This Agression Will Not Stand

Let's set aside the obnoxious old saw that it takes more muscles to frown than smile and admit that, in situations that are frustrating or unpleasant, the path of least resistance is to be awful.  It's a hard thing to admit and most of us have the blinders on when it comes to our own tendency to be ungracious, but it's true and human and something that requires vigilance instead of denial.

The past few weeks at work have been particularly hellacious, an impossible numbers game wherein hundreds of people descend on our five-person operation with everything they own and, owing to a poor understanding of geometry, physics, and the notion that the world doesn't revolve around them, become enraged to find that we can't fit the astonishing pile of consumer goods they've deemed necessary for a weekend getaway on a boat immediately.

Look, I'm no angel where this is concerned.  No one ever thinks they're the one being unreasonable, and I'd like to imagine that I can claim the high road. Realistically, though, it takes an extraordinary amount of energy not to trade snark for snark, raised voice for raised voice, veiled insult for veiled insult.  I try. Really hard.  But while I'm mostly successful in not shooting first, I struggle not to fire back in kind and when I dig in for a fight, I am not fun.

That said, being on the receiving end of these shenanigans and being responsible for young seasonal employees who are still learning the operation but who are smart, courteous, and hard-working, and watching bitter hags having a bad day just eviscerate these kids makes me realize what a lot of assholes there are in this world.  And now that I'm more conscious of it, I see it everywhere that customer service happens: in stores, at the movies, in restaurants...Ev. Ery. Where.  Customers are awful, entitled know-it-alls.  Sure, sure, there are times when things are legitimately bad and someone needs to do a better job, but just look around and see how often someone in a line near you goes from 0 to subhuman because a grocery clerk needs a price check or won't accept their Canadian currency or asks them to wait a moment while they put out the fire that's just erupted in the trash can.

So the thing is, it takes a little bit of decorum, a little bit of restraint to overcome the junkfood-style satisfaction of being awful in the moment but it's well worth it because in the long run it's kind of soul-crushing.  Or it should be, if you're even kind of a good person.

Am I a broken record?  Maybe.  But if the easiest way to be is awful, it's worth reminding myself and others to be diligent about NOT being so as often as possible.

It's 4 a.m. and I'm about to go to work.  Today I will behave as though every customer is an alien new to earth and in need of guidance.  Today I will muster an appreciative laugh for lame jokes just to honor the spirit of positivity.  Today I'm bringing cupcakes to work just because.

Ready? Go!

We're Going to the Promised Land

I'm guessing most everyone's familiar with some variation on this phenomenon, but let's define a term real quick before I get down to business:

"Black Eye Season" is the nebulous off-season of businesses (or for that matter cities or states) that operate year-round but are largely seasonal.

During the long, dark, cold winter when things get a little sleepy people have a lot of time on their hands, a portion of which inevitably ends up devoted to grousing about working conditions in the long, dark, cold winter, and concocting grievances (both reasonable and un-) against co-workers, management and the cruel, cruel universe at large.

Those of you don't work in an industry like this can just picture Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Well-adjusted people don't live here anymore, Mrs. Torrance.

Good then. Let's go.

Loving Life, or, Oversharing by Way of Introduction

I have, by my reckoning, lived a charmed life.

I come from a large, close, sparkling family of gifted people: an ivy-league educated gentleman carpenter, an international law enforcement consultant, writers of the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry stripe,socialites, an Ultimate Fighter/ceramic artist, and our matriarch who was a basketball ref, dental assistant, and single mother of five children in the days when all three were unlikely positions for woman to find herself in.  The crown jewel for me is my mother, a kind, adventurous, underestimated lady who made me feel like the MVP of the world.  All of them are flawed, naturally, but in ways that are harmless and (mostly) adorable and mostly serve to make them attractively human and accessible.

I got some pretty awesome genes from them and whether by nature or nurture managed to pick up pretty respectable skills related to all of the categories above. (Except Ultimate Fighting.  Maybe I'd be good at that too, but I'm satisfied to leave that in the realm of speculation). As a kid I was a model student, played the viola and soccer, read early and often, wrote well and often, drew, sculpted, photographed, cooked, ran, played varsity tennis, cultivated a small circle of tight friends and got along easily with everyone else, and generally had a hell of a time.

