Work Redefined

It is your choice where you land

Of course, the money enticed me. I did not care about delivering anyone’s newspaper. But I did like collecting payments from customers on the way to the mall to buy coke bottle gummies. However, every month I would end short of what I owed, and my dad begrudgingly paid for the neighborhood’s paper to be delivered for over a year.

The context of my life teetered around preoccupied hippy parents who married after five years of courtship in a Buddhist temple at the Self Realization Center in Santa Monica, where speaking was prohibited.

My dad was my mother’s drug dealer, and several years into the relationship, they moved to Thousand Oaks. Prior to that, they lived in Venice, California, and partied with the likes of Jim Morrison and such.

Three weeks before my tenth birthday, my mother left the family. My father worked many hours at the Hollywood studios, leaving my brother and I alone to figure out the world.

I truly believed they meant well. But the extent of neglect created an unusual child. I made my own dinner at seven. I visited the mall alone at five. At seven, I wrote the mayor to complain about the lack of bike lanes on the roads. He returned my letter permitting me to ride my bike on the sidewalk. Furthermore, I did not make a single friend until the fifth grade: unaware I was truly alone.

Underneath it all, I possessed a strong ability to overcome insurmountable obstacles because I believed that Wonder Woman might be my twin flame. And becoming employed was highly tied to my sense of worth.

The fear of being abandoned loomed over me, and I only felt safe when I had a job. At eleven, an ad to hire a papergirl appeared to be my only option. With no experience and a great smile, the local newspaper offered me the job without the consent of my parents.

My Work Ethic Revealed

Customers that complained about me coincidently found eggs on their garage door. Sometimes I would roll the papers; sometimes, I would walk around holding stacks and drop each paper in front of their doorstep.

My biggest complaints were as follows:

1. I didn’t particularly enjoy waking up at 5 am on Sunday mornings. 2. My hands were laden in ink all the time.

This set a precedent for my all-consuming hand washing for the rest of my life, among other OCD habits that made me a valuable employee at many jobs.

By seventeen, a compilation of short-term jobs became my showpiece for future interviews. I babysat at twelve but never returned because the mom found out I locked her little girl in the closet. At Zuma beach, I worked as a cashier. The only issue in the building was that if I touched the cash register at the same time as the ice cream cart, an electric shock would flow through my body for several seconds holding up the line. Then a friend referred me to a man who owned two stores: a vacuum supply store and a video store for everyone’s VCR pleasure.

At the video store, I was forced to work alongside the owner’s wife. She clucked like a chicken to entertain herself and monitored my every move. Often, she would question a customer that rented porn: wanting to know their reasons for watching. I turned bright red every time until I finally quit one day shouting, “ Your wife is crazy” as I walked out the door.

I worked at a cart in the Topanga Mall and never sold one piece of merchandise. The tall good looking guy who worked at the adjacent clothing store kept me preoccupied. However, the sex was definitely not worth the cart going bankrupt.

The other girl who worked there dated a Crip named Heavy D who sold me pre-rolled joints. Rationalizing that a writer should experience an onslaught of crazy adventures authenticated my dead strong belief to hang out with his friends until the day someone tried to break into his car. They all pulled out semi-automatic weapons with the intention to kill him.

Clearly, the daily grind was fraught with trouble. And my naivete emboldened me to take chances far riskier than I realized.

Still, I managed to keep a janitorial job at a hospital for several years, cleaning the blood and fat off the walls. While such a job may be demoralizing for others, I learned that fat could be squished forever and never break, much like silly putty and bloodstains are harder to clean than eggs to a garage.

On My Own

On my 18th birthday, I applied as a waitress. Little did I know, I would know these people forever. And while every job contains some dysfunction, the laughter between the staff as we passed each other on the floor still echoes in my ears.

Until then, being a 5' 11" tall blonde opened many doors for me. But my general manager beat me into submission. Like an overbearing father that never smiled, I was on his radar. My lackadaisical behavior led him to retaliate by yelling and humiliating me, but I needed a person like him to learn accountability.

All the managers drank in the cooler on shift with the staff, and on our days off, we spent many days in that same cooler drinking beers before heading out to drink beer. Suffice to say, drinking on shift seemed mandatory, and somehow, we pulled it off.

On one Friday night, the general manager awaited my arrival.

“I need to talk to you after your shift,” he summoned. Every connective tissue in my body attached to my sympathetic nervous system, leaving me terror-stricken throughout my five-hour shift. There was no one to rescue me if he fired me. I was on my own.

I painted on a smile and served each table by using my gift for hiding emotions: a gift that would someday haunt me.

The general manager requested a six-pack of beer when I found him preparing his ritualistic sadistic badgering session in the basement. Every second that passed, I envisioned new scenarios of my life painfully ending with a whip of his tongue.

When I handed him the six-pack, he retorted, “That is for you.” The alcoholic in me overrode my common sense, and I asked him to wait a little longer because I preferred blended margaritas. I slipped in a couple of shots before I returned; liquid courage was my only weapon in the face of this man.

“I looked through your cocktail tickets over the past year.”

“Okay,” I thought, unimpressed.

“On every ticket, you added random tax amounts but then never turned in the money for them in your paperwork.”

Hmmm…that sounded extremely typical of me. On my Saturday shift, I worked in the bar, and I got slammed every week. I served food and drinks without a busser and often served more than twenty tables at a time.

