Leading With Assumptions

I Almost Missed My Exit Because I Was Too Busy Being Right

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I was the Karen. I’m not proud of it. Here’s what it taught me.

Cost of living goes up, your car park options go down. I’d found a cheaper one. Longer walk, more steps, good trade. Or so I thought.

What I hadn’t accounted for was the layout.

After work, I made the long walk back to my car. My feet were tired. My bag felt heavier than it had that morning. I was already quietly regretting the whole economy-parking experiment. I just wanted to get home.

I reversed out of my space, and as I did, a car came toward me. The driver gestured; he wanted me to reverse to the right so he could pass. I gestured for him to reverse or move left instead. Several seconds passed that felt like minutes. Neither of us moved.

I switched off my engine.

I sat there, arms folded in my spirit, performing a silent protest that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with every room I’d ever had to fight to be taken seriously in. I had clocked everything I thought I needed to know: male, assertive, foreign accent, telling a woman in a car park what to do. I had filed him neatly under another one of those.

Then he got out of his car and walked to my window.

He was calm. He was patient. I was not generous.

He told me there was enough space at the back — all I had to do was reverse. Simple information, offered quietly. And I sat there with my engine off, performing the very kind of silent protest I would roll my eyes at in someone else.

And then, and I still can’t fully explain this, something in me said: just listen.

Not surrender. Not agreement. Just… listen.

So I did. I reversed to the right.

And that’s when I saw it.

Right in front of my new direction, clear as day once I had moved: an exit I had never noticed. A second way out. The whole time I’d been sitting there making my quiet statement, that exit had been there, just invisible to me from where I was positioned.

We were both heading out. He knew. I didn’t. And instead of understanding that, I had cast him as the villain in a story he wasn’t even part of.

I passed through. He followed. And as I drove away, I sat with the full weight of what had just happened.

I never got to apologise.

I was the Karen.

Not my proudest moment.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with since:

Resistance is sometimes data. My immediate reaction was to switch the engine off, wait him out. This told me something important about where I was holding tension. I brought a full case file into that car park. Years of navigating spaces where I’ve had to fight to be heard had primed me to see threat before I could see help. He got the sentence without the trial.

The context gap is not a character flaw. He wasn’t a control freak. He could see what I couldn’t. He knew the layout. He was sharing information, not asserting dominance, and I had dressed it up as the latter because of everything I’d carried into that moment.

The person who looks like your obstacle sometimes holds your exit. I was so focused on what I thought he represented that I nearly missed what he was actually offering, which was a way through…a view I didn’t have.

The exit only appears when you move. I could not see the second way out from where I was sitting. I had to reverse, in a direction someone else suggested, before the new path came into view. That is not a car park problem. That is a life pattern.

Insight doesn’t always come with closure. By the time you realise you’ve misjudged someone, the moment is already gone. He drove away. I drove away. The window for a direct apology closed in split seconds. I can’t always fix it after, which means the only place to do the work is before. Before the next car park. Before the next man gestures at you. Before your history walks into the room ahead of you and starts making decisions that belong to the present.

The car park is a metaphor for any situation where your past experiences hijack your present perception. The real work is in examining your assumptions, noticing your triggers, questioning your biased views and being present in the moment.

I chose that car park to save money and add steps to my day. I got both. I also got a lesson I didn’t budget for.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been the calm one on the other side of someone else’s snap judgment…thank you. Your patience cost you something. It shouldn’t have.

And if you’re reading this and you recognise yourself in the engine-off moment, you’re in good company. The work isn’t in never getting it wrong. It’s in being honest enough to say so.

Sometimes the exit you need isn’t the one you planned for. Sometimes you can only find it when you stop, breathe, and let someone else’s perspective shift your view, even when every part of you wants to sit there with the engine off and prove a point.

MOVE anyway.

The exit is there. You just can’t see it yet. 🦋

Have you ever caught yourself being the one in the wrong and had to sit with it? I’d love to hear how you handled it.