Pick your battles and your friends wisely

There you are, in the Trader Joe’s check-out line, standing behind some strange woman with mostly black but also slightly burnt-reddish hair, and you’ve got a million things going on in your mind. You think to yourself, I’m tired. I don’t want to go to the grocery store. But I want my green-leaf lettuce for salads, and I also need to get— Fuck! I don’t want to go to the grocery store. But, if I don’t go, then I’ll have to go tomorrow. I’ll also have a crappy lunch, because I’ll have to walk to get fast food and my toe hurts.

Your mind is so preoccupied with what you’ve done, and what you have to do, that you don’t see the person in front of you, you just see someone standing in front of you. You’re just waiting for your turn to pay.

In my case, my mind was busy thinking about the copies I’d just made, 30 minutes ago, for my up-and-coming court appearance where I was scheduled to discuss the appeal I’d filed to the State of California. It would be decided whether or not it was a financial hardship for me to pay back the $4,500 in unemployment benefits the state awarded me. As I was thinking about lettuce, I was realizing that I’d spent a year of my life stressed out of my mind working for a woman who I felt was the source of my misery. I know now, she was just a catalyst and I have a lot of work to do. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve spent another year fighting to prove I was justified in receiving the benefits the state awarded me because of this boss and the environment she set forth.

That’s two years of my life re-living something I desperately want to be in my rear-view mirror. That’s two years of my life giving up my power. I’ve wanted to be done with this energy for so long now, I even planned an apology blog, saying how sorry I was that I didn’t realize sooner that it was never my right to use my pain, my hurt, or my anger in a blog to complain against my previous boss, or the boss before, both human beings.

My whole life, all I’ve ever wanted was for people not to hurt each other. This need started earlier than I can remember, but there are events in my life which have stacked up, and I can recall me saying, in one way or another, “Hey, you can’t do that to someone else! You can’t take from them while you are trying to give to yourself. That’s not fair!”

Everything always has to be fair with me. I think it’s deplorable for someone else to step on the back of someone weaker as they attempt to grow stronger. Yet, in my efforts to gain back my own strength, I’ve been unfair to the people who are probably my soul mates.

If you are thinking WTF?, let me explain.

Bad bosses, difficult friends, challenging mates, intensely-negative chance encounters, they are all people who may have agreed to enter into a contract with us, to return and assist us with the lessons we asked to learn. Hard or easy lesson, they are our soul mates. Another theory? You’re either learning and paying dues, because life is a sentence, or you’re on the path to your happiness, because life is an experience to seek fulfillment from. Either way, I’ve not been fair. And, since I’ve allowed myself to be free in this blog, and not always check myself (when it comes to spelling or being a big of enough person to let go of my own hurt and anger), I’m sending out an apology.

To any boss I’ve worked for who I felt wronged me:

If somehow my blog gets circulated and my attempt to grow while I seek happiness affects you adversely, I’m sorry. I’m just as much of a fraud as the rest of us. Only, in this moment, I am able to recognize that you deserve better than my unfairness.

(Check back with me tomorrow, and I might call you an asshole again. HEY! I’m human, too!)

Back to the check-out line.

My mind was whirling, desperate to catch itself up with something other than my stresses at hand, so I started to dissect the woman in front of me. She’s got thinner arms than me and no cellulite, I thought. Good for her. She’s obviously older than me and I’m never going to have arms like that at her age. She doesn’t have much of an ass. Eh, well, it probably looks better than mine will when I get older. Shit, she has bags under her eyes. The bags under my eyes are only going to get worse and probably put hers to shame.

Then, realizing I was not seeing the stranger in front of me for the whole woman she was, but was, instead, just dissecting her individual parts to escape my own mind, I didn’t stop myself. Hey, I needed the diversion. So, I did the chick check all of us gals do. You know, when we compare ourselves to another woman to gauge where we are.

I thought: if I am being honest with myself, she looks better than I am going to look when I get older if I keep going at this stress rate. I even thought about what Vican has said to me. “Negative energy and stress, it can age you more than anything else.”

Got that right, sister. I hardly recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I seem so much older than I’ve ever thought I’d look. I can’t remember seeing such a weighted gravity behind my eyes. Nor do I recall seeing the visual evidence (the dark circles and bags) of the weight I’ve been carrying.

I’m not the only one carrying a lot, though. Lyta and I were talking the other night, and we agreed that the world has gone a little mad. It’s time for this bad economy to wake people up, so we can all realize what’s really important. But that is not what’s happening yet. Everyone is still chasing fires. Many of us are chasing our tails, growing more and more fearful. The fear is palpable in the work place and it’s affecting our personal lives.

Sadly, I’m still experiencing a difficult work condition, asking myself if I am in the right environment yet, as, just in the last two weeks, four people were canned and two others resigned. Another cried to me at lunch as she told me she couldn’t take the stress our work environment was offering her.

