Tag Archives: working

Two Months Out Of The Gate: What I've Learned

College wasn’t the best time of my life. I didn’t stand outside smelly frat houses each week, lips stained red, and giggle at all the right moments while a stranger whispered sweet nothings into my ear.

That just wasn’t me.

But it was hard, in it’s own way, and I fell flat on my face some days. Some semesters. After, I emerged feeling like I had this whole life thing down.

It’s only been two months since then, but it already feels like I get daily lessons about what really matters and what’s true today. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

1. We work to live. Careful, now. Don’t think too hard on that one. When it sunk in, I felt this deep ache in my stomach, like it was the secret nobody had told me. All my life had been about achieving the next level, and now I was just working to pay the rent and the electric bill and the groceries. That was the big reason to get up in the morning?

2. Find pride in those hours. Some of us will sell Nathan’s hot dogs and large diet cokes beneath striped umbrellas. Others will haul packages into corporate offices. I will write stories of dogs whose lives are better because they had surgery done. And I will feel good inside, warm inside, because of that. Whether we vend food or deliver reams of paper or offer stories of hope, that makes my first lesson okay.

2. You have worth. I think, in some ways, I was waiting for college graduation to brand me not just with a diploma, but also a level of reassurance that now, I would have to be taken seriously. Now, people would answer my emails. Now, I would deserve as much respect as the person trying to cut me off in the middle of traffic. When that didn’t happen, when I didn’t cross an imaginary line, I had to go out and decide it myself. And every day from now on, I have to decide it.

4. It’s never what you expect. Just yesterday, I caught myself telling my coworker, “Hold on a second. I’ll Google it.” When said problem didn’t resolve itself, even after I followed the How To guide, I realized this: you can have all the knowledge you want about a certain decision or task, but it’s the next step that dispels all of that. That’s where the learning really begins.

5. No one expects rainbows. It’s been hard. These months have been downright difficult, at moments. And for so long, I held that feeling inside because I thought my strength lay not in handling life, but pretending to be fine just fine whenever anyone asked how I was handling life. Major changes? They’re hard. Always. Don’t be afraid to say that out loud. It feels good.

The one thing that seriously intimidates me about all this is that there is so much to learn. And so many years left. And what we take as truth today may shift drastically depending on the consequences of tomorrow. That’s scary. But at least, for now, it helps to write it down.

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All play and no work makes Kaleigh a dull girl.

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We’re doing this huge Jobbin’ In July campaign at Uvisor where I intern, asking people to tell their story and why we should personally help them find a job.

It’s been less than 24 hours, and already the stories are breaking my heart. Lay offs, medical issues, and families to support. Unemployment for more than 10 years.

There’s this episode of The Office where Michael Scott shovels a take-out container’s worth of fettuccine alfredo into his mouth to carb load before a 5k race. The pasta sits in his stomach the whole time like a rock.

That’s the feeling I get when I think about long-term unemployment. Like I ate too much pasta before a race.

It makes me wonder how these capable, love-filled human beings wake up each morning and plug through the day not sure if they’ll come out on the other side a little stronger.

That’s what it is for me. I want to come out on the other side feeling like I didn’t twiddle my thumbs or waste a single second. Maybe it’s the young energy in me.

I used to be the girl who jumped up and down waiting for her turn on the cheese mat to do a backward roll, pizza hands up. I’d do cartwheel-a-thons until my head spun and I had trouble walking straight. I’d ride the ocean waves into shore until the salt in my mouth made me sick to my stomach.

There was beauty and freedom in letting out all that nervous energy. Then I grew up, held it all inside, and tried to blend into the walls so people would stop making fun of me. It wasn’t cool to be spastic.

Now, I’m finally in a place where I either don’t care what people think of me or I know they’ll love me anyway. And I decided, without really realizing it, that what was more important was doing what I loved and throwing every ounce of energy into that no matter what.

I think I could handle unemployment for a little while. Please, dear God, do not test me too much on that. I think I have enough projects to keep me busy for a lifetime, but I’d have to turn those projects into something.

There’s girls to inspire and letters to write and hearts to lift. Minds to ease and money to raise and a whole country’s worth of silenced voices.

That’s what this campaign feels like for me. I feel like we’re standing back and giving these people voices. Like we’re handing them a megaphone in the middle of the Financial District and begging them to shout their credentials for all of Wall Street to hear.

As long as I am doing that, as long as I am working towards something concrete and real and I am honest-to-God helping people, I’ll have no reason to complain.

But then again, isn’t work supposed to feel like play if you love it? So maybe all play doesn’t make Kaleigh a dull girl. Maybe all play makes Kaleigh a smart girl.

"You know, that's really unprofessional."

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I am in the business of defending people.

I didn’t realize it. I thought I was a sales associate at a children’s clothing store, but if you look at the fine print on my job description, you will find it buried beneath all the more important tasks: picking up the clothes that someone else left behind. Adjusting prices for mismarked merchandise. Handling returns for babies who were too small or too big for the item.

There is probably a separate sub-section for the tough situations.

Returning the baby shower clothes for the child that was never born. Or dusting off the teddy bear thrown off the shelf and kicked around the aisles. And then there is the hardest task of all: defending people.

The woman in question scans the aisle for clothes while my manager, on her hands and knees, stocks shelves with diaper bags and receiving blankets.