Minus, pocketing a year’s worth of taxes, to my credit, when I dropped that shift, management hired two cocktail waitresses to maintain a functional level of service ahead of the rush of people.

However, I chose not to defend myself. He had caught me red-handed.

The truth is I did not purposely steal the tax money. I skipped steps when I wrote each check by calculator because the chaotic situation placed me in survival mode. And, I was that absent-minded. I deplored details. Speed and charm were my skillsets. And after he drank the sixth beer, as expected, this otherwise quiet person scolded me.

“You can be a ten in serving and a ten in pleasing the guests, but if you are a zero on your paperwork, what does that make you?” He asked.

I did not reply.

“Ten times tens time zero equals zero. Bozo, the clown, could do a better job than you, “and he went on and on, demeaning me. I could not comprehend the severity of my mistake, perceiving my scolding as unjust.

I worked hard at that job. Starting as the Hot Dog girl at happy hour, moving to the buffet line, serving customers unlimited eggs and beans by spoon. I hosted, I served, I bartended and I was at their beck and call at every moment.

I vividly recalled pleading with the general manager for one day off a week, “The schedule is ink, and your name is in pencil,” he muttered. Therefore, the only way to get a day off was to pay another coworker to pick up my shift.

For some reason, he did not fire me. But all I wanted was to get the hell out of there. I began applying to other restaurants all over town. When the general manager found out, he called me at home late in the evening.

Drunk, I answered the phone, and he told me he did not want me to quit. But my grandiosity was on high alert, and I am almost positive I called him a motherf*cker and demanded that he never speak to me that way again.

The audacity of my youth left me blindsided about the value of work. Work, in itself, was merely a way to provide me with my basic needs. I did not understand that this man would be an integral part of training me to be an excellent employee.

Unaware that there are no shortcuts to the top, someone finally stepped in and put me in my place while having mercy on me for being so short-sided. He will never know how much he taught me as I continued to be hired by various employers for several years.

One thing I am certain about is that no “one” person would be able to humble me. However, life would beat me down. That was inevitable. And while I fantasized about a time where I would not work again, I continued agreeing to meaningless jobs, wondering when I would get my break.

Work Redefined

The irony of life is as such: our wishes are granted but in an unexpected way. And at 34 years old, I began over a decade of being unemployed due to several major surgeries.

I laid in bed with debilitating pain, day after day, in pursuit of no agenda. Many people told me how lucky I was to be free to stay at home. But, one can only get so many manicures, watch reality shows, or interact on social media and take care of their basic needs for so long. Slowly a touch of madness crept in on the down-low and manifested into a deep depression. And that depression hit me like a freight train.

Work serves a purpose. The opportunity to obtain meaningful work relies on hard work, baby steps, goal planning, and a leap of faith. No one is truly stuck, but one’s mind may say differently.

My husband is a physician. So for many years, I did not work because I envied that what I would make in a day, he could make in an hour. The difference between him and me is that he chose to work for seventeen years as a student and follow his dreams. Whereas I believed being charming was enough to reach the top.

Therefore, convincing myself of being useless became my new line of work. Marrying him opened exciting opportunities for me like living as a US Diplomat, traveling, being elected as a school board member, and learning the distinct differences that climbing the socioeconomic offered.

Before I met him, a fear of homelessness lurked heavily in the back of my mind. I would often wake up drenched in sweat as my panic gave in to the relentless belief I would end up on the streets.

However, that fear kept me motivated. And that motivation trickled into every aspect of my life. Without it, I lived in my head, the place where my inner committee commenced long meetings pointing out my failures.

I am not sure if I was the walking dead, but the pain pills, extended naptimes, and my inability to move opened the gates for my demons to rummage. It was not until I began talking about my pain to another person that I noticed an improvement in my mood.

Work became redefined. I pried open barriers built in childhood, exposing unknown traumas. To move forward, the desire to live became critical, and it was imperative that I let go of the idea of ending my life. I was a wife, a mom, a friend, a sister, a confidante to many, an aunt and woman with much to offer the world.

My Purpose Found

When I finally returned to my lifelong dream of writing, purpose replaced the dread, and I welcomed the idea of working. Apparently, the concept of work is on a spectrum. Where one chooses to land evolves. Working a job played only a minor role when compared to the importance of working on self-care and facing fear.

The beauty of work is the meaning it provides. Every living creature is working to survive on this planet. When humans surpassed the survival mode, neurosis ran amock. However, innovation transpired, too. As did love: the force that drives a person to seek enlightenment.

The truth is no one really has to work. There is always a choice in the matter. Choosing to stay alive versus choosing to die underlines that choice. And life can be so beautiful even when it is hard.

Now, upon awakening, I am eager to begin working. I am motivated to write and work with young people because my life has meaning outside of my ego through the means of creativity and my need to help others. It is as if the work finds me.

And yes, delving into one’s psyche and observing one’s behavior can feel overwhelming; but every part matters. My willingness to be vulnerable places me out of my comfort zone and smack dab into the wonder and curiosity life brings.

Being too comfortable is dangerous. It leads to complacency. I would rather stand in the cold and feel the wind on my face because I cannot deny I am alive in that discomfort.

For when one works, the consequence of the work is the reward. It is the mark of existence. It is what is left behind after our last breath is taken.