“You can be anything!”
My existential crisis about work, highway driving, and fish heads
I really loved reading over on Wordy Bird about her job as a Kelly Girl, and it made me think about the year my job was to take high school students job shadowing. I had been laid off from the role I had before and felt like a total fake showing students around the world of employment.
I do want to note that I highly don’t recommend having a job where you are essentially a tour guide of employment directly after you are laid off. It’ll get you very existential about the meaning of life and happiness and work in a ‘is happiness even real unless it’s shared’ Chris McCandless/Alexander Supertramp type of way. You’ll start wondering if you should become a volcanologist, what your degree is even for, or, at a particularly low point, whether you should sell essential oils. You probably shouldn’t. But we are all just trying to make it out here, so who am I to say?
Anyway, welcome again to Following Studies, where we adventure through subcultures and obsessions or, in this particular instance, my yearlong employment crisis.
Several years ago, at the San Francisco Airport, I checked my work email and realized I was going to be laid off. I was traveling from visiting a friend in California and was on my way back to North Carolina. I was not shocked. For a few weeks, I’d watched others get laid off. Programs were restructured, and program directors were told they were demoted to clinician positions. I worked at a mental health and disability agency doing a marketing job that my supervisor had called a ‘pilot program.’ That sounded flashier than it was. Simply put, there were empty group home beds, and those empty beds cost the agency money. The year before, I had been hired to do referral marketing for the outpatient clinics in the eastern part of the state. I would drop flyers and batches of cookies at doctors' offices and hospital emergency rooms and document them in a spreadsheet for my supervisor to review. But there were empty beds in group homes, and I was told that’s what my role would now be marketing. I would be driving across North Carolina and telling people about those empty beds. We needed to fill them.
I told my supervisor that I didn’t think it would work. She was mystified, but I felt sure. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t know that these group homes existed; it was that our group home staff were overstretched and didn’t have time to process the piles of paperwork that came with a move-in. You had to be a QP — or qualified professional to sign all this paperwork and process it (at the time, I don’t know if it’s changed). I was many things, but I wasn’t a QP. I didn’t have a degree yet or years of experience. But I did have a company car and a marketing role, and there were empty beds, so off I drove.
That is how I spent the better part of a year driving across North Carolina. I wanted my boss to be happy and check Excel spreadsheet boxes. Life can be many things, and for a while, I thought it could be this. I talked about group homes and helped families fill out paperwork for their kids or siblings. I carried around conflicted feelings about congregate living. It felt nuanced and complex, but for many individuals, it was difficult to access support and truly navigate options, if any were available.
That year, I listened to podcasts at such a speed that I would beg people to catch up to me so that I could discuss them with someone, anyone. Once, in a small town in the middle of the state, I got food poisoning from a lasagna, and in another town, I caught the flu. I was driving hours across the state to meet people in hospitals, their homes, or coffee shops to talk about these group homes with empty beds. I was the the only one of my friends that drove up and down I-40 sometimes 6 hours a day. No one breezed through the S-Town episodes as quickly as I had.
Months moved forward. I thought I loved driving, but it turned out I hated driving. Work travel had felt fun and shiny when I was only doing one day a month, but suddenly, I was doing four days a week, and all the hotels looked the same with the same blocky windows covered with the same heavy curtains looking out to the same strip malls and fields. My hip began to throb. I ordered a heating pad that plugged into the car for the drives. When I started to see others at the company get laid off, I knew I’d be soon. Because even after all that driving, it turned out my role really didn’t make sense. People knew about the empty beds and I couldn’t help process paperwork with the staff, and those conflicted feelings I’d had all along felt hard to hide on my face for a paycheck.
Before I left for my California trip, I met with an old friend. Kelly and I had worked together years before at a similar organization but in the supported employment department. I’m miserable, I told her. My hip ached from driving. I was tired of touring group homes. I would see the same marketing people from other mental healthcare agencies at the same events and most times the only meaningful conversation I would have was about the giveaway branded chapstick on my display table. I love this kind, someone said filling up their bag at a conference, I stock up from ya’ll every year.
Well, the door is open, Kelly said. She had worked at that organization for years and loved it. For every big work anniversary, she’d pick an appreciation gift from the catalog the organization sent. I wanted to walk through the door badly, but I knew the job would pay less. I was younger and didn’t understand what I was trading for a higher check.
My flight back to North Carolina was a red-eye. After the security check, I opened my work email at the San Francisco Airport. I had left for my planned PTO right after a hurricane, and before I left, I found out my work car had flooded — all my agency-branded chapsticks and notepads swam in the trunk of the car. I was going to be flying back to a flooded-out car and an irritated boss. There were more hotels on stretches of highway and all those group homes with empty beds that I wasn't close to filling. I clicked through my inbox, and one email jumped at me.
I need to meet you in New Bern, my boss wrote. Bring your computer.
I hated my job, but that’s the thing about things you hate. It can be humiliating not to be the one to leave first. I was so proud in the beginning; felt so good, each paycheck adding to my confidence. I bought more button-down shirts and dresses and even liked the lanyard they had us wear. But driving around the state had just made me feel lost. I slept too long on the weekends. I didn’t have any balance. I spent hours in the car following my GPS, completely losing my way.
You’re gonna get let go, my dad said before I started driving to New Bern. I had stopped at his office, and we stood in the parking lot. It was bright outside, and the palms beading the skyline blew in the breeze. You’re gonna be ok, he said, his hands on my shoulders. I wasn’t sure if I could believe him. I had cried on the flight from San Francisco two nights before, not knowing if I was sad or just exhausted or just ashamed I was coming home to my husband and going to have to tell him I was losing my job. I had driven everywhere and gotten nowhere. It all felt the same, and the day before I drove to get let go, the morning I had walked off my red-eye flight, I met up with Kelly again. She said there was room for me at the organization. I was going to walk away from that driving, away from that job, no matter what was waiting for me in New Bern.
I was laid off in New Bern at an office that I would sometimes stop by but never had actually worked at. A HR representative looked sorry when she told me my job was eliminated. My boss stared at me. Her hair was long, always coifed, and she always was in a pantsuit. That day it was tan.
Was it something I did or didn’t do? I asked. Months before, I had spoken with someone looking for housing for their adult child. They didn’t qualify and the Dad screamed into the phone at me, certain his kid was going to die and I was standing in the way of something, anything, everything he needed. You’ll get used to this, my boss had said. I knew I never would.
It’s money, my boss said, looking right through me, and I understood. Money had been the only reason I kept driving.
My two-week notice was typed into a short letter, but I kept it in my purse and took the two-week severance offer the HR representative gave. For a week, I laid around the house, zig-zagging from extreme joy that I never had to answer an email about an empty group home bed to deep shame that I’d been laid off.
After I was laid off, I went to my old organization and worked for a year. I was hired to go back to a job I had done before - supporting individuals with disabilities in finding employment. There isn’t a feeling quite like having to help other people find jobs when you were recently weren’t able to keep one. This was particularly disheartening, so I said yes when another coworker left, and Kelly asked if I would take on the program the previous employee was working in - to take high school and college-aged students on job explorations. The goal of the program was simple: to expose kids to different career paths. All my post-lay-off feelings lingered: the bitterness, the frustration, the feeling that I had scooped out parts of myself into a job that, when faced with a budget issue, saw me as a line item. I had thought that the job would make my life bigger, but in reality, it had become small enough to fit into a car that I drove around the state.
With this new job, there were few constraints about what job shadowings we could do. ‘You can be anything!’ the program said. I deferred my student loans because the job paid so low. I lived in a beach town sometimes used for filming, so most students wanted to be marine biologists or movie stars. I took different students for a tour of the aquarium so many times that I could have probably given it myself. Once, the tour guide let us feed baby octopi. We stood around large aquariums filled with jellyfish and used tweezers. I marveled at the baby octopus I fed, but the next time I toured with a different student, the guide said that the octopus had died. When a student told me they wanted to work in film, I begged a coworker to take us to Screen Gems, the studio in town that her family worked at, and we walked through a fake jail, an office in carefully constructed disarray, and a treehouse. There were two giant pools, deep enough for a boat to move through, on set, and the water was so murky, you couldn’t see the bottom. The trees in the swamp twisted around themselves and reached out of the water, looking so real that it was as if we were outside. I moved closer, and small white circles made a pile on the ground. I picked one up, pressed it between my fingers, and looked at the trees again. They were all Styrofoam.
