CAEEERS AND FEARS

I’ve reached an age in my life where reflection has taken on a multiplicitous ( I think I made this word up, better for meaning than duplicitous) nature. I remember my past self, and I remember remembering my past self, and so on back to the age of 4 or so, (each day a new me emerges, you see) and the reflections and projections I made at each of those times. I have had a good life. A beautiful life and at times a terrible life and I am hyper-aware how each moment has shaped today’s me. Changes are usually subtle and unnoticed except when they are not, like my decision to declare and my college choice, and, thus far, my career choices.

Something I have been increasingly aware of is how the past five years of waiting tables and being in sales has changed how I relate to people and how I think the thoughts in my head. My spiritual self is rearing and snorting in protest at some of those changes, my intellectual self is FASCINATED to see how easily what I thought was ‘core me’ could so easily be changed, so malleable what I thought was stone. It is hard to explain, and certainly I am grateful to the experiences which have nevertheless pushed me well along my way to independent adult-hood and provided much fodder for those best-selling novels I will someday write, but there is in me a way of thinking now, an automaton smile and a knowledge of how to manipulate, ever so subtly, PEOPLE, to get what I want. (Except it is not what I want, but what my bosses all want, more money, more business, more renown, but I need to eat so I do it.)

Here is the conflict, or the irony, though, I have also learned to be more sensitive to other’s feelings and address them “accordingly,” even when I didn’t understand remotely why they might feel that way, only to have these same people shower me with gratitude and unexpected kindness and/or respect. I have learned to remove myself emotionally from situations that may have hurt me in the past in order to ‘get the job done’ effectively. Example: Mr. Man needs 200 t-shirts for a company picnic in 4 days. (standard production is, of course, 7 days) He calls me and from the start begins to verbally abuse me and threaten me with taking his business elsewhere if I don’t give him what he wants yesterday. I used to get scared about that, thinking “what will my boss think if I ‘lose’ this order? And I got flustered and frustrated that the client is putting such a rude pressure on me. NOW I empathize. I think about how his ass is probably grass if he doesn’t get this order completed and he is thinking about his boss as I am thinking about mine. In the past, if someone spoke to me like that I would walk away or give them a piece of my mind.

Now I take a deep breath and smile and tell them I understand how frustrated they must be. I then tell them I will do everything within my power to help them. And you know, sometimes, it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes my company (or, before, the restaurant) would pull some miraculous feat outside of the norm and actually print 200 shirts and have them delivered yesterday, and sometimes my company would not. But even when it did not, my reassurances to the man, or woman, in distress, would calm them down. Afterwards they would thank me profusely and be kind to me ever after. Lots of times they even came back to give my company more business.

Strange how that works, huh? So I am thankful for the lesson. Shower them with kindness….serve with humility….

I decided against being a daily news reporter years ago because of the amount of anger the readers would direct our way when I was a reporter (intern) at the St. Paul Pioneer Press for a few months. But I loved the fast-paced environment, and I loved the challenge of taking an actual event and turning it into a story on paper. I still love that, getting the front page story, coming up with things I thought people should know about and then getting to write about them. But (this is the ultimate motivation behind what I am writing about) I was paralyzed with fear to take on people’s anger. My self-esteem was fragile and it was difficult not to internalize it all. So I quit. And I had a brief stint in the magazine world as well, but when things didn’t work out, I didn’t fight for it. I wasn’t ready. And ironically, these last five years have made me ready! I can face you, anger and hate, I can, and I can be resilient and strong in the face of adversity, and this is exciting news. I mean the world IS an angry place and people I think can place entirely too much importance on trivialities, but I/we still have to live in it and live our lives living in it. No excuse to hide away, you know?

So with all that said, I am not going after the newspaper job. Not yet, maybe not ever. But I am writing (for magazines) and I am no longer afraid to believe I deserve a chance at the career of my choice. Run-on sentences aside, wish me luck in the search!