After Three Years

It's been three years and three and a half months since I began this apprenticeship and I feel the need to adjust or add to my previous posts. Not because they are incorrect now, but because the realizations and relationships to previously mentioned people have evolved. Life does not truly stagnate. 

In "expanding on emotion" I mentioned a particular journeyman whose abuse only strengthened when I began to fight back. The man eventually broadened his workplace vernacular to include "dumb bitch" and this development was more than I could bear. I didn't know what to do; it seemed the entire company sided with this man in his dislike for me and I was ready to request a transfer to a different jobsite. When next I went to school for class, I spoke with the director of our school (a reasonable action if you understand the hierarchy of our apprenticeship) and asked him what I should do. He knew immediately who it was I complained about, and said reassuringly that he would speak to this man as he had just graduated the program and should know better. I expressed my concern that this would be problematic and only intensify the bullying, but the director assuaged my fears again and that was that. The next morning when I returned to work, I was assailed upon entering the building by the crew. They couldn't believe I would "rat out" their fellow journeyman to the school director like a weepy child. Five angry voices overlapped each other as they all tried to shout out their individual fury. The training director had called the foul mouthed man the afternoon previous while he was on lunch break, and the man had told the gathered journeymen around the table about my complaint. I was horrified. I tried to play it off like I had every right to do as I did and I didn't care what they thought, but in my mind I felt that I had made a huge mistake. I realized that this was not an industry where I was safe to express myself in any way to any person. I steeled myself against the attack and waited it out.

At this time, I was still mentally recovering from the loss of my mother two years previously, and the harassment that day caused something in my brain to tweak far enough to incite a panic attack. I ran outside holding a trash can with the perceived purpose of emptying it into an industrial walk-in dumpster, and therein I bent in half gasping as if my lungs were fighting for air in the vacuum of space (not the most realistic simile as there would be no gasping in space). There, heaving hard enough to induce vomiting, my foreman found me. I passed off my physical state as an adverse reaction to excessive coffee and he calmly explained that if I was having a problem with coworkers on site I was to report my issues to him first. He assured me that everyone knew the abusive journeyman was an asshole but I needed to confront my problems there before taking them to "higher authorities" (my words, not his). I agreed to his conditions and went back to work as if nothing happened. I could not in fact go to my foreman; he and the journeyman were friends and my foreman was guilty of some very minor bullying himself. But I had come to understand the hard way how I was expected to conduct myself. I grew one hell of a callus after that. 

Weeks later, the work load on the jobsite was lessening so journeymen had to be laid off. The first one laid off was the foul-one. He took his severance check and left early without a word to anyone. Things improved after that though people continued to tease me about what my "good friend" was up to. Eventually only my foreman and myself were left on the job and without all the machismo miasma in the air we got to know each other better. I learned enough of the electrician craft to be considered less than useless and went out to work for other foremen in the company. 

Two years later, I am working at a job where the foul-one is on site with a different company. I suspect he is somewhat irritated with the fact that this company continues to employ me when it had let him go, but that assumption is based more on gossip than anything he has said or done. When first I saw him on site, he called after me in a hallway saying "hello" and I turned to find an unrecognizable, forgettable, generic, overweight man. I stared momentarily before saying "hey" and turned to walk away. After mulling over his appearance and voice and the fact that I knew somewhere in my lizard brain that he had been seen working around the area previously, I remembered who he was. His nearly cheery greeting as if we were old acquaintances surprised me. When next we crossed paths I asked him how he was doing and we made small talk like normal, boring, civilized humans. He continued his past habit of gossiping about people in the industry and complaining about his family and I nodded along politely. When finally I extricated myself from the encounter, it was with confidence in my place within the industry. 

It seems like a small thing, but I wasn't afraid of him or anyone else anymore. Truthfully, I didn't... and don't care. The calluses I have built while working this job have made me more callous as a person, too. I strive to restrict this callousness to the workplace, but we cannot break ourselves fully into different people who go into hibernation and then emerge in varying climates. Who I am at work and who I am at home are certainly different people to some degree and I am okay with that. We do what we must to survive. However at work I have become a person who only interacts with others when it is strictly necessary to complete a task. I listen to my audiobooks and keep to myself, often fully ignoring half the words thrown my way. People there sometimes refer to me as "quiet" - an identification that no one who truly knows me would apply to my person. I can be cold, distant, even selfish in my actions at times because it is safest that way. I do not risk being hurt by mockery when I cannot hear it. I do not risk the erosion of my mental sanity when I cannot hear the bigoted, ignorant political rantings of a conservative chauvinist. I sometimes fear that these habits leech into my personal life. I fear that I do not hear or respect the much more reasonable entreaties and opinions of those I love. I fear our disagreements go sour more quickly than is rational because I am accustomed to shutting down dissent as ignorance and bigotry. 

The person I had become in "mortification to self actualization" is not entirely gone. I am still that person. But after another year or two of filthy work environments and back breaking labor and health problems and abrasive social environments, I have become... jaded, I suppose. When I am fully myself, I am drawing attention to myself. As I am often the only woman on a work site, the last thing I need is more attention. I want to be left alone. The best way to be left alone is to subdue the traits that make me who I am. Interestingly, I spent most of my youth and early adult life wishing I was "mysterious". I always wanted to be the quiet, brooding type with secrets none could fathom. To some degree, this is the person I have cultivated at work. Now that I am as close as I ever have or could hope to be to "mysterious", I find I do not like her. Mystery is cold for the person who possesses it. The intrigue mystery inspires is only felt by the outsider looking in. I cannot be the energetic, transparent person I am at my core at work, though. It is dangerous to indulge personal facts about oneself among construction workers. Every little thing about yourself that is shared becomes a tool for manipulation in the hands of the callous. And we are all callous here. So I continue to work tirelessly at being two sides of the same coin every day. An open book at home, loudly snapping open and closed, pages fluttering. A closed fist at work, curled tightly, inconspicuously, hiding away but ready to strike at provocation. Two and a half more years... and maybe I will be free of this cloying dichotomy.