A charmed life.  I counted my parents' divorce when I was a toddler as a blessing rather than a curse (children would rather come from a broken home than an unhappy one...that's right, I just quoted Dr. Phil).  There were no untimely deaths close to me.  I never broke a bone or suffered a serious illness.  I could offer a list of grievances to demonstrate that it wasn't perfect, but in the scheme of things, I really couldn't complain.

And I didn't, but somewhere around 13 or 14 years old, even in the midst of this great wealth of family, friendship, native gifts and good fortune, it became harder and harder for me to be happy.  If worrying about outrageously unlikely possibilities was a sport, I would have been the champ. Always a little reserved and introspective, I found that my brain, which had traditionally been a tremendous wellspring of outrageous plans and rewarding diversions, had morphed into an emaciated, slightly rabid-looking squirrel digging up a treasure trove of self-doubt, self-loathing, and any other self-hypen-negative-adjective you can think of.

I went to college powered by the last scraps of my confidence.  I quit. I went home. I slept on my mother's couch in what resembled a three-month sick day.  And finally admitted that I was depressed.

That admission was really the bottom for me.  Because I had a charmed life.  I could not, in good conscience, justify the depth of my despair when I held my life up for comparison with...well, in my estimation at that time, most of the world's population.  And adding utterly unnecessary fuel to the fire, it seemed hideously pathetic and unforgivable that, recognizing my good fortune, I could not pull myself up by my bootstraps and get happy, goddammit.

There was a therapist.  I hated him because he treated me like a silly child going through a phase.  I managed that quite well on my own, thanks. To this day, I think that the advice, "When God made time he made a lot of it," easily ranks among the stupidest, hollowest, most condescending ways to tell someone that they should let go of their total sense of failure as a human being.  I quit.

I'll gloss over the intervening years between then and now, by saying that they can be represented by increasingly shorter cycles of the same:  Infinite faith in the future, crushing sense of failure, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Make no mistake, in the "infinite faith" phases, I did a lot of great stuff, made a lot of awesome friends, lived some beautiful days that I held like totems against the bad times.  I learned to keep things on a relatively even keel so the landing during the  "crushing failure" times was less bruising.  I stumbled into an interesting and unlikely job that I still have today. I got married to a very good man.  I divorced him. I was elated, productive, miserable and sluggish by turns until finally I was just exhausted. 

And that's when I finally, after rebuffing the suggestion on the many occasions it came up over the course of fifteen years, waved the white flag and started taking an anti-depressant.

It was a big deal.  I'd resisted, vehemently, for a number of reasons. 

For starters, I prefer waiting to medical intervention just as a general rule.  I eschew aspirin and cold medicine. I've taken antibiotics a grand total of once in my life.  I've landed myself in the emergency room on morphine and fluid drips more than once because I thought I'd just wait out a flu or food poisoning.

The second, and probably most potent objection, was fear.  I was desperately afraid that the misery I wanted to escape was part of some kind of unwitting Faustian bargain, the price I had to pay in exchange for my talents, my victories, the stretches of enthusiasm and unfettered, childlike glee woven through the whole ugly mess.  It's not an uncommon fear.  It's probably true for some people, but I also think it's a naturally self-fulfilling prophecy.  When you've grown accustomed to exercising your gifts despite (or in a futile effort to alleviate) depression, it's easy to conflate the two.  Like an abusive spouse, your depressed self is horribly co-dependent.

But I did it.  I take a dose so low that I almost couldn't recognize the effects until I found myself in a typical trigger-type situation running the typical dirge-like internal monologue and had the remarkable epiphany that I was thinking depressed thoughts on auto-pilot -- telling myself that I felt awful, but feeling nothing of the sort.  Whatever was going on was annoying, unpleasant, a real day-ruiner. Not the end of the world or evidence of my fundamental fucked-upness, just a bummer.  It had been so long since something had just been a bummer that I actually cheered up at the prospect.

So that's how I converted to happy.  After years of torturing myself, I finally recognized the body I'd always considered a handy tool and a great ally was betraying me.  That in the end, I was literally my own worst enemy, my biology a double agent. 

I'm excited, engaged, delighted by chance encounters and small wonders.  And occasionally grumpy, which is awesome. Now I just have to deal with the repercussions of a different kind of emotional extreme.  I'm a 32-year-old 8-year-old, reconnecting with the dozens of things I love to do, exploring the hundreds of others that call to me.  Instead of figuring out what options will let me get by, flat out survive, I'm figuring out what I want to be when I grow up. It's exhilarating and liberating and more than a little scary and I'm infinitely grateful for the challenge.