want to say and I’m going to say it badly: I don’t think the answer is to run more yellow lights. I think the answer is something I don’t know yet. I think the answer might just be sitting in the red. I think the answer might be crying at the wheel on Cesar Chavez with a stranger. I think the answer might be the 90 seconds where I don’t check the phone.

I’m 34. I make $142k. I have a girlfriend I love. I have a dog. I have a Roth IRA. I have a Le Creuset my mom gave me when I moved out at 22. I have all the things. I am still, on most Tuesdays at 9:47pm, sitting at a red light feeling like I can’t even explain why my chest goes tight. Why my palms sweat. Why I’m gripping the wheel like the car might float away if I let go. Why I’m 34 and the mirror at the red light still shows me a 22-year-old who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I’m writing this from my apartment. It’s 10:23pm. The street light outside is making everything orange. My dog is asleep on the couch. I can hear my neighbor’s TV through the wall — sounds like Jeopardy, somebody just lost in the wager category. I just ate cold pad thai standing up at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like a commitment. The Commitment. To rest. To be. To stop.

I Don’t Have Anything Wise to Say

I keep trying to write a clever ending. A bow on it. A takeaway. A ‘here’s what I learned’ moment. I don’t have one. I have a check engine light and a girlfriend asleep on the couch and a dog who’s snoring and a red light I just sat through on Mission Street without checking my phone once. That felt weird. That felt like something. That felt like90 seconds of just being in a car at an intersection in San Francisco in October at 9:47pm on a Tuesday.

I think that’s the whole point. The red light is the only place in my day where nothing is expected of me. No reply. No deliverable. No status update. No Slack thread. No standup. No ‘what’s your bandwidth on this.’ Just me, sitting, in a 2019 Corolla, in San Francisco, in October, at 9:47pm on a Tuesday. The light is red. I am red. We are red together. The mirror is showing me a guy who is tired and scared and still here and still breathing and that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. The light is going to turn green in a second and I’ll forget this and check my phone.

## Verdict

I know this isn’t right. I’m conflicted too. But I just needed to write it down. If you’re out there at a red light right now — the chest tight, the hands on the wheel, the nowhere-to-go feeling — me too. I see you in the next lane over.

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