Almostgotit.com

I said no to the IT job.

Maybe I’ll blog about it later, but first, I have to hold my fingers in my ears for a while.  See,  the toad people and vinegar-faced ladies are massing on my borders, ready to launch a major attack.  The people under the house are muttering obscenities.  The thugs on my bus are beginning to shift in their seats, stealthily reaching for their weapons.

Photo by Yodi Ann

Drat it all.  I already know everything they want to tell me. 

It may be my last chance, it may mean major financial hardship.  People may think badly of me.  I can already think of several who will think I’m making a mistake.  Let them. 

Yes.  Statistically, women who have stayed home with their children can’t expect to be paid better than this or treated more professionally than this when they go back to work, particularly if they aren’t willing to play the game by starting from rock bottom.

Statistically, women must settle.  In real life, there is no beautiful soundtrack that plays when you make difficult, brave decisions.  There is no audience that gasps with admiration.  There’s not even a guaranteed happy ending.  In real life, bills need to be paid, obligations must be met, and compromises made.  Life plods on.  Very few people would keep working at their current jobs if they won the lottery.

And in real life, you never win the lottery. 

Instead, you learn that the difference between the right and wrong choices is rarely crystal clear.  Usually there are several options, all of them problematic, and all of them with great potential. 

Usually, you just have to do your best and choose.  And this chick chooses not to settle.

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Related Posts:
How (not) to interview for a job (this story begins)
Confusion Cookies (this story continues)
Woman vs. Rabbit Hole
Toad People

We have a wonderful used-book store in our city, which until recently was within walking distance of our house.  One of our favorite pastimes was to rummage through the “free bins” parked outside the store. 

We found many treasures in it:  a whole entire set of encyclopedias, for instance, missing only “volume 11.”  Thousands of Martha Stewart magazines, back when she even still dared put her face on every cover.  Tattered books in Italian, or about calculus, with which to impress one’s older brother.  And once, an ancient copy of Atlantic Monthly, in which I found an essay by Marilynne Robinson about courage and the petty coercion of society that conspires against it.  It was gorgeous.

It drove me crazy to misplace it, which I inevitably did, almost immediately.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, in a fit of extravagance, I ordered several books from Amazon.com (to get the “free shipping,” of course) and among them I chose one by Marilynne Robinson called The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.  I’d seen the list of contents and knew my essay wasn’t in it.

But tonight, after an exhausting day I started leafing through the book.  And there, at the very end, the final essay in the collection, I found it.  Really!  I don’t know how it got there, but it feels like a gift.  This is what it’s called:

“The Tyranny of Petty Coercion.”

Which (my usually good memory not-withstanding) apparently appeared in the August 2004 issue of Harper’s Monthly, not in the Atlantic, and here, moreover, is a quote:

Courage seems to me to be dependent on cultural definition.  By this I do not mean only that it is a word that blesses different behaviors in different cultures, though that is clearly true.  I mean also, and more importantly, that courage is rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it.  Theologians used to write about a prevenient grace, which enables the soul to accept grace itself.  Perhaps there must also be a prevenient courage to nerve one to be brave.  It is we human beings who give one another permission to show courage, or, more typically, withhold such permission.  We also internalize prohibitions, enforcing them on ourselves – prohibitions against, for example, expressing an honest doubt, or entertaining one.  This ought not to be true in a civilization like ours, historically committed to valuing individual conscience and free expression.  But it is.

. . .

It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness.  The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd convention. We have our own Rosa Parks.  That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers is a demonstration of the power of social consensus.  How many minor coercions are required to sustain similar customs and usages?  How aware are any of us, absent direct challenge, of how we also deal in trivial coercion?

Click here to read The Tyranny of Petty Coercion article

A few weeks ago the Washington Post convinced Joshua Bell, one of the world’s greatest violinists, to play unannounced in a Washington subway station. Bell played for nearly an hour on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. More than a thousand people passed him by, with only one man stopping to listen — for three minutes, total.  Interestingly, every single child who passed DID try to stop, but in every case was hurried along by a harried and embarrassed adult. 

Altogether, a little over thirty-two dollars was dropped into the violin case of one of the world’s greatest musicians. 

(Thanks for sharing, Chris!)

Someone gave me an interesting employment suggestion today, and I must confess I had a bit of what I now call “a Target Moment”  Target is, of course, a cleaner, more uptown version of Walmart.  It’s the place where you always find everything you sort-of-need plus 54% more (it’s amazing, what happens to your bright red shopping cart in that place).  It’s also the place I’ve ended up more than once when I had a vague feeling I badly needed SOMETHING, and hoped Target would help me figure out what that was.  (Target’s marketing strategy is based heavily on existential crises, I think.)