One day, I sat next to a high schooler interested in marine science. We were at the community college, sitting in on a lecture and lab about otoliths. Next door, there was a room filled with aquariums that the program’s students cared for. Most of the aquariums looked unimpressive, full of crabs or just mucky water, but in one, a quite out-of-place clownfish swam. It had been a donation.
The professor held up otoliths. They varied in size, one large enough that I saw it from across the room and another so small that I just trusted she was actually holding something. Otoliths are calcium carbonate structures. Otoliths, or ear stones in Greek, look like tree stumps, with rings spanning out. They are used to tell age, to clock the time. A student in class asked if you could write on a chalkboard with it. The professor drug it across the board. It screeched but didn’t leave a mark.
In the front of the class, there was a bucket of fish. The professor shifted through it, grabbing a large fish head and putting it on the counter in front of her. It’s hard to find the otoliths, the professor explained. They are usually so small. There are three, and typically, the sagittae are dug out of fish because it’s the largest and easiest to find.
If you quit this program right now and all you learned was this, you could get a job at a fishery making 40K, she said, her hands in the fish head. I contemplated that. Digging around fish heads would be more lucrative than what I was doing. Maybe I could do this, I thought. I had considered many things that year and poked around the website program we used to determine students’ interests. The computer told me I would be good in hospitality, but that same year, when I needed more cash, I didn’t get hired in a hotel restaurant. I started to work as a barista on the weekends and put my tips in a metal container in my underwear drawer. Slowly, they counted up.
How does customer service sound? Have you looked into STEM? Achievement is one of your work values, but you can’t forget teamwork. After school, students and I would sit in front of the computer, where they would click emojis and answer questions so the software could spit out work placement suggestions. For hours, we would watch videos about jobs where perfectly happy-looking people would talk about their perfectly good jobs. One student said he wanted to be a volcanologist after being told he had to pick three careers to explore and was stuck on just two. You want to be a volcanologist, I repeated back. In this program, students had to answer the work personality questions that told them things like they were good team members who valued loyalty. They had to watch the videos and then pick the jobs they wanted to tour. Every cycle was the same with different students. I looked at him for a moment, then back at the computer where the website home page prominently displayed a volcanologist video. I didn’t know where the nearest fault line was, but I knew there wasn’t one in Wilmington, North Carolina, which was where we were. The student had said he hated science the week before, but here I was, holding the program’s rules of three job explorations over him. Our contract with Vocational Rehabilitation said we had to shadow three jobs, no exceptions.
Volcanologist it is, I said, jotting it down. Finding a volcanologist we could job shadow was going to be a tall order in our town. I felt like I was living on a fault line, all of it grating over something, anything, everything.
If a fish is alive and you take its otolith out, it would lose all concept of balance. The fish wouldn’t know which way was up. Inside the otolith is its entire life. As the layers build, the food the fish ate or the water it lived in etches their way into the chalk’s memory. An otolith is a map that’s constantly being added to. You can read migration patterns, go backward, and follow the way.
The students began to go to the front of the classroom to pick out their fish from the bucket. They were at the beginning of something, and I was firmly in the middle, floating between job explorations, with each one putting more life paths in my mind, each one more confusing than the last. I was always telling the students I worked with there was so much they could be, but I was wondering what I was doing, taking students to endless job shadowings, acting like I was going to find something out there one day in some job that I should have been trying to pluck from myself.
The students grabbed all their fish and went back to their seats. My student and I sat silently, watching the professor sift through the red snapper. Got the otolith, the professor said. Together, we watched her scoop it out.
Last week, I flew out of the San Francisco airport to my home in Southern California. I walked past the bench I was sitting at when I checked my email all that time ago and realized I was going to be laid off. It looked exactly the same, and I walked right past it, further into the terminal, and towards my life at home. So many things have changed, and so many things have been the same since that flight when I cried. If I had an otolith, you could look inside and see.
Thank you for reading along! It means the world to me that you are here. To support my writing, follow along and share with your other friends that you think would like to join us on this ride. Leave a comment and join in on the fun.
It’s your turn. I want to hear about the times that you really tried. The times something worked and the times something didn’t. The times that you thought you found the thing you were looking for and the times that you actually did. Give me all of it, I want to see all your otoliths.
But also, what was your wildest job?
Your otolith 😭 What a truly incredible adventure you’ve had this far 🩷