I had never once considered being a teacher until November or December of 2009. Teaching requires patience, and as far as I was concerned I didn't have any. And besides, teachers don't make a lot of money. Throughout college I bounced between majors. I tried advertising, journalism and finally finished with a degree in film. It was as if every time I chose a different major I immediately knew it wasn't for me. But college is expensive and finally I had to stay on one course in order to ever graduate.
Immediately after college I started working in Nordstrom. I genuinely enjoyed this job for quite a while. But eventually, I grew to enjoy training new employees more than I enjoyed fighting for sales. Seeing a new employee blossom and grow before my eyes made me feel wonderful. This, however, ended up being my downfall in the end. In the world of retail numbers are sacred and in order to help others build their skills as salespeople I sacrificed my numbers. Eventually the pressure got to be too much, and when compounded with a miserably prolonged breakup, I sort of lost it. My manager pulled me aside one day and said, "I feel like you just don't want to be here anymore." I paused for a moment and thought. The joy that I felt from interacting with customers before was gone, I had chosen to transfer from the men's department where I had loyal shoppers and could generally interact with new customers easily to the juniors department where I had to deal with awkward pre-teen girls who all but ran away when I even greeted them. I didn't leave willingly. My original boss had been a mentor and huge influence on me. Actually, his tough love approach and emphasis on being tough have contributed a lot to my character. By this I mean that I understand the importance of being tough; I'm still working on being that way. Anyways, after he was replaced by an absolute dunce of a woman who cared more about buying new shoes with her manager discount than making the customer happy, I found my performance constantly being threatened. I did not want to quit but I could not work for that woman. But, I also did not have the passion that I once had in my new department. I looked at my manager and said, "You know, you're right. I don't." Moments later I was signing resignation papers and walking out of the building. I was in such a stupor that I didn't buy anything on the last day that I would have a discount.
I enjoyed about two weeks of vacation time during the summer until I secured a job at the mortgage company where my mother works. It was never meant to be a permanent job. Scanning files, making copies and sorting mail were redundant and boring tasks, but I was making pretty decent money for ridiculously easy work. Then, due to certain changes in the industry, which I won't explain in detail, I was assigned the task of divvying out appraisals to different appraisers on a specific list which our company worked with. This resulted in a constant storm of complaints from both loan officers and appraisers, both of whom were used to getting some sort of advantage from working with certain people. I was placed right in the middle. But, despite being bored to tears by this job in which I had no interest, I did my best. When the rules changed yet again and I was put in charge of reorganizing the entire process, I spent countless hours, skipped lunches and tried to create as perfect a system as possible. None of this was in my original job description, by the way. So when I went to my boss asking for a raise since I was now doing a completely different and tiring set of tasks that were not discussed in my initial hiring, I figured it wouldn't be a problem. But it was. Apparently my boss had forgotten that this was not why I was hired.
I found some of the journal entries I wrote from that time. The banality of my life at that point is staggering. I'm not quite sure how I survived that time. Every time my alarm clock went off I wanted to cry. At one point I was drinking a bottle of wine a night just to numb my anger. And that's also when my eating habits really started to go downhill. Before starting I had lost quite a bit of weight from the stress of breaking up with my ex.
Whenever I've faced stress or sadness in my life I've lost my appetite. Sometimes the sight of food alone can make me nautious. It's not that I stop eating intentionally. Well, I didn't at first anyways. My ex had this incredible way of making me feel not-good-enough in every way possible, including the way I looked. I couldn't even trick him into telling me I was pretty, particularly towards the end, and therefore had to look to myself for gratification. Not that self-gratification is a bad thing, it's just that sometimes a girl's confidence can suffer if she doesn't hear a compliment every once in a while. As my relationship deteriorated, my weight began to plunge, but I liked it. For the first time in my entire life I could look in the mirror and see soemthing I liked. I could fit into size zero jeans. That had always been an unconscious goal of mine, and finally it came true.
I spent the second half of the summer of 2009 feeling beautiful, going out often and flirting with many men, who all found me attractive. My confidence was boosted. I attributed it mostly to my weight loss. I was still haunted by the residual mental side-affects of dating such a bastard, but the attention helped to mask the pain. Also, I started dating someone whom I had kept on the backburner for some time. We didn't have much in common, but he was a good distraction, and also didn't want to be too serious with me (perhaps because he sensed that I wasn't too serious) and therefore I had the freedom to go where and do what I pleased, with noone to answer to..
At the end of July I began working at the mortgage company. The work was easy enough, but deathly boring. I figured I would just enjoy my life, which I was able to do because it didn't really matter if I was hungover while making copies or not, not worry about work, and figure out my future later. This was fine for a while, until I began to become aware of all the things that bothered my about that job. A big part of it was the people. There was a high enough concentration of disrespectful, rude, and downright nasty people I was dealing with that really just struck a nerve with me. I won't even mention the incredibly assonine ones. There were certain people sprinkled throughout that company at varying positions (all higher than mine, of course) who, for some reason, really got under my skin.
I always felt like a target. I may not have been well-versed in the details of the industry, but I was never the kind of person to turn the other cheek to people superior to me who are not very nice, being absolute idiots. Although I made all attempts to keep my words professional, my temper was just uncontrolable. Attempting to keep these feelings bottled up was no help, either. I would often go home so enraged that my stomach felt as if it were tied in knots. Naturally, I was unable to eat. But this didn't really happen for a few months after I started.
In fact, for the few few months I rather enjoyed my life. My job was simple. I didn't have to socialize with anyone at work. My social life was blossoming. I was making decent money. Everything was great. I didn't even mind doing boring work. Having a mindless job seemed like a great opportunity to focus on my self. Everything was okay, for the time being.
But then he entered my life...
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