For context, I used to be a person that “didn’t give up” on jobs or people or anything. I grew up a Friends denomination church as a child (an insane offshoot of Quakers), leaving really only in my teens. Through this church and my family, I was trafficked most of my life. I didn’t know any better, I just thought that was how life was. I worked for family in factory conditions, at “gift shops,” I was a surrogate in some bizarre pregnancy ring when I got old enough, I danced at clubs when I was very much underaged, worked at A Seventh Day Adventist summer camp in Florida one year, and probably more that I can’t recall. I am slowly uncovering memories that I’ve repressed and it’s giving me a new perspective on life.
I don’t know how much education I got as a child, but somehow I managed to escape this vicious, disgusting community and go to college. It took me over 5 years, but I graduated college with a BA.
My first job out of college was a nonprofit that focused on autoinflammatory and autoimmune arthritis. It was cool at first, but we were remote and so we were expected to only bill them for the time we worked, not counting times we went to the bathroom, took a break, or got food. Working 8 hours there was hard. I was struggling with my ptsd, and I would space out for periods of time. This became an issue and my boss eventually asked if I could “stop working if I felt it coming on and work during on of the other 168 hours in the work week.” Which, it doesn’t work like that. I left for an in-person job, hoping it would be better.
I started at a Market that sold Fresh produce (if you catch my drift) as an assistant manager. At first it was fine, and I had no issues. Well, not no issues I guess. My direct supervisor told me (twice) that the discrimination training was “really funny because no one really talks like that.” As a genderfluid lesbian with a disability, I beg to fucking differ. That same supervisor has been known to approve days off months in advance and then turn around the week before and schedule them to work and him to have that day off. He doesn’t care about the people he works with and he schedules them days and hours that he’s been told they can’t work. We have a 73 year old woman who had a stroke last year who asked for 4 hour shifts only. He scheduled her for 6 hours next week. I’ve reported him to HR and nothing has really happened.
So, I got an offer somewhere else that seems like a better fit for me. It pays less money, but I’m willing to take the pay cut to go somewhere where I don’t think about killing myself every day. When my big boss found out, he cornered me in the office and started grilling me. I told him about how my supervisor was incompetent and he defended him, saying that the supervisor “learned a lot” during the HR meeting addressing my complaints. He also asked if I was “really leaving because of something that happened to someone else” and he told me my supervisor “made a mistake but is going to do better.”
The entire time I felt trapped and he tried to insist that he “worked hard to be approachable” (he’s not, he terrifies me) and that he “really thought I was going to stay and do good work because I just started.”
I don’t even want to go back. I’m so tired of this bullshit. I didn’t escape literal child trafficking for this. I didn’t claw my way to getting a degree after everything just to be shit on for trying to be happy. Y’all, I’m so fucking tired. The idea of going into work tomorrow makes me want to die. I’m sitting in the bath, crying at the thought of going. I have so much potential— my fiancé and I are meeting a man about painting a mural for him tonight and tomorrow I’m meeting with a woman about teaching community art classes about how everyone can be an artist and anything can be art. I just want to do art and help others heal like I have.
I remember a million times when I was sleeping on warehouse floors or on shitty mattresses, thinking that if I could just get out that everything would be better. It is better, but not in the way I’d hoped.