“I can’t do it. The negativity is too much here,” she said. I felt like I was watching myself meltdown before I’d walked away from my last employer. About 40 minutes later, after only two days back on the job, she walked out after lunch and went back on Leave of Absence; joining approximately 6 other employees also out on LOA. (Considering the department I work for only has about 55 employees, that’s about 10% out on leave and 10% canned or fired. Did I do the math right? Just saying.) Another person at work confided in me that she couldn’t eat lunch in the break room. “They’re all just talking about how much they hate their job. I can do that at home,” she said.

I had another friend, who works for a different company, who has admitted that she hates weakness, confide in me that she just had her first panic attack at work and can now understand how horrible it feels. She also confided that there’s too much weighing her down.

After telling Lyta all of this, she says she’s decided that anxiety, depression, stress, and anxiety attacks are NOT a sign of weakness. They’re simply signs of having tried to remain strong for way to long.” (Of course, she’s brilliant, and right.)

It was time for me to take the pay spot. The woman in front of me was about to leave the store and it was my turn to pay for my goods. As the clerk asked her, “Do you need a bag?” and she responded, “No. I live close,” I felt guilty for making my way up to the cash register. Had I encroached on her territory too soon? It sure felt like I had.

I wanted to make good on the energy I felt I’d soured by being anxious to knock out one more errand, so I scrambled to focus on something I could make a light comment about. The woman was buying flowers. There was a small graphic stamped onto the clear cellophane which the flowers were wrapped within. The graphic looked like the old-style blue and yellow California license plates. There it was, the simple something I could turn into a light exchange to engage a stranger and give my silent sorry for getting in her space.

“Oh, that’s cute. Made-in-California,” I said, as I pointed to the graphic. But, I can’t remember her response. It was something like, “Argh,” or, “Harrumph,” or, “Eggh,” but I can’t say for sure. My eyes followed her walking away from me and that’s when I thought: Well, I guess I didn’t smooth that one over, did I?

Then, my brain kind of bounced between my ears. Wait! What the fuck!? I know that walk, that hunkered-down, shoulder-slumped purposeful swagger. That’s the Mr. Burns gate. That was not a Simpsons encounter I just had. That strange woman who was standing in line in front of me was my old boss.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

Screech! Quick. Turn to the cashier. Find your ground. Figure it out.

“Oh, shit! That was weird,” I said to the young brunette girl scanning and bagging my goods. “I’ve been in a court case for almost a year and the woman who just left your checkout line is the person who made my life miserable for a year before that. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her until she walked away.”

The cashier clutched her chest. “Oh my gawd. Are you serious?”

I was still reeling. I looked to see if my old boss was totally gone from the store, then, in almost a whisper, I said, “Yeah. I’m serious as a fucking heart attack. I mean, her hair is now almost black and it used to be more red, and it’s now four inches longer, but still, I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her. I wonder if she recognized me.”

The clerk said, “Yeah. I thought I felt a weird energy there. I don’t know.”

Now, as I write this, it still mystifies me that I didn’t recognize my old boss. The only explanation I have is that I am done. So fucking done. I want to put this shit behind me. I was done a long time ago, but I didn’t recognize it. I am sure that if this life is for lessons, I haven’t yet learned how to deal with authority, with people who exert their power (their pain) over others, but I have learned which battles are important to keep fighting. This one isn’t. No matter how broke I am, $4,500 is not worth my sanity.

Yup. I’m out. I hope one day that my old boss can forgive my anger, can forgive herself, and can find the same peace I am just grazing the surface at and wish I could get to so much sooner. But, whether she’s already found peace, and I’m still the asshole scrambling, or we’re both just as lost, I’m done with this exchange. It’s not useful anymore. It hasn’t been for a while.

Still, that day I kept asking myself how it was possible that I didn’t pick up on her energy sooner and recognize her when I am so sensitive to energy. I kept telling myself: Maybe it’s because that energy is supposed to be behind you. But, I wasn’t sure if that was it yet.

It was not until I appeared before the appeals judge for the case I had been preparing for that day that I truly realized that I wanted— No, needed, this experience in my life to be finished.

Ultimately, I still don’t know what my lessons are. I still don’t have a firm grasp on my happiness. But, after meeting with the judge, I realized, at the very least, that money has been a major reoccurring fear in my life. So much so that it’s consumed many of my decisions pertaining to security and I’ve had enough of that fear. Or, at least I want to have had enough.

But, before I visited In-and-Burger (for the tenth time in the last four months) after my meeting with the judge, and before I realized that I was not going to see anyone from my previous employer’s office during that meeting with the judge, and before I questioned the receptionist at the California office of appeals (or whatever it was called), and asked, “Is anyone from my previous employer going to be here?” as my ever-threatening tears remained at bay, I hadn’t yet recognized the need for the end.

I do remember the drive to the Appeals office, though. As I tried to figure out where I could park, so I wouldn’t incur the debt of another parking ticket (I’d gotten one that morning just outside my apartment), I was feeling bad for Lindsay Lohan. I asked myself: Who cares what Lindsay has done or hasn’t done? Who, amongst us, would want their drama played out and exploited in front of millions?

