I Did A Big, Bold Thing
I have dreams that are borderline sexual about a receptionist job I worked at for years
I did a big, bold thing: I took a leave from my job. This is a privileged thing, yes, but also a necessary thing for me to do personally otherwise I’d go absolutely batshit fucking insane and lay down in front of a train and ask it to hit me twice.
I can’t talk about it. I think I signed an NDA years ago. I’m almost certain I did. But what it really amounts to is capitalism sprinkled its exploitative fairy dust, and my limit has been reached. I was eyeballs deep in bullshit, crying about things that do not matter and falling apart in all ways over, like, diaper commercials. How pathetic is that, right? Like, if you’re going to somersault into a downward spiral at least let it involve cocaine and whiskey and hanging from hotel windows in leather pants.
Please know that I have fallen apart from the comfort of my own home, with a perfect red lip, screaming inane shit about collaborative spreadsheets.
Please know that I have fallen apart from the comfort of my own home, with a perfect red lip, screaming inane shit about collaborative spreadsheets.
I don’t know what I should call this thing that I am doing that is unpaid and at huge personal risk except: pulling a Lebowski. I need to mosey, be a bum. Find an autumnal sweater with large delicious buttons the size of hard candy and live in it. Make comfort my entire persona. Possibly have a signature cocktail and say things like, “there’s a beverage here, man” when shit gets too serious and out of control.
Before I landed the gig I have now, I accepted a job at a pretzel stand. But never showed.
This is not a joke. The perception I have of myself and who I am in reality are widely in opposition to one another. My confidence says pretzel stand, my reality became editing large, corporate advertising campaigns. At this point I have come full circle and the pretzel stand seems to have been the one that got away.
One time I asked my father if his preference against cheese was due to his Irish Catholic family of nine living in a three bedroom house and maybe, I thought, they couldn’t afford it so he learned to live without? He responded, “Some people like cheese, some like squirrel.”
My father lives in suburban Philadelphia, not some country bayou — just so we’re clear where I get the wildly inaccurate self-assessment gene.
The pretzel stand appeals to me now, as it did then, because the expectations are so low. Be nice, make stuff, don’t burn yourself. There are no productivity apps at the pretzel stand to download or “thought leaders” believing their own hype. No one at the pretzel stand “circles back” or keeps anything but dough in the loop. The application did not include hanging all of my self-worth in a closet so I could embarrass myself trying to care about LinkedIn. When they called to give a start date, I didn’t think: Do I know a lawyer? This sounds like they own me now.
I have dreams that are borderline sexual about a receptionist job I worked at for years before I left to finish college. I think about this place, where they told me I could “do anything as long as you show up everyday and answer the phones.”
Today I paid fifty bucks to squeeze myself into a hospital cardigan two sizes too small and get felt up by a stranger doing the two finger press and roll on each breast. At least if I was stripping, they’d be paying me.
I gave birth to a brand new human being working the phones at this cubicle job and never received a bill — the health insurance was that good. Now, twenty years later, I stub a toe and leave the remaining four as payment with a career. I think I’m supposed to be excited and thankful about this level of care. Today I paid fifty bucks to squeeze myself into a hospital cardigan two sizes too small and get felt up by a stranger doing the two finger press and roll on each breast. At least if I was stripping, they’d be paying me.
Sarah Kendzior, the journalist and scholar behind the podcast Gaslit Nation, sums up the rock-meet-hard place of trying to live and work in the United States over the past ten-ish years in her essay collection The View From Flyover Country by writing:
Individuals internalize the economy’s failure as a media chorus excoriates them over what they should have done differently. They jump to meet shifting goalposts; they express gratitude for their own mistreatment: their unpaid labor, their debt-backed devotion, their investment in a future that never arrives.
Kendzior, who I’d follow into the deep end of a pool, continues later:
Survival is not only a matter of money, it is a matter of mentality—of not mistaking bad luck for bad character, of not mistaking lost opportunities for opportunities that were never really there.
You are not your job. But you are how people treat you.
Put that last line on a mirror and start every Monday with that kind of scorched Earth energy. Whew, I love this woman.
Before I sent my leave request, I called a friend to talk me down from my pantsless ledge. I aim for sure things, control what I can, mitigate disasters. What I was about to do came with an entirely new unknown. “Now what?” I said, scared. She paused and told me, “I’m excited for you. It’s more like: Now! What?!”
Which sounds comforting and exciting. It made my heartbeat settle into—not a perfect calm—but a warm, couch potato beat.
Then I called another friend who told me, “Fuck your funk.”
And we laughed so hard I couldn’t imagine two more strikingly different ways to say the same thing: treat yourself better.
Message received.
CURRENTLY
Nightstand: What Would Frida Do? // Arianna Davis
Reading: Sean Young on Surviving Hollywood’s Many Toxic Men // Daily Beast
Watching: L7: Pretend We’re Dead documentary // YouTube // ignore the subtitles
Listening: Angel Olsen // Aisles // Covers of 80s classics. Listen to Safety Dance
Coveting: Men Have Made A Lot of Bad Art t-shirt // Last print run is October 10th
SHARE FLOP ERA with the kind of person who has quit better jobs than this.