When my Mom passed away, it shook my entire world. I was working as a claims trainer at a top insurance company making a decent amount of money. I tried to continue working full time because I hadn’t been at the company long enough to qualify for FMLA leave. For four months I drove back and forth between two states multiple times a week. I scrubbed and painted walls, ripped up carpet and tack strips, went through an entire house full of stuff, researched flooring contractors, compared quotes, did yard work, changed out electrical outlets in the house, got her vehicle swapped over and sold, found an antique dealer, sorted through the garage, visited the courthouse more times than I’ve ever been in my life, sobbed so hard every day I threw up, and finally realized I just could not do anymore. I didn’t mention that about a month into this I was in a pretty bad wreck on the interstate on my way home from working on the house. Even with some amazing friends pitching in to help with things like ripping up carpet, cleaning walls, and painting, it was completely overwhelming.

So, I quit my job. And I kept working on the house. And I realized that the best choice out of the few limited options I had to choose from was to move back to a place I never wanted to live again.

Currently, I am working a retail job I took as a temporary thing because I needed to pay bills and needed health insurance. I thought it would be helpful to take a job for a while that could be fun and not really matter at the end of the day, instead of something that could deeply impact other people. I needed a break from high pressure. I applied for this job because it was a team lead position, but I was hired on as a regular team member and was told that “We aren’t going to hire anymore team leads from the outside because burnout has been too bad.” I later found out two of the other team leads were hired from the outside the same time I applied.

I am one of two employees who wear a mask. The other is a manager who is an older lady with kidney failure. She recently had surgery and was out for maybe three days before she was back at work doing everything she probably shouldn’t have been doing. Without saying a word, her persona shouts, “If I can do it, you can do it.”

Another coworker of mine has a seizure disorder. Apparently, these happen pretty regularly. But when I found out that she was going to stay at work for the rest of her shift after having her seizure because she was afraid if she left she’d accrue too many “points” and get fired, I was quite upset.

Every day we hear things like “Take care of the customer” while simultaneously being insulted, dismissed, and degraded by managers and other employees. As a matter of fact, if anyone talked to a customer the way our team talked to each other, even on the not-so-bad end of everything, they’d get fired on the spot.

Today, I had a really bad day with my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I don’t usually talk about it openly, because it is misunderstood by so many people and is exhausting to explain to someone once, much less over and over again to multiple people.

The intrusive thoughts that relentlessly inundated my brain this morning were a mixed bag: fear of not saying just the right thing, fear of losing things, fear of being responsible for unintentional harm or something terrible happening. And as I started into a compulsion that I’d normally go to stop those fears, I just sat with it instead. And I cried so much for so long I gave myself a migraine and upset stomach.

When I called my store to call out, my manager answered. I told him that all morning I’d had a migraine and upset stomach, so I wasn’t coming in tonight. He said, “Oh, uhm, well… we are really struggling today. I kind of need everyone here that can be here. So, if it’s manageable at all, I really need you here if you can get to feeling better enough to come in.”

Half of the employees at our store are out with Covid.

I long for a day where I could just be honest. “I’m having a really bad OCD day and have done what I needed to deal with my disorder today, but now I’m sick because that involved a lot of crying and really heavy emotions.” And even though I disclosed that on my application, I don’t believe for a second that I could actually say that without being utterly dismissed or punished for it.

I’ve been thinking so much about all of these things lately. I watch my coworkers get torn to shreds. I watch exhausted people drag themselves into work. I hear about things I should never hear about, like how during the pre-Black Friday manager meeting they discussed a coworker’s concern about having a panic attack. I watch crippled coworkers limp around and push through hours of work that their bodies just can’t take. I had a manager grief-shame me and dismiss me after asking for sensitivity around talking about death during morning huddles around the holidays.

Facing experiences like this day in and day out wear on people, and it’s not just retail workers. The reality of living this is the feeling that your voice doesn’t matter and you have to toughen up and do what you’re told, or else. Or else, you can’t feed your family. Or else, you don’t get insurance. It is no surprise to me that America was recently listed as a “backsliding” democracy according to a European think tank. When so many of us live in an authoritarian hierarchy 40-60 hours a week (or MORE somehow?), of course our country has been desensitized to anything fair or egalitarian. Something that many would debate we have never understood the entire time.

How do we change this narrative? How do companies respect people in their workforce? Some companies do an EXCELLENT job at this! And you know what? They’re hard to get jobs at because everyone wants to work for them.

How do we create a situation where getting insurance for physical and mental ailments doesn’t first require having jobs that cause them?

How do we stop being so dismissive of others and seek to actually empathize?

I so deeply appreciate the social science research that Dr. Brene Brown has worked on unearthing for years. I appreciate the work on grief by Megan Devine. I appreciate the work on faith and Christian theology by the late Rachel Held Evans. I appreciate the voice, uplift, and stories that Glennon Doyle and her team are putting into the world. And I appreciate knowing that other people out there so deeply want our existence to be better than this.