advice
Posted January 7th, 2005 by MichelleA person very, very dear to me is having troubles at work. Indeed, two people very dear to me are having trouble at work but one is 3000 miles away, and that’s the one I’m worried about at this moment. I hated my job from fall of 1995 to summer 2004, but I was good at it, and it made me enough money to get by. It was this little-known professional called “waiting tables” and I always used to tell myself that I’d pulled one over on the rest of the world by discovering this oh-so-deeply rewarding job. When the 9-5 hacks were sloshing away in their cubicles, I was sleeping in, or taking a bike ride, or walking around the park, or reading. I would go to the beach on a Tuesday morning, a museum Thursday afternoon. I would leave work with cash in pocket, rather than waiting for a pesky paycheck. I would tell the government only what it wanted to hear but not a penny more when tax time rolled around. And I’d work only four shifts a week and make more than my friends working full-time. My days were free, my evenings filled with music and people having a good time.
Except… except I don’t like staying up late. I love mornings, and I never saw them. I may not have paid a lot of taxes, but I had no health benefits, no paid vacation, no retirement, no savings. And when my family and friends got together on Friday nights, when someone would come to town for the weekend or invite me away for the weekend, I could never see them, could never go. I would wander Chicago/Los Angeles/New York on my own, because everyone was working. Except for most of the time, I stayed home and slept because my four shifts were so physically challenging, so emotionally draining that I needed two full days just to recover. And the people I was working with and for never liked me, not once. I was a relatively good person in the midst of sharks, a geek surrounded by high-school-esque cliques who never wanted to let me in. I didn’t smoke pot, and I wasn’t bitter and sharp, so I was excluded from every possible clan. I was belittled by management and ridiculed by fellow staff members.
Everything changed for me on 9/11. I shudder to even write that, since it makes me nauseous when anyone dares lay claim to such a statement, but it’s the only way I can explain it. All my life, a small handful of people have told me I was a leader, that I was truly capable. Over a number of years, I went from thinking they were stating the obvious to thinking they were delusional. But that night forced me to remember what it is I am supposed to do. Even then, though, I had to be told to take the reins- there were always so many brothers or co-workers or some other band that I would allow to overshadow me, even if it wasn’t their intent- and I didn’t think I knew how to command. I get flashes, sometimes, not just of that night, but of being eleven years old and irate that I was moved to second chair cello for a concert: it was a political move, and I was furious because I was the best. I knew it, and so did everyone else. I remember my parents coming in to the theatre during the dress rehearsal and catching my eye and I looked at them, looked down at my seat, and back at them and managed just to barely shake my head at the injustice. I remember visiting my high school choir teacher in the hospital after a heart attack and telling him not to worry, that i was putting together our spring show and that he needed to relax and recover. I remember hours in the practice room in college on a Sunday night, teaching myself the next week’s music so I’d be prepared to run sectional. I remember believing I was smart- not brilliant- but smart enough to do what needed to be done.
The nights of that September were shocking not just for the obvious reasons, but also because it was like the real Michelle suddenly appeared to whup my ass. She held up a mirror and asked if I was fucking joking. I was not meant to be doing what I was doing- I was not meant to be taking pride in being a great server, or crying about the unfairness of my life. But it took me two solid years after that September to quit that life and that job…eight years in all. I leapt with all my might, barely holding out hope that the net would appear. It did, less than a year later, and now, in the same way it’s hard to remember what cold feels like during a July heat wave in New York, I can only barely remember what it felt like to loathe my job. Although I have to admit, sometimes I can’t enjoy going out to dinner because all I can see are the cracks in the machine of serving: I know how brutal it is, and I know also that it is quicksand.
Two years ago, if you had told me that I was going to have a 9-5 job, with a desk and an office and letterhead and meetings and a fancy title, and that I was going to love it, I would have laughed at you and perhaps given you the finger. That’s not my life, I would have thought. Because I thought that the only thing that would make me happy is performing. It still feels a little sacreligous to admit that something other than performing brings me joy. But there was also a lot of terror in performing for me- fear that I wasn’t as good as I should be, fear that I wasn’t going to get the next show, and good, plain ‘ol stage fright, actor’s nightmare sort of stuff. There is no terror in my job now, no harrowing fear of failure. Not because I will necessarily succeed, but because I’m doing the absolute best I can and I feel no shame.
And so I think of my dear friend, my dear sister, and I know exactly what she’s feeling. I don’t know what is right for her, but I do know that she is so… god… so otherworldly in her brilliance and her talent and her, well, capability, that she could do any damn thing she wanted. She’s under the thumb of an asshole right now, and it will simply never improve. I am not one to give advice, because nothing that applies to one person necessarily applies to another, but if I dared speak, I would say one thing: run. Run like hell. Get the fuck out of there. There is NOTHING you can’t do. If you have to work a crummy day job, chances are that in a city of 8 million people, you could find a boss who isn’t an asshole. You have always hated that job. Run.
Heck, run all the way to San Francisco.