People Have Layers. Onions Have Layers. You Get it? We Both Have Layers!
Some of you know that I work your standard desk job, business casual, organized desk, balancing pretending to work with actually working, the whole deal. Being in the non-profit industry, I’m not getting rich, “yeah but what about spiritual wealth?” As soon as I can eat, fuel my car, or exchange these spiritual dollars you speak of I’ll be set for life. Spiritual wealth is a lot like those decorative pillows on your bed, they’re nice but you still need regular, real world pillows if you want to get a good night's sleep. And that shitty metaphor poorly explains the reason I work a second job on the weekends. This past weekend I had the chance to help out a family friend with a landscaping contract in northern Virginia, which is about as exciting as it sounds. But, I learned quite a bit (Spoiler: not about landscaping) and thought I’d write about it.
Starting any day by waking up at 6am is not good but having to wake up at 6am on a Saturday is downright blasphemous. But there I was driving to work at 6:30am to do manual labor on a weekend. I had to meet up with the guys that I was supposed to work with that day and take one of the company trucks to the job. When I roll up to the meeting spot there’s only one guy there. I found out later that the other three had gotten blackout drunk the night before and were too hungover to come in. We’ve all been there. But c’mon, get out of bed, put your big kid pants on, get yourself a bacon, egg and cheese, some coffee and show up like a goddamn doctor!
The boss throws me the keys to the work truck and proceeded to give me directions to where we’re working. “Drive up 95, take 395 to...” in my head I’m realizing this is a lot further away than I initially signed up for. Waking up at 6am on a Saturday to go on an hour long commute just to spend all day spreading mulch sounds like and is a fucking nightmare. Once we realized the other guys weren’t showing up we hopped in the truck went on our way.
The car ride was mostly me trying to keep this giant truck between the lines on the highway while simultaneously trying to understand my coworker’s English. Even though I speak Spanish he insisted that he practice his English which upped the level of difficulty on the mental gymnastics I was performing. Finally, after an hour I pull into this neighborhood of million dollar houses and a sprawling campus. All very lovely, except the massive amount of mulch sitting in the parking lot just waiting to be spread.
As we start to work, grabbing the tools and filling wheelbarrows I plug my headphones in and prepare for the long day ahead. Not long after we start spreading do kids start pouring in for Saturday sports practice. I guess it’s lacrosse season because there was about a hundred kids on the field I was working around. Seeing the practice brought back memories, the early morning practices, my parents dropping me off, running around thinking this is the most important thing I’ll ever do. I started to think about who I was in high school and how different I was now.
Remembering my high school days sent me even further down the rabbit hole and I wondered how they were seeing me or how I’d see me; just some guy spreading mulch around their school, wearing clothes he didn’t care about and an old hat that had sweat stains unacceptable in most public settings.When I was their age I would have written that guy off, "he’s just a landscