Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Shame, shame...

I have been absent quite a bit, and for this I must wholeheartedly apologize. As penance, this has been all the change that has happened to me to get me where I am today. This should completely catch you up.

This last year and a half has been a whirlwind of change. In June of 2011, I left my family and friends on a whim, hoping to change my life. I could no longer stand to see where my life had gone, working hours upon hours for a company that did not care about me, for managers that did not treat their employees with any sort of respect or dignity. I love my friends and family, but things were becoming too confining. My parents, while well intended, had become suffocating. At the age of 24, I should have been more, I should have done more. I couldn't go back to school because work demanded too much of my time. I couldn't change jobs because no one cared that you worked for Staples for 8 years with barely any promotion. Application after application was sent out, but not even one phone call for an interview happened. The only positive that I saw was the time I spent with friends who were able to take me out of that horrible little crevice I had dug myself into. I spent hour after hour wandering the streets of DC, going to shows as much as I could because for that little bit of time, I was happy and not thinking about work or home or failure. But even with this little escape, I understood that I'd have to go back to my world, go back to working excessive hours for next to no pay. I was unhappy to say the least, so I decided that I needed to make a change, and it needed to be dramatic.


In May I decided to visit a very close friend, really a brother. Paul had realized how unhappy I was and knew that I needed to do something different. He convinced me to sign up to work through the temp agency for Amazon. I applied, and didn't really put too much thought towards it. I didn't want to get my hopes up, but hey, anything's worth a shot. After a month or so, I got a call. Not only had I been accepted, I only had a week or two to get everything together. This meant dropping everything I had in Maryland and completely uprooting. This may have been the change I needed! I got the call at work, and I couldn't have been more excited to go into my little office and quickly type up a two-week notice and attach it to a time off request. While quitting work was exciting, the drive home proved I hadn't quite thought this one out... I may not have mentioned the whole applying thing to my father, who I knew was not going to be overly supportive. I was right. Telling him was pretty hard, and he was pretty angry, but after a few days of not talking, he was happy for me. I don't know how much my mom had to talk to him, but she did turn him around. She had known the whole time, so she was ready at a moments notice to catch his anger and shut him up. By the time I was ready to leave, he was finally happy for me. I think he understood how unhappy I had been and that I did need this change. I think it was more because my mom reminded him of how it was when he left home and how they didn't their relationship with me to be like they had with their parents. Whatever it was, I was happy and he looked happy.


Working as a temp agent, you don't get much. I worked hard for everything. I trained on as much as I could as fast as I could. I knew I was on the right path when the manager knew my name. The first few weeks were difficult, and many days, I would drag myself home and barely make it to the couch before passing out. I had already made friends in the area because of the time I had spent up here with Pauly, so weekends were spent going to parties. All was good until one night, one party. I had driven this road plenty of times, several times just that day in fact. On my way home, taking a teenager who had partied a little too hard, my car lost traction. Instead of turning with the road, my car decided to go straight... into a mountainside. While I was sober, my passenger was not. He volunteered to go find somebody to help us and ran off into the night. The area I had crashed in was right across from a little B&B, and all of the visitors were outside, worried and trying to help me. I got out of the car very calmly and asked a man to please find my glasses. Looking down, I was covered in blood apparently from my nose. The rational thing to do at the time was to go to my trunk, grab the towel and a bottle of water and clean up. I had a spare shirt in the car, so I changed into that. The man was very nice and brought me my glasses which were somewhere on the dashboard. They had informed me that the police had already been called and asked if I would like to have the ambulance there as well. I thought I was fine and turned them down. My nose was still bleeding by the time the officers had arrived. They asked me what had happened, and upon inspecting the interior of my car, they saw the blood. Very concerned, they asked who had been injured. I told them I had hit my face on my steering wheel on impact, and my nose was bleeding, explained that I had cleaned up and changed shirts. I was very calm in explaining all of this and this alarmed the fine specimens of law enforcement. Apparently, when in a car crash, all survivors are supposed to be wildly out of control. When questioned about it, I told them it would do none of us any good to be upset, that it was what it was and me being out of control wouldn't help either one of us. This got me my very first breathalizer test! I passed with flying colors. Even though I had left a party, I had not been drinking, nor had I been speeding. I had already called Pauly, who had come back to pick me up. The officers had me get back in the car as they tried to push it to the side of the road. That did very little good as the wheels were bent inward. But it did a fantastic job scarring me for life, hearing the sound, yet again, of metal on asphalt. For the next few days I was sore, and my nights were long as I could get no sleep. I had been fine that night in front of the officers, but when I got home and had time to mellow out, my brain would relive every second of the crash and I could hear the sounds of the car as it skidded over pavement. 


