I was in a dissociative state the last three days at work, completely numb to the utter chaos around me.
It’s REI’s biggest sale of the year — “A Sale,” or “Anniversary Sale” — and I can say, without a doubt, it brings out the most heathenish side of people I have ever witnessed. There were 2-3 dozen people outside the store doors on Friday morning, Day 1. The store traffic is insane; the phone line is constantly occupied. Footwear, call on line 3. Action Sports, line 4. Service Advisor, line 6. People are shoving shoes in my coworker’s faces, asking for attention when each of said coworkers is already working with 5 other customers. I folded more pants this weekend than anyone should have to do in a lifetime and re-racked hundreds of items of clothes. I am exhausted.
The only way to get through it all is to literally dissociate. There is truly no possible way to maintain a level of caring, optimism, and upbeat energy when you are being emotionally pummeled by customers. All you can do is tackle the problem in front of you as best you can for your 8 hours, then clock out. Think too hard about it, and you’ll break.
Well, after 4 days straight of dissociation, I thought a little too hard about it. I got in the car, called my parents, and cried over the fact that I had spent literally 32 hours of my life cleaning up after grown adults, putting things back in place. When a year ago I had a full-time job — with benefits. With paid time off. With open weekends. With reasonable pay. I reminded myself that it’s all temporary and that I’m doing my best. I took myself for an hour-long sunset bike ride and felt better. But I wish I had stayed dissociated.
Since it’s A Sale, management has been trying to boost our morale by providing free food and creating themed days. I don’t know how much our morale has been boosted, but none of us were complaining about making one or two (or three) hefty sandwiches each day of this last weekend with sides of chips. Friday was Hawaiian shirt day, Saturday was crazy sock day. Crazy sock day was sort of a conundrum for me, since I own — one could say — TOO MANY crazy socks. In fact, I own 5 pairs of donut socks alone. And I didn’t purchase a single one of them. I was able to narrow the socks to four options: beer steins, yellow submarines, donuts, or foxes. Not long after posting a poll of these socks on my Instagram, I had this revelation that my entire personality could be boiled down to my sock collection. Like, you could literally come to my house, and without looking at anything but my sock drawer, determine the person I am. I wonder how many people this also applies to…
Part of my dissociation at REI was a tactic to hone in on my “emotional content,” a term from my favorite yoga instructor at the rock gym, LeAnne. She explained in one class how our emotional content is the energy we’re unknowingly putting out. She explained, “You know, sometimes you’re having a great day, and you get your coffee and you thank your barista in a sunshiney way. But other days, you come into the coffee shop and you’ve already spilled yogurt on yourself and pulled a button off your shirt — and so you thank your barista, but in a snappy, harsh way. And that barista absorbs that emotional content, even though they had nothing to do with the things that happened.”
I realized a few ways that my emotional content showed up like that in the weeks following. For instance, a dad at the gym came up to me and introduced himself. He exclaimed, “I recognize you from 503W and REI! You work at the two best spots in town!” I gave a hollow laugh and replied, “Yeah, well, they’d be better if they paid me more.” He got a little quiet and awkward after that, and I realized that my words were so unfair and unsuspecting.
I’ve also found that when I’m at 503W and it’s really busy, I don’t always do a great job of remaining calm and kind when more customers enter the restaurant. I think my face and tone betray my stress, and I can tell the customers then feel bad for simply coming out to eat. So I’ve now tried to greet everyone who enters with the same enthusiasm, whether the restaurant is empty or packed.
At REI this weekend, in my dissociated state, I had a pretty much neutral face the entire time. I stayed unphased by the piles of clothes in the dressing rooms and answered customer questions with a smile on my face. The emotional content was level, consistent. But it’s so much easier said than done.
You know how Friends names all of its episodes starting with “The One Where …” something happens? Last weekend, it occurred to me that some of my best memories — best days — can be boiled down to a descriptor like that. I specifically had told Ryan how I remembered him scoring the winning soccer goal at his game on Cinco de Mayo last year.
“Remember that day? How we went to the climbing gym and then I went to your soccer game and you scored the goal? And then we went to Costco with your parents and then downtown to get a Mexican lager? And how we made Mexican food when we got home?” See, that was a memorable, fun day. An episode.
The sad thing about life is there are a lot of non-episode days. No one wants to watch the episodes titled, “The One Where Sarah Woke Up, Worked All Day, and Went to Bed.” But many days — for some people, most days — are like that. They’re like the “building” episodes in a TV show; they’re necessary but decidedly boring. We’d all much rather watch the fun college episodes, like, “The One Where Sarah and Marta Borrowed A Friend’s Dolly to Steal a Clawfoot Bathtub in an Alleyway Because Marta Wanted to Create Her Own Hot Tub.” Those are the episodes you want to watch over and over again, with the friends involved. (As a side note: Adults tell you not to stress too much in college about exams and grades, because you’ll forget about them. And they’re right! The studying and the classes are totally NON-EPISODES. The college debauchery with your friends? Undoubtedly episodes.)
I think I get unsatisfied with my life when too many days are “non-episode” days. I also have a lot of arguably episode-worthy days, but they feel repetitive. For instance, last Monday: “The One Where Sarah Was Supposed to Climb with Casey in Golden but Casey Had a Work Snafu So Sarah Did Errands and Had Lunch with Ryan and Climbed at the Gym with Casey and Ran at Run Club with Mira.” Kinda interesting, but also, I have so many Mondays like that — errands, climbing, run club. I feel like those days also don’t count as episodes, since you don’t watch shows where episodes across a season are virtually the same.
I want episodes all the time in a world where society keeps us boxed into non-episode routines and rituals. We’re told to get up and do the same job for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. We try to spice it up in the evenings with a happy hour or physical activity or social group, and we pray that the weekend will come soon to have free time. But then we’re so behind on the mundane tasks — cleaning, fixing things, organizing — that our weekends turn into non-episode days too. We’re not afforded episodes easily. I think that’s why I’m always scrambling, packing too many things into too few hours — I’m trying to make an episode out of each day. Otherwise, why bother watching the show?
The last time I talked to my brother, Fletcher, we talked for an hour. He is one of the most wholesome people I have the fortune to know. He had had a stressful situation go down at his work (he’s a teacher at an all-girls’ middle school), and he was facing backlash from frustrated parents despite feeling very secure in the decisions he and the school had made surrounding it. He told me, “The kind of silly metaphor I’ve been using this school year has been that teaching is kind of like curling. And each student is one of those stones. And we teachers are the curlers, and we are furiously scraping at the ice, trying to direct each student as best we can. Sometimes, though, the stone comes out too fast, and we can’t direct it the way we want. We can only try.”
I found the metaphor quite the opposite of silly. It was profound. Because you could really make it a metaphor for life. How each stone is an event, and you, as the curler, react to it by scraping the ice. A stone could be the unexpected loss of a loved one, a stone you can’t slow down. Or a stone could be like the business I’m starting to create: a slow roll that I am meticulously guiding as best as I can. This metaphor comes from the same guy who regularly secretly leaves home in search of a coffee shop for a good cookie he can eat.