Once, though, I’d not changed out of my gardening clothes before dashing off for something I sort-of-needed at Target.  I drove into the crowded parking lot and suddenly froze inside of my car.  Everything had gone all surface-y and intimidating.  All those people striding so purposely to and from their cars (87% of them SUV’s), efficiently bundling children and bulging bags of things back and forth.  Wearing all their clean, soccer mom outfits. Everyone seemed to know exactly who they were, what they wanted, and what the plan was, in general. What had any of this to do with me?  I wondered, a little stricken. 

Tada! A Target Moment.

Everyone has her own little issues.  I doubt this one is at all unusual, even.  The other night, at a little supper club I belong to, our host for the evening admitted that when we first started our club, she’d been very worried about what to wear to it.  She didn’t know us very well then, and we were only 14% real to each other at that point, so her head made up all sorts of intimidating stories about us.  But on this night, we wore anything from jeans to the formal outfit one of us had worn earlier to her daughter’s prom party.  None of us gave 2% of a rip, either. 

Target Moments are what we have when we forget that everyone else is the same as us, scared to death much of the time and desperately wanting to be loved.  Remembering this is even better than thinking of the audience sitting in their underwear.  Generally speaking, no one really has it together any more than we do, and we’re all just bumbling along best we can.  This includes 100% of those well-dressed, efficient-looking EMPLOYED people, including those who might possibly consider hiring us.

A relative of mine who is a successful physician, while still in school, formulated the “Shmuck Theorem,” which I find very helpful when a Target Moment sneaks up and threatens to derail me from being my most successful self.  It’s very simple:  “If the other schmucks can do it, so can I.”  Amen to that, baby!

The hardest things you’ll ever have to contend with are your own interior critics: They are powerful and noisy, not to mention irrepressible. Anne Lamott calls them her “vinegar-faced ladies;” a friend of mine (who, I should add, NEVER swears) calls them the “FCC”, or “Fucking Critical Committee.” Julia Cameron calls her inner critic “Nigel.” My mother’s voices, when she contemplates putting her paintings in a community exhibit, tell her she’s “showing off.”

My beloved step-aunt-in-law (yes, I really have one of those) calls them her “thugs on a bus.”

You know them perfectly well, don’t you? We all do, these voices that tell us we’re not good enough: the ones that demand, especially if we are women, that we “sit down and shut up.”

I think they are deadly, too, spoken by a thing or things that might even be in league with those immortal terrors that Madeleine L’Engel calls the Echthroi: the shrieking naughts (as in zeroes, or nothings): black holes who want to unname and X the entire cosmos. I call them my “Toad People.”

Most times I try something brave and new (and always when I’m writing,) no matter how freely my hand is moving or how well the work is going, they are always there, cursing in my ears, banging dissonant cymbals in the background, picketing with rude and obscene signs in front of my desk. They perch on the end of my pen and jeer at me. They poke their bony figures in my eyes and jab them at my words even as I’m forming them on the page. “Bad, bad, BAD!” they screech.

While these characters have always been there, recently they’ve been particularly raucous. I think I’ve been making them nervous, carrying on despite their scolding as I never have before. My toad people are well-established after years of residency – apparently, they even have a dental plan and an 80-year mortgage. They seem perfectly confident that they can weather whatever current flight I’m taking, and I must admit I find their confidence deeply disturbing. They have very strong, hairy arms, and seem to believe that if they keep pulling on me hard enough and long enough, I’ll eventually come crashing back down. I worry, sometimes, that they be right!

But then again, here I am, still showing up at the page and still writing. And here is my friend, still looking for a job. There’s my friend recovering from divorce who’s just been accepted as a Ph.D candidate; there’s my mother who’s going to show her paintings anyway. We are all so afraid, and we are all so beautiful. Look at us, though, take a really good look, because here we are. We will not be “X’d”. We keep showing up… not only because it is our God-given right, but because showing up is our God-given obligation.

So: suck a lemon, vinegar ladies. Go jump in a dirty old lake, Nigel. **Note to all toads:** this meeting is adjourned.

Addendum: When I wrote this, I had no idea I had been scooped. Sort of. But it’s an interesting thought that perhaps we’ve both somehow intuited the same archetype: http://www.locksley.com/humor/toad.htm