The trite saying seems to say that "What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger," and yet, for most of life, it doesn't even come close to feeling like that.
Since January 9 of this year, I returned to my former job making a nursery, owned by three coworkers, thrive. Thrive is a code word for work your employees to death while demeaning them, creating a pyramid of favoritism that reminds one of high school, underestimate most of them and puff yourself up to look like a caring, helpful and somewhat less than totally fake retail human. Huh. Thrive indeed.
I have worked like a demon each week and especially creating the nursery into a place of beauty after a very cold winter. Winter became Spring and people poured in with their checkbooks. It looked good and an early start of gardening began to appear. Some vampires skirted the sunshine to appear with their sunglasses on asking repeated questions like some kind of trial lawyer and instructing us to pick up plants for them as if we were Egyptian slaves. Well, we are slaves but actually all white all now.
I am tired. Or rather, I became tired of the games, the drama, the shame and blame bestowed upon me by the three heads of a business built upon a 1941 farm stand that ended up at the busy corner where several new retail ventures threaten to close it down. Location, location, location. In the past month and a half, two people quit and one was fired. Four new chickens were brought in to join Lucy and Gertie, much to their chicken chagrin. Humans go, chickens enter.
I was horrified when, in April, the sharp comments and ensuing blame became the standard for my low paying job. A strange energy began to take up residence and the nursery workers became the pin cushion for barbed comments and overtly hostile criticism for efforts not commenced at lighting speed nor executed with the precision of a surgeon. The slaves were becoming slackers? Hardly.
For someone, like myself, who came to work as a favor for another coworker at death's door, gave all she had and about 20% beyond that, surely the smallest worker in residence, the hostile management traits began to make me fume and blister. I wondered what I had done to deserve that kind of erratic harshness and I wondered what had happened to my "beautiful wife?" When the spring was over, business slowed radically. We all began to be bored and searching for projects and tasks to keep us employed. The slaves became restless or at least, I did.
First, one cashier fled to Wyoming, then another veteran moved off to Oregon and then a third was fired for some obscure reason still unfathomable. I continued my search for a respite, each day wound up in knots and each day trying to see how I might act more generously. In the end, I was just pissed and I didn't care how it looked.
I am not really excited though truthfully, a vacation would be something I could get behind. I feel exhausted physically and emotionally. It turns out that I walk about 30 miles a week there by my new pedometer and that is a slow day in the nursery. I am not excited yet I am overly ready for calm and direct criticism of my efforts given without shame. I am ready for a higher wage and medical benefits. I am ready for P.T.O. and a chance to be something more than a pyramid slave. Simple. Calm. Steady.
What doesn't kill you requires a brief hospital stay is more like what I imagine. Stronger? Not so much.
Adios.
