The Stupidest Thing That Ever Happened to Me, Part Two

The tiny altar of my old desk: Dexter the Emotional Support Peacock, "Oprah Rules" on a light-up marquee, a baby eevee that a student drew, a paper snowflake another student made me, Garnet being made of love, My Little Ponies saying "Friendship is magic," the times I met Cecile Richards, John Lewis, Hillary Clinton. Dear Prudence is on the monitor, as he always was when I had a spare moment.

My coworker and I went outside for a while and decided we would just lock up the store until Amy got there, but when I went in to lock up, 7-10 members of the security staff and the maintenance staff had formed a concerned circle alongside the fire chief. A member of the public safety staff, a young woman I’d never met before, said “Miss, you can’t talk to the chief like that.”

So, it was fine for him to come in reprimanding a grown-up citizen and to have to be cajoled into doing his actual job, but I was a serious problem for cursing. And it was more important to soothe this dude’s dignity than to make sure that the other dudes’ mistake had been fixed. Confronting this many uniformed people at once about this cascade of lunacy was too much. My coworker and I left the store with the ego-soothers and went to breakfast, which we admittedly should have done in the first place.

My wonderful treasure of a coworker took this opportunity to direct me to a nearby old-timey diner she’d been wanting me to try. While we ate a big, bacony breakfast and waited for Amy to arrive, my friend gave me some insight about the workings of the campus. She explained that campus public safety often tried to limit and even suppress calls to emergency services outside of campus, including in cases of sexual assault. In other words, the college was completely willing to put their students at risk if that meant fewer official incidents to report. The students and their families were paying thousands of dollars for students to live on a campus that prized its reputation over their safety. Including, it seemed, being willing to sacrifice their own property.

It has taken me a long time to write this down, partly because institutional horrors like this are hard for me to process. Anxiety brain connects the dots, and somehow, the whole world is conspiring against bodily safety for the stupidest of reasons: money, men who are scared to admit they’re wrong, preserving ancient gender, race, and class oppressions and most of all, protecting the institution itself.

In times when I tangle with authority, I tend to self-gaslight, so at the diner, my friend reassured me again and again that I wasn’t crazy, that there hadn’t been a better course of action, that it wasn’t my fault. Amy agreed as she sat down with us and ordered, but the (Rush Limbaugh listener) campus liaison had been on the phone and things didn’t seem good. I knew that Amy wouldn’t want to fire me, but I knew I was probably in trouble. Isn’t it weird as an adult, feeling the same in-trouble feelings you might have felt when you were seven or sixteen? The emotions of a traumatized kid never really leave me, they just find different ways to fight.

            The three of us finished our breakfast and went back to the store, where public safety was guarding the door I hadn’t been able to lock. The smoke smell had dissipated so I guess there wasn’t a fire. But that didn’t make me feel safer on a campus where I now knew that calling for emergency services was restricted, and, as I was about to find out, punishable.

I made some detox tea and turned to Dear Prudence for a few minutes, happy that after that I could finally turn to the online orders and other first-thing-in-the morning tasks, but soon, the Rush Limbaugh listening campus liaison was on the phone again. “I want her off campus,” he said, “Now.”

Amy couldn’t do anything about it. Security would be on the way soon. I lingered for a while, in denial, finishing my tea, my coworker determined to cheer me up with surprisingly hilarious old Veggie Tales episodes. (Rhyming “manatee” with “humanity”!! I can’t even!)

I packed up my pen cup, took some of my favorite employee art and customer thank-you cards off the wall. I left the sticky notes with happy faces and spangle-heart emojis. I’d posted one for each time I snuck some art or writing into my work days. There were so many sticky notes, in rainbow colors. When the store was packed up a few months later for Amy-swears-unrelated reasons, the ladies just left all the sticky notes there.

I wrapped up my archetypical work coffee cup, (Charlie Brown saying “Good grief!”) and all of my brightly colored pens. I would miss (until my next store) checking off purchase orders and dispositions in neon pink and light blue, writing thank-you’s on the online orders so we could all feel (okay, so I could feel) less like cogs in a heartless corporate machine.

The head of security, whom I’d known only as kind and helpful, was there to escort me off campus. I was afraid to tell anyone the story because I was worried that it seemed implausible—it still kind of does. I didn’t want anyone to know (and also I wanted EVERYONE to know) how poorly I was getting along with others, how I hadn’t been able to stop myself from letting a stupid mean man take away yet another thing I liked.

What scared me most, and still does, was that in the moment I called the unwilling fire chief a sexist piece of shit, it didn’t feel like a conscious decision. It felt like a pulse from deeper inside, from all the way in the center of the earth, like it was bigger than me and also totally stupid and mundane. I want to give myself a little time before the next installment, to think about what this all really means.

