February 29, 2012

Today, I went back to my therapist after a long pause, to figure out a way for me to deal with the stress of my work, which routinely involves me smiling while rich housewives chew me out for things that aren’t my fault. People dumping a lifetime’s worth of insecurities and asking me to make it all better for about $12 an hour. Other days when I make people feel beautiful when they have felt ugly, and just making some people feel normal who have spent years feeling like freaks.  But, I told him, the thing that sends me home to drink a bottle of wine by myself, is just knowing that the world is woefully without compassion. Imagining what someone’s life is like, what they think of themselves and others, that drives them to verbally torture a retail worker without considering how that makes a fellow human feel—I can’t imagine. People who go about life without any consideration of anyone else, or chasing an impossible ideal. I get angry with the people who made the one person so bitter that she walks into the mall and corners a retail wage slave and yells at her until she has to go into the back room and cry for a moment. I said, “Sometimes I think that, despite my outward nonchalance, that I’m too sensitive for a world where small nuggets of brutality come along with a regular, minuscule paycheck.” Being scolded for things that aren’t your fault—or anyone’s—to being held responsible for “curing” people of their insecurities…I dunno. I could never have guessed that this is what I was signing up for when I took this job. My point is to please, please be kind to your waiters and your retail workers and your shoe store guy and your pharmacist and the person you call to dispute your telephone bill. They are people and they have feelings and hearts, and you don’t even know each other, but every mean thing you say and do has a huge impact. Please try to be kind. The people who need it the most are the people you don’t even think about the moment you break eye contact. 

Today, I went back to my therapist after a long pause, to figure out a way for me to deal with the stress of my work, which routinely involves me smiling while rich housewives chew me out for things that aren’t my fault. People dumping a lifetime’s worth of insecurities and asking me to make it all better for about $12 an hour. Other days when I make people feel beautiful when they have felt ugly, and just making some people feel normal who have spent years feeling like freaks. 

But, I told him, the thing that sends me home to drink a bottle of wine by myself, is just knowing that the world is woefully without compassion. Imagining what someone’s life is like, what they think of themselves and others, that drives them to verbally torture a retail worker without considering how that makes a fellow human feel—I can’t imagine. People who go about life without any consideration of anyone else, or chasing an impossible ideal. I get angry with the people who made the one person so bitter that she walks into the mall and corners a retail wage slave and yells at her until she has to go into the back room and cry for a moment.

I said, “Sometimes I think that, despite my outward nonchalance, that I’m too sensitive for a world where small nuggets of brutality come along with a regular, minuscule paycheck.”

Being scolded for things that aren’t your fault—or anyone’s—to being held responsible for “curing” people of their insecurities…I dunno. I could never have guessed that this is what I was signing up for when I took this job.

My point is to please, please be kind to your waiters and your retail workers and your shoe store guy and your pharmacist and the person you call to dispute your telephone bill. They are people and they have feelings and hearts, and you don’t even know each other, but every mean thing you say and do has a huge impact. Please try to be kind. The people who need it the most are the people you don’t even think about the moment you break eye contact. 

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  1. this-here-is-unrelated reblogged this from hermusery
  2. moshu said: AMEN! Damn that was a fine, direct and much needed rant! You rock baby!
  3. hermusery posted this