My manager looks up, sees the woman’s butt right in her face, and makes a face. A “whoa-didn’t-know-you-were-right-there” face. And I make a face back, confused. A “what-are-you-making-that-face-for?” face. So she says it out loud (“I turned my head and her butt was right in my face”) and the woman turns, apologizing.

“You didn’t know I was there?” my manager asks, laughing.

The woman shakes her head. Two steps. One, two.

Then, “You know, that’s really unprofessional.”

She has a whole lot to say about the comment. About someone reacting, innocently, to something as simple as that.

“Who’s your manager?” the woman asks, looking from me to my manager.

“Me,” my manager said.

“You’re the manager and you’re acting like that?”

There’s more, I am sure, but I tune some of it out because that’s how it starts. And that’s all I need to hear.

“Ma’am,” I say. “She was just joking around. It’s not about you in particular.”

The woman points a finger at me, snaps like I’m defending a serial killer. “You know officer, he may seem like an awful murderer but it’s not his fault, really. He was unloved as a child. It’s his way of caring about people. Honestly.”

“You stay out of this,” she says to me.

I fold a t-shirt.

“I’m just saying,” I say, this time lower, “that I’ve worked with her for three years. That’s just how she is. She didn’t mean anything by it.”

She’s heard enough from me. I let them talk it out and go back to work. But the chills run up and down my arms like something wasn’t right. Like there’s something terribly wrong with this world when we can’t be ourselves because we might step on someone else’s toes.

Are we all supposed to tiptoe around like ballerinas because if we elicit any sort of human reaction we might ruin someone else’s day? And how can we ever read someone else’s futuristic mind when we don’t even know what we’re thinking ourselves most of the time?

My heart rate speeds up and I try to calm down. I walk over to the register, take a second to look around, and tell the next customer in line I can ring her up. Her. She doesn’t move.

I silently pray over and over and over that she might not. Because I know that I am strong-willed in the business of defending people. And the minute I let someone else make me feel bad about something, I’m thrown off kilter. I know she’ll say something else and I know I’ll have to bite my tongue, stuck between feeling bad for not being a better rescuer and feeling good for keeping my cool.

But please dear God do not mess with the people I love. Ever.

Aren’t we all just one misstep away from a mistake and even if we can’t see that misstep to know what it is? Maybe she’s never crossed that line herself, but the rest of us? We know how being human equates to being fallible. And I don’t know how to apologize for being human. I just haven’t figured it out yet.

Call me if you do. Call me if you know how to bite your tongue when the person you respect most is cut down for a silly little reason. I’m a fish out of water.

We trust a blindfolded 5-year-old with a Louisville slugger not to knock someone out; so why don't we trust a 21-year-old walking barefoot outside?

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My roommates yell at me if I go outside without shoes on. There’s always a reason. Someone had a house party last night and smashed beer bottles now litter the front lawn. There’s rocks and twigs and ice and — yeah, I know.

my cousin running along the shore, into the waves

The world is full of patches of black ice. We can’t see them, but then we’re spinning and we wonder how we could’ve been so oblivious in the first place. Because we cannot know what’s in front of us. Only that right now, we’re passionate about this one thing.

It’s not that I want to step on a shard of glass. Nobody does. But I want to be trusted. I want to walk barefoot.

Simple enough, right?

We trust five-year-olds to spin around blindfolded and not knock into the piñata or smack someone in the head with the Louisville slugger. So why can’t we trust a 21-year-old to walk into the street without shoes on?

A large part of me worries I won’t fit into the world. Because I would rather spend my Easter Sunday in a room with no air conditioning for 13 hours, coming home at 10 p.m. with dirty black feet and tired eyes. Because I would rather skip winter altogether and sit in an Adirondack chair, reading a novel with the ocean foam kissing my toes.

“Some days I want to live alone on the beach with a pad of paper and a pen,” I wrote three years ago. “I’d find the perfect spot, right where high tide hits. Not too far from the water so I could still hear it. And I’d write forever. There’s a lifetime of things to talk about.”

I went on.

“But then I have days like today when I just want 3 kids, maybe 4, and that chaotic life where I’m driving all over creation. Something where I wouldn’t have any time to think about what’s going on in my life, just that it’s happening,” I wrote. “I think that’s what would keep me happy.”

I won’t fit in. I’ll run in circles, undecided between wanting it all and none of it. I lose my roommates’ trust and I’ll accidentally step into the street without looking both ways. I can’t help but wondering if my transparency has worked in my favor.

No one should make you question yourself. No one should make you worry that you don’t have it figured it. Because nobody else does.

We’re all stepping into oncoming traffic, just in different ways. The black ice sneaks up on even the most cautious driver. There are an infinite number of moving pieces in the puzzle of the world, and we think we know the outline and where the one piece goes, so we try to shove it in. But it’s wrong. All wrong.

And so I’ll walk through the cool grass in the summer heat without shoes on. I’ll let the pavement blacken and callous the soles of my feet. Let the sun kiss the back of my neck. And time will wind down. Nothing bad will happen.

Trust yourself. Trust to know what you love and what you want and trust that nobody in this world ever really knows who they are or where they’re headed. All they really know, right now, is that they want to be where they are. That’s all we can know, isn’t it?

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