Later that night, as my belly (my mostly-three-years-of-being a vegan stomach) did it’s best to work up even more enzymes to deal with the meat and cheese emotional coma I attempted to induce, I thought about the judge I’d met with. (Before I get to the meeting with the judge, I need to ask: why does it always have to by so extreme with me? When I am stressed, I either can’t eat or I want to eat the couch with my French fries, my quesadilla, and my salted and enriched snack. Can we get a happy medium here?)

Anyway, I kept thinking about how hard the judge’s job was. I thought about when I was in my late 20s and I was on a jury where we had to decide if this guy was guilty or not of building a pipe bomb. (Wait. I hope I am allowed to write about this and not break the law.) Our job as a jury was to make a decision based on the facts. Emotions weren’t supposed to play a part of the equation.

I think I was the youngest one on the jury, as I only recall mostly business men (old guys) and barely remember if there were any women. It might as well have been 12 Angry Men and me. Okay, so the dudes weren’t that angry, but they were pretty damn adamant in their path forward.

They all wanted to enter a plea of guilty for this guy because two of his fingers, his thumb and his pointer, were missing. He didn’t even have stumps. He just had skin over the knuckles.

Yet, I kept saying, “But his two missing fingers are not the evidence that was presented to us. We are not allowed to make assumptions based on our emotion or based on what we can see. We are only supposed to decide based on the evidence presented to us.”

Against my trepidation, and in spite of fearing the wrath of these powerful older dudes, over and over I kept repeating my understanding of our task at hand. Finally, based on the evidence that was presented, which we all finally agreed didn’t prove guilt, our jury was hung.

Maybe it was that experience which allowed me to be okay with whatever the judge decided. Maybe I saw the fairness of the law in this judge. Maybe I couldn’t hate the judge because he looked like Tim Kang, the actor who plays Kimball Cho in The Mentalist. (Tim Kang is one of my secret crushes.) Maybe, I was just DONE.

Whatever the judge decided, I’d decided that putting this experience behind me really was more important. Now, more than ever, I understand what it means to pick your battles. If the fight to hold on is costing you more than you will lose if you let go, it’s not a battle worth fighting.

How come this took me so long to figure out?

It’s a good thing that I’d made the decision that I wasn’t going to fight for $4,500, an amount so small in comparison to moving forward, because when I got the letter yesterday that I had lost the battle, my instinct was to keep fighting. Jen and I were on the phone together, as I was driving home from a tough day within a tough work week, when I parked my car, checked my mail, saw the envelope from the EED, and then went upstairs to open the envelope and accept the verdict.

“Hold on,” I told Jen. “I’m opening the envelope now. I guess we’ll both find out together.” I read the high points out loud to Jen. “The decision is final unless appealed within 20 days from the date of mailing… .” I sucked in a breath and continued. “Any person who is overpaid unemployment insurance benefits is liable for repayment… .” More breath sucking. Tears starting. Then I finished reading what I knew was coming. “In the present case, the claimant was paid $4,500 in benefits to which she was not entitled.”

“I guess that’s it,” I said to Jen. “It never mattered, my appeal. The law had already decided my fate before I started fighting.” Then, I felt the panic ensue. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to live it anymore. I couldn’t afford it anymore, financially or emotionally. It didn’t matter that I’ve been $139.00 in the hole every month and that my new job doesn’t pay me enough to pay for my life and that I’m not only going more and more into debt, I am still not happy at work. I couldn’t breath. I had to get off the phone.

What I didn’t tell Jen, is that I was overwhelmed that I still had another phone call ahead of me that I didn’t want to make. I was pissed that I knew it was going to take more out of me. It was going to take me many days of dialing and waiting time, and possibly more than once call, where I would have to figure out how, during work hours, I’d work out a monthly re-payment plan with an EED representative (and finally, finally, put a part of my life I was eager to have behind me, behind me) all the while figuring out how to keep up with the demands of my present job because the only time I could get this resolved was during work hours.

Once that phone call (or calls) was made, I knew I could breathe again. But I still had that ahead of me, and that meant I still had some battle to do when there wasn’t any more fight left in me. So, trying to avoid the panic, I was desperate to get off of the phone with Jen. “I have to go. I need to process this.”

I hung up. Then, I cried. But, only for about five minutes. Then, I decided to write. But, only enough to get an outline down so I could process what I could. Now, I’m finishing this. But, I know there are gaps and brain mishaps. I don’t care.

I can’t say if I’ve processed it all. It may take more time. But, I don’t want to write about it anymore. It’s been said that to conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom (they said that on the television show The Finder). Here is to hoping that I am starting my wisdom. Here’s is to my hope that I won’t let my fears be stronger than my faith.

Here is to thanking my friends for getting me through this. I know sometimes we all feel ordinary when it appears that we are standing alone. But, when we stand together we are extraordinary. We are fabulous. Better than fabulous. We are friends.

Thank you, my friends. I’d be lost without you.