Reset, Regulate, Re-Enter

Usually I float through the factory like a graceful Butterfly Princess.

That may sound dramatic, but it is true. Most days I move through that loud, industrial place with a strange kind of ease. I hear the hum of the machines, feel the rhythm of the work, and stay surprisingly present inside it all. I am not usually the woman unraveling in steel-toe shoes beside a floor scrubber. I am usually the woman gliding through her shift, minding her business, doing what needs to be done, and keeping her peace intact.

So when everything started going wrong that day, some part of me knew something bigger was happening.

Because that kind of upset almost never happens to me anymore.

The floor scrubber started acting up out of nowhere. A red exclamation point came on and the battery lights started flashing. The same thing had happened Monday. Back then, I had bumped the ignition-switch area with my butt, and the machine acted strange for a few minutes before suddenly working again. I assumed maybe the battery had been low or dying. I did not know. I only knew that now it was happening again, right in the middle of my shift, and my area still needed to be done.

At first, I tried not to let it get to me. But frustration does not usually arrive all at once. It stacks. It layers. It gathers quietly until suddenly your whole body is speaking it.

I stopped John and asked him to help. He did not really know anything about the machine either, but he kindly stopped anyway. We checked the filter. We turned it off and on a few times. We tried the obvious things. Nothing worked. Since I did not know any better, I assumed the battery must have died.

That meant I had to push the scrubber back to the charging area.

The machine I use is a T600, and it is heavy. Not mildly inconvenient heavy. Heavy in the way that makes your whole body aware of the task. Heavy in the way that becomes even more miserable when you are already frustrated, already behind, already trying not to unravel. I started pushing it back, and because it was leaving the floor damp behind it, I slipped.

I fell hard and fast.

I landed on my stomach and knocked the wind out of myself. For a moment all I could feel was the shock of impact and that awful breathless feeling in my chest. I got up quickly, but I was sore, rattled, and angry now in a way I had not been a few minutes earlier. Not because I am an angry person, but because my nervous system had officially had enough.

The machine was out of the way and charging now, or so I thought, and my area still needed to be finished. So I had to do it the old-fashioned way: mop and bucket, sore body, no grace left in reserve.

And then came the moment that pushed me over.

I had my wet floor sign up and was mopping when a maintenance man came through with a cart. I watched him walk right past the sign. In my already aggravated state, I thought, Surely he sees this. Surely he will go around.

But he did not.

He kept coming, pushing the cart right toward the floor I had just mopped. By the time he got to me, I was already simmering. Meanwhile, he was in a perfectly pleasant mood, completely unaware that he was stepping into the blast radius of someone who had already had enough.

He smiled and asked, “How are you enjoying your new job?”

If I had been calm, I probably would have laughed.

But I was not calm.

I growled, “It’s great till people walk on my shit,” and gestured toward the tracks.

Thankfully, I do not think he heard my exact words. The factory is loud. But he absolutely caught my tone. He laughed and said he had to get his cart through, still apparently oblivious to the fact that he could have taken the longer route. I tried to soften it a little by admitting I was annoyed, but the moment had already happened. My frustration had left my body and entered the room.

And for a while after that, I unraveled.

Not forever. Not in some dramatic, world-ending way. But enough. Enough that I felt off for nearly an hour. Enough that I knew my peace had been disturbed. Enough that the whole chain of events had gotten under my skin more deeply than I liked.

The broken machine.
The confusion.
The extra labor.
The heavy pushing.
The fall.
The pain.
The delay.
The wet floor.
The cart tracks.
The sharp tone.

It had all stacked into one perfect storm.

Hours later, that same maintenance man came back by and tried to talk to me again. At first I did not understand what he meant, but eventually I realized he was checking to see if I felt better than I had earlier. It became obvious that I had upset him. He had been thinking about the interaction. Carrying it around. Ruminating, maybe.

That realization sobered me.

Not because I suddenly needed to collapse into guilt and shame, but because I saw clearly that I had become part of someone else’s hard moment. He had walked through in a good mood, probably innocent in his own mind, and walked straight into the overflow of a nervous system that had already been overloaded for quite some time.

That mattered to me.

Because I am not an angry person.

But I am a human person. A person with a body. A person with limits. A person whose nervous system can, under enough stress, get overwhelmed and react before wisdom has a chance to catch up.

Old me would have used that moment against myself.

Old me would have replayed it all evening. I would have relived the machine, the fall, the soreness, the tracks, my tone, his face, the awkwardness, all of it. I would have turned one dysregulated moment into a trial about my character. I would have sentenced myself to guilt and called that accountability.

But new me did something different.

When I reviewed my day later, I did not ask, What is wrong with me?

I asked, What happened? And what can I do differently next time?

That is the difference between shame and healing.

Instead of making myself the problem, I studied the pattern.

I realized that by the time I snapped, I was already far past the point where I should have taken a pause. The problem was not just the man with the cart. The problem was that my system had been overloading for quite a while, and I had stayed in it, trying to push through, trying to force myself forward, trying to finish strong while warning lights were already flashing inside me.

That is when I came up with my new plan.