After about a month or two things seemed relatively calm again. I got a car, a little Mazda3 hatchback. My job had improved quite a bit as well. On a whim, I decided to go for a PA position which is much like an assistant manager anywhere else. I didn't do it because I thought I was good, or because I knew what I was doing, but because I hadn't been on an interview in years! I just wanted to see how this company ran and what they were looking for. By all rights, I shouldn't have gotten it. I had only been converted to an Amazonian less than a month prior.  I knew my job enough, but had no idea what a PA actually did. There was so much I didn't know. On top of it all, I had just recently dyed my hair firetruck red. Talk about making an impression... I walked into the interview putting all of my cards out on the table. I was 100% honest with all of my answers, just being myself. All of the questions were work related, not one even mentioning my hair, but I could feel some tension. By the end, one manager asked me if there were any questions I had or anything I would like to add... At this point, I felt like the elephant in the room must be addressed. "Just so you know, if I got the job, my hair would go back to a more acceptable color. I'm not really stuck on being a redhead." With that statement, everyone there let out a sigh of relief. They were comfortable talking to me now, and told me that hair color was superficial, but that they were impressed with my comfort at conforming to a norm. We discussed how it was hard, coming in to a new company, taking up a management position and being young were all hard enough stereotypes to conquer, let alone to do it with bright red hair. I left feeling pretty good about myself, but still without any hope of getting the position.


I waited and waited, but nothing. Until one night, one of the managers from my interview showed up. I was surprised he was going to deliver bad news in person. I expected a formal email explaining that while they appreciated my time, I was not qualified for the job, but that they would coach me in the future. He pulled me into a little office and sat me down. He explained both the positives and negatives of my interview. They liked that I was honest with them, but thought that I may be unapproachable by associates. They liked that I had done a lot in a very little bit of time, but felt that I was still inexperienced. (Not going well at this point) They had gone through quite a few candidates with far more experience, a lot more time and plenty of reason for them to promote... but one thing kept ringing in their heads: "Just so you know, if I got the job, my hair would go back to a more acceptable color. I'm not really stuck on being a redhead." My brutal honesty didn't just extend to my accomplishments at work, it extended to myself. The negatives that they saw in me, I had pointed out myself, and if I was willing to change my hair color, I was most likely willing to change the negatives as well. They were impressed! I got the job!


I changed buildings, changed jobs, changed shifts... It was a lot of change. Things didn't do much changing for a while after that. 


January 4th, 2012, while out with Pauly I got the most random text message I could have possibly gotten. I hadn't spoken to this person in years... In fact, we all joked, but it was entirely possible, he fell off the face of the earth. The text message was only 4 words long, but packed with meaning... "Bring me sushi STAT." For the next month all of my focus was on answering his messages. I was working days, so I'd count down the time until he woke up and started texting me and from there we would text into the wee hours of the morning. I would sleep a few hours and then repeat. We talked about everything, the past, present, and what we wanted the future to be like. We would ask each other questions about likes and dislikes, and our answers were so similar. Damien and I had known each other for years, but because of timing, we never got this deep before. After a few weeks of complete focus on this, we couldn't stand the distance anymore... Damien moved in. On February 4th, I drove down to Florida, completely on a whim, nervous, excited, jittery, and without any particular definition of  our relationship. 


10 months later and I regret nothing. Pauly has left to go to SC, and Damien and I are still together, happier than ever. I miss my friends. I certainly miss my time with Cha. I know we don't get to hang out, and usually, my trips to MD are short leaving very little, if any time for friends. I miss going to concerts and bars in DC. But, life has certainly picked up. Modern age has kept me in the loop, and texting, while not quite the same, has at least kept me in contact. I need to do better, and that will be my focus this year. Two things I would like to work on: My friends need to know I'm still there, and I need to kick my own ass and get back into a less rounded shape. 

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