Thanks Bookstore! And What Comes Next

Yesterday was my last day at the bookstore. It’s hard to overstate the gratitude that I feel for the place—what I took for a straightforward and undemanding job ended up, of course, meaning so much more.

The day back in February when I emailed the OM to see if I could pick up some hours, the email was the only thing I was able to accomplish that day. I was still panicking hard, trying for an hour walk each day, writing down my dreams and not much else. After I sent the email, I was petrified that I would let everyone down, especially Amy, who’d be one of my supervisors.

I was worried that I was so broken that I couldn’t even do my old standby day job, which I love and which has brought me so much comfort over the years. I was still having panics in the grocery store sometimes, feeling unworthy of groceries I knew my former students’ families couldn’t afford. (Once a lunch-party guest, the brightest and most determinedly positive girl in the class, expressed envy of my baby carrots, she said her dad couldn’t afford things like that. I gave her all of my carrots and was never the same again.)

It was hard. For the first few bookstore weeks, I could pretty much only work and sleep. I rode with Amy to work most days, which, like the job itself, ended up making me feel both comforted and trapped. The shadows of school life lurked around with me, I was never sure if I was acting normal or like a mental case.

Sometimes, the young people who worked with me wanted to talk about Important Topics, and I would feel the fear and self-loathing and self-consciousness that precipitates a panic well up and I would have to stop them, but I found their existence so comforting—the wild-haired blogger who declared herself “sick of corporate America” and just stopped showing up, the philosopher who used the phrase “patriarchy as death machine” in casual conversation, they give me hope that everyone’s going to keep fighting evil, even as I move on to cozier ways of doing so.

But what I loved the most, what I’ve always loved the most, is idle work conversation. (This is why Clerks is one of my favorite movies, in spite of my brother’s complaint that nothing happens in it.) (see also: the season three OITNB conversation about the Black-Eyed Peas)

I love the genial, jokey exchanges of near-strangers, the kind that arises from the most exquisite boredom: parsing the intentions of cable radio pop singers, punning on book titles, eventually finding out what creative projects are lurking just beneath nearly everyone’s surface.

And in that spirit, another miraculous thing happened—I got a crush. One day a few weeks ago I was startled to realize that I’d flirted my way through eight hours, with only a break for lunch, and with a mix of embarrassment and exhilaration, I felt a return to myself. Another day went by like that, complete with him recommending an album and me typing while listening to it and settling back to the part of me that has muses, that gets a little giddy and then makes more things. He’s not a viable option, this isn’t that awesome of a story, but just to be off the rails a little, kind of dizzy in the head for someone, it gives me hope that I might still be capable of happily falling when the time comes. Also, it makes me just an eensy bit impatient for that time to happen.

I told someone yesterday during the process of goodbyes that I was broken when I started, and he asked if I was unbroken now. I’ll go with less broken—last week, I wasn’t sure if I had Lyme disease or was sick from all the racism news. I’m better able to engage with the world now, easing back to the Important Topics. It’s still hard to fight the sense of failure and the crippling self-consciousness that got exacerbated in the classroom.

Even though my poetry class is very fruitful and camp seems promising, it’s so hard not to feel like a failure about teaching. Talking to my brother-in-law, a born teacher, over the weekend, it’s hard not to envy the confidence he has with his career, with his place in the world. I envy my friends who all seem so settled, so at home in the world, in their families, in their work.

But playing Mario Kart with my nephew, I wondered aloud why I ended up off road so often. He said “Maybe you’re a…criminal? No, that’s not the word.”

“Outlaw?” I asked, and he heartily agreed.

Outlaw sounds about right. I hate the way that the school system is set up, the way it focuses on data and saps the creativity of teachers and students alike. I feel desperately jealous of my friends who slot so easily into their classrooms, but I have to sympathize with the intensely talented friends who’ve had their love and inspiration sucked right out—that waste isn’t okay with me. It’s not a sacrifice it seems right to make.

Somewhere in my love of connection and my madness for protecting creativity, I hope to find my next line of work. It may be in a nicer school or in homes or I don’t know where. I take comfort in knowing that summer art camp is a job that makes sense, that pays well enough, so maybe that can give me hope for the jobs that follow. My brain is still fragile, but I’m so grateful for the healing that the past four months have brought—thank you, self, for making summer come in February. Thank you, friends, who’ve supported and loved and written with me. Thank you, work, for bringing me back to myself. I’ll do my best with the road less traveled, and I’ll always choose the Kart with good offroad capabilities.