In the event of an upset condition, I will reward myself with a ten-minute time-out.

Not punish.
Reward.

That distinction matters.

I will step away for ten minutes and cool down. I will set a timer. For the first eight minutes, I can scroll, play a game, stare into space, breathe, or do whatever helps get my mind completely off the thing that upset me. Then for the last two minutes, I will decide how I want to handle the situation.

Not from the heat of the reaction.
Not from the adrenaline.
Not from the wound.
From choice.

That felt wise to me. Loving, too.

Because healing is not me never getting frustrated again. Healing is me knowing what to do when frustration shows up.

And then came the part that made the whole day feel almost absurdly symbolic.

Later, I found out the machine was not dead at all.

The fix was ridiculously simple. I had accidentally bumped the safety shut-off button. It just needed to be turned so it would pop back out. That was it. That was the whole mystery. Monday suddenly made sense too. It must have only been barely pushed in then, which is why the machine eventually started working again and let me finish the last fifteen minutes of the job.

I was in shock when I realized it.

How did I not see it then? How did I not realize, in real time, that I was living out a nervous-system healing story?

But honestly, somehow the truth was already speaking to me, even before I consciously understood it. Somewhere under all the irritation and soreness and embarrassment, I knew this day meant something. I knew because this kind of upset almost never happens to me anymore. I knew because I usually float through that factory like a Butterfly Princess, and that day I did not float. I shut down. I strained. I fell. I snapped. I had warning lights flashing and no idea yet where the reset was.

That is what gets me now.

The button my ass accidentally pushed was the reset button.

I laugh when I say it, but it is also true in a way that feels almost too perfect.

The machine was not broken. It had been interrupted. It had been knocked out of its normal flow. It was sending signals that something had been triggered. And because I did not yet know where the reset was, the whole situation became heavier, harder, and more painful than it needed to be.

That feels truer about life than I would like to admit.

How many times have I mistaken a triggered system for a broken one?
How many times have I thought something was dead when it was really just shut down?
How many times have I tried to force movement while the warning lights were already flashing?

The next day, I saw the coworker I had snapped at.

He smiled as he walked toward me, and I could tell life had already moved on for him more than it had in my own mind. So I stopped him and said, “Listen, I want to apologize for yesterday. You didn’t know it, but you walked up just as I had finished fighting with the scrubber machine, and I wasn’t too happy about having to mop the floors the old-fashioned way since the scrubber was acting up. I’m sorry. That wasn’t your fault. Yesterday was all on me.”

He smiled gently and went about his day.

That moment mattered to me almost as much as the reset button.

Because repair is part of regulation too.

I could not go back and unsay what I said. I could not make the moment not happen. But I could take ownership. I could clean up my side of the street. I could acknowledge that my reaction belonged to me.

And the truth is, how someone treats us has everything to do with what is happening inside of them.

Their nervous system.
Their triggers.
Their overwhelm.
Their inner world.

Not in an uncaring way. Not in a dismissive, “that’s their problem” kind of way. But in a truthful way. In a humble way. In the kind of way that reminds me I do not have access to another person’s internal wiring any more than they have access to mine.

What I met in him that day was not malice. What he met in me was not my character. He met my overload. He met a moment. He met a system under strain.

And the same is true so often in life.

People are forever bumping into one another’s bruises and calling it personality.

But sometimes it is not personality at all. Sometimes it is dysregulation. Sometimes it is old wiring. Sometimes it is a nervous system asking for a pause, a reset, a little more grace.

That day showed me something I do not want to forget:

Sometimes the problem is not that everything is broken. Sometimes the reset button has been triggered, and you just do not know it yet.

And once you know where it is, everything changes.

Now I know to check that button first.

With the machine, yes.
But also with myself.

When the warning lights start flashing inside me, when frustration rises too fast, when everything suddenly feels heavier than it should, maybe I do not need to force, shame, spiral, or collapse. Maybe I need to reset. Maybe I need to regulate. Maybe I need to step away long enough to come back online with intention.

Maybe I am not broken either.
Maybe I am a system asking for a wiser response.

That day in the factory did not feel graceful while I was living it. It felt messy and uncomfortable and painfully human. But now I can see what it really was.

I did not just have a bad day.
I lived a chapter.

A chapter about what it means to be interrupted.
A chapter about what it means to get overwhelmed.
A chapter about what it means to choose repair over shame.
A chapter about learning where the reset is.

Usually I float through the factory like a Butterfly Princess.

But not that day.

That day, life handed me a nervous-system healing story in the form of a malfunctioning floor scrubber, a bruised body, a sharp tongue, an apology, and a reset button I did not know I had hit.

And maybe that is healing.

Not becoming a woman who never gets dysregulated.
Not becoming someone too enlightened to have hard moments.
But becoming someone who knows how to notice the warning lights, honor the overload, find the reset, make the repair, and return without turning one rough moment into an identity.

Reset.
Regulate.
Re-enter.

That is the lesson.

Reflection

The next time your own “red lights” begin flashing, pause before assuming something is wrong with you.

Ask yourself:

Do I need to fix myself… or do I simply need to reset?

Sometimes the smallest button changes everything.