The sandwich order that brought two strangers together
Titian and Neha have very little in common, but they helped each other from afar.
Neha’s hands were cold, like they always are when she’s feeling anxious. It was March – but not an ordinary March – and the 20-year-old was standing in line at Subway. Days earlier, the coronavirus pandemic had shuttered the engineering student’s Texas university; she was just one of a handful of students left in her dorms. There were only two places nearby that Neha could easily grab food: the campus cafeteria or this small sandwich shop.
Before March 2020, Neha had never ordered at Subway. Like many people, she finds the idea of ordering at a new restaurant intimidating: “I just feel that everybody around me hates me for some reason. They’re judging me. I’m like, taking too much time.” Waiting to be called to the counter, Neha’s stomach twisted with nerves. But she had come prepared. She looked down at her phone, where a stranger had written step-by-step instructions for ordering a sub.
“Take into account what you would like on a sandwich. Maybe plan ahead before going,” read the first words of the stranger’s instructions. “You’ll go in order of what bread you want, then meats, then cheese, and then after it’s veggies and sauces.” In total, the instructions were 200-words long. They ended with a colon followed by a bracket: a simple smiley face.
Around 333 miles away in Oklahoma, 24-year-old Titian was recently homeless and living with his wife in his car. Despite his own struggles, the veteran decided to spend the winter on subreddits for others in need. In March – not an ordinary March – he scrolled through a 463,000-member forum for anxiety sufferers, r/anxiety, when an unusual post caught his eye. It was titled: “How to order from subway?”
Neha had never posted on Reddit before she asked the site to help her “gather the guts” to order a sub. Titian – who had been sharing his artwork on Reddit for a few years – was immediately interested in her post. “It struck a chord with me because I was like, ‘Yeah, ordering food can suck sometimes. So I want to help this person out.’”
Drawing on his own experience as a chef in the military, Titian wrote his instructions to Neha as thoroughly as possible, taking her through the journey step by step. Neha pulled up his comment the very next day and ordered an Italian BMT (the “biggest, meatiest, tastiest” sandwich on the menu), a cookie, and some crisps.
“I went back to my room and it was like a small little prize,” she says, “That was a good day… I mean, it’s just a Subway order. But as someone who deals with anxiety on a daily basis, it was a huge achievement.”
Over the course of the next year, Neha and Titian remained strangers – he settled in Georgia where he now lives with his wife and mother-in-law; she remained in Texas, dedicated to her studies. I stumble across their post in March 2021 and reach out to them both individually via Reddit’s direct messaging service. Titian replies almost immediately. A month later, I hear back from Neha. In April, we all meet on Zoom.
“Yes!” Titian cheers when Neha tells him how, after reading his comment, she ordered Subway every single day for a week.
Superficially, Titian and Neha have very little in common. He sits in a small square on my screen with swooping black hair, a just-visible chest tattoo, ear gauges, and a soul patch under his lip. Neha’s long dark hair lies on a green sweatshirt that complements the immaculate bright white polish on her nails. Yet quickly, the pair find they have one quite significant thing in common. For many years, they’ve both struggled with anxiety.
“I started to have panic attacks that would render me immobile, I had to lay down and calm down,” Titian explains of his teen years. After growing up in an abusive household, the artist’s anxiety manifested as “terrible pains”, hyperventilation, psoriasis, and eczema.
Neha is no stranger to these sensations – whenever she’s in a body of water that hits above her waist, she suffers a panic attack. She attributes much of her anxiety to being a person of colour who was held to Western beauty ideals as a child. “Growing up, my extended family used to tell me, ‘Do not go to the beach. You’ll get too tanned, you’ll get too dark’,” she says, “When your uncles and aunts constantly tell you something like that, as a kid, you believe that. That creates more insecurities inside of you.”
After Donald Trump lost the 2020 United States election, “everything went a little crazy” in Neha’s town, exacerbating her struggles. “That was extremely anxiety inducing – just thinking that somebody would attack me just because of the colour of my skin,” she says. In February, her grandmother in India passed away. “That was a huge trauma, and that was a huge contributing factor to my anxiety. And I think that was the reason I was so freaked out about Subway: because I was not in a very good mental state.”
In this context, successfully ordering a sandwich was transformative for Neha. “I was so happy,” she says – she even made friends with the cashier, another engineering student. “After the post, I accepted that, okay, I do suffer from anxiety,” she says, “Once I accepted it, I started to see solutions. And I think I’ve done pretty well in the past year when it comes to studying and social situations.”
Funnily enough, Neha isn’t the first anxious person to ask Reddit how to order a Subway; Titian isn’t the first person to provide a detailed answer (around four months earlier, two other strangers had a very similar interaction). While both Titian and Neha know the internet can be troubling at times, both also believe it can provide a unique support system. “I think it’s cool that it can kind of bring people together,” Titian says.
Brought together on Zoom, Titian and Neha are a little shy and a lot grateful to each other. “One of the things that helps me with my anxiety is making sure that other people are okay,” Titian says, “I guess it’s like my weird way of figuring it out.” The pair sympathise with each other’s struggles, find out they’ve both visited England in the past, and complain briefly about anti-maskers (“A bunch of goofballs,” Titian says). Neha is hoping to secure a summer internship while Titian hopes to go to art school. Both are happy to put a face to a username.
“For a very long time, I thought something was wrong with me,” Neha explains. When – for want of a sandwich – she first started looking up anxiety online, stumbling upon the subreddit and interacting with Titian changed her perspective. “It felt like a safe hub. I felt that there were people like me,” she says. She does not, however, recommend eating at Subway every day for a week.
“It was kind of gross,” she laughs, “I got kind of nauseous.”
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