Weekly Thoughts 8/5/23

It occurred to me the other day that I am a very self-centered person. It’s not something I’ve ascribed to myself and have actively run from in the past, because I don’t want to be a bad, selfish person. But I don’t think it means that. I am nice and try to be patient to the best of my ability, and I’ll usually help with whatever when asked. But also, I live alone, I don’t have friends to hang out with, and I don’t have a love life, which means I don’t have anyone that I have to make changes in my life to accommodate. And I don’t take other people into account when I do anything. Why would I? It’s not something that I can practice on my own, either. My life can’t change until I change my life. Until then, though, I don’t think it’s like a negative about me as a person. It’s just a skill I don’t have.

This week…You’d think I’d have a better idea of what I can write about for this, since it’s just whatever I’ve been thinking about in a week, but it’s really in one ear and out the other with my constant radio DJ chatter. Like, so many of my thoughts are in the form of words that I think it contributes to misidentifying emotions. I can sound smart enough to fool myself, so if my fear, anxiety, or sadness takes the form of an hours-long freeform essay, it all seems like productive working through of feelings. Very verbose emotions, I have.

But there is one exception. I am angry for large portions of my workdays, and often while driving. Probably the most common times, as I’m sure everyone can attest in their own lives. And when I’m angry, it’s immediately obvious to me, to the point that I often think of it as a defining trait, which I don’t like. I don’t want to be an angry person, as my personality. But I am often angry, in a very visceral, irrational manner. The amount of time I spend in a day cursing out customers in my head who leave shirts in the wrong place and wishing some form of violence on them is not insignificant. It’s never like a simple, “Ah, jeez, that really grinds my gears!” type of anger; it’s always a, “I am going to murder everyone in this room, I hate everyone and everything so much,” kind of anger. I have a lot of things that have bothered me that people do that I can’t stop or alter in any way, and as soon as I see another example, I can feel the pressure jump to the top of my skull. I immediately want to beat up everyone who leaves a shopping cart in front of a cash register. I once had a panic attack because I had to hold back so much anger listening to a coworker – a superior, to be clear – lie to customers to get them to sign up for credit cards and generally spew so much nonsense that she would regularly take ten minutes with each transaction. Like, I’ve had customers thank me for being the cashier they got instead of her, and others see how fed up I was with her and apologize to me for it. So yeah, one time I was so wound up about it that I could feel a change in my body and mind, like they were separating, and I was barely aware of what was happening around me. It was pretty scary.

I’m sure that if anyone I know read that, they would be surprised. I was once told I had “golden retriever energy” and my boss said one thing she was worried about with me wanting to move up in the company was that I was “too relaxed.” I still don’t know what that means; if it’s not clear, I don’t think I am a relaxed person at all. But it’s true that I am very nice and kind and I volunteer to do what’s necessary to finish the day strong. I am a good listener and very empathetic, to the point that I’m often a person people I don’t know well talk to about their problems. I’ve often been praised for being wise beyond my years and having the patience of a saint. All of these things, to some extent, probably contribute to imposter syndrome. Not that I don’t have some or all of those qualities to some extent, as I’d like to think those are my better angels that I listen to most of the time; it’s just hard to accept praise about patience when I think about all the bones I could break on the person who thinks it’s acceptable to leave their stuff wherever they want in a retail store, as if they’re the first person to encounter that scenario or they’re kindly “giving the employees work to do.”

I really don’t like projecting my anger outwards. It’s not the energy I want to bring into the world. I know it’s a passing feeling that will give way to other emotions and won’t be a defining element of a situation in my memory, so I don’t want to lash out at someone in a way that will really hurt them. Because I was raised like a boy, there’s a continuing association between anger and masculinity in my mind, since anger is one of the three emotions society allows men to have (next to hungry and horny); I don’t want to be masculine in that way, among others. Honestly, it causes me a lot of hardship and stress, and I don’t want to put that on other people.

All that to say, I don’t have a way to let out any of that anger, either. I don’t have anyone to vent it to, and I don’t have…insert other method here, I guess. What outlets do other people have? I guess it would be nice to punch things again, like when I had karate class. Then again, I was just as angry as a teenager. I usually get myself out of the headspace with hobbies. But that doesn’t have the effect of getting rid of all the pent up frustration in my bones, and that’s more of what I need. It’s not usually anger at a specific incident with some kind of novelty; it’s an explosion about something that’s bothered me for a long time that I feel powerless about. Holding that in is drinking constant stress, and I don’t like what it does to me.

Part of me thinks that these feelings of mine shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. I think that a lot of the nicest people you know are probably filled to the brim with anger. I go through my days trying hard to be as good and nice as I can. Very often, it doesn’t take that much effort; the actions are easy, and I want to do them. So it’s very frustrating to see other people not putting in the same effort, to think they can be mean to others or not do the obvious decent thing we were all taught as children. The lack of reciprocation is galling. You might as well spit in everyone’s face, because you clearly don’t think we deserve basic human respect. So actually, it takes a lot of effort to be nice while working customer service.

Besides general everyday frustrations of which I am incapable of letting go, the other big form of anger I have is projection. I’m glad I can identify that now, though I can’t stop it. Because I’m so angry with so many things in the world, it’s easy for me to turn that anger on myself. If I do something I don’t like, or fail to do something I want to, then I have to be punished for it (as I write that, I stop wondering why I was afraid of secret telepaths from whom I needed to protect my thoughts as a child). After a while, I get resentful that I’m the only one getting blamed for these issues, so it has to be someone else doing it to me. The really frustrating part is when I can’t fully separate the projection from a possible event. Like, I know my social anxiety holds me back from inviting people at work to hang out, but isn’t it also unreasonable that no one at work ever asks me if I want to hang out with them? I hate that being quiet is like having social cancer; just because I can occupy my own time doesn’t mean I don’t want to hang out. I know I’m assuming certain (often non-malicious) motives that I can’t prove or disprove about a lack of action, and that doesn’t solve anything, either. I’m left with a void that can only be filled by someone coming to my rescue or me finally stepping up, and the only thing that washes into that void is frustration and anger. Anger I don’t want to have against good people who have only been nice to me and that I want to be closer to.

Anger is very often a first resort to problems in my head, and I want different first responders. It’s not a solution to most situations, and it isn’t the one I want. I’d like to be able to cry sometimes, and freely admit if I’m scared. And when I do feel angry, I’d like a way to express that to people without hurting them. That’s the kind of motivation anger is supposed to provide. At the moment, I don’t have a vocabulary for letting someone know they did something wrong. I avoid confrontations at all costs because I’m afraid of what I might do. I need something else to say or do; like Marin Kitagawa said, “When you feel something, you owe it to yourself to tell someone.” As I close out, it occurs to me that this is another situation of being self-centered. I can’t take other people into account with my own feelings, either. I haven’t learned how to forgive others, so I can’t forgive myself. That’s something I can work on.

So to close, a PSA on behalf of all retail workers. It’s our job to clean up messes in the store that we see, but that doesn’t make it ok for customers to make a mess. We aren’t personal servants. We have plenty of work to do without you making extra work for us, and if it looks like we really don’t have much to do that night, it’s not any of your concern. For anyone looking down at us like “a monkey could do your job,” I can assure you from personal experience that many, many people cannot actually do retail work. If you have something you don’t want anymore, your three options are to put it back where it came from, give it to an employee, or hold onto it and give it to the cashier. We’ve seen this before, and we have solutions in place. There’s never any need to take clothes off a hanger before trying them on. It’ll look the same on the hanger as off if you’re just looking at it, and as a full-grown adult, you know how tacky it is to try on clothes in the middle of the aisle. That said, if you’re going to remove clothes from a hanger for any reason, you should button, tie, and fasten it back up like you found it. Always ask questions if you’re confused by anything, and don’t worry about looking stupid; everything looks obvious once you know the answer, so it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. If you ask us a question, please stay and listen to the whole answer instead of saying, “Thanks,” and running off halfway through the sentence. Similarly, if we’re making our obligatory credit card or other sales pitch, just wait until we’re done talking and say no. We’re human beings, not pop-up ads you can click out of, and we’re as annoyed by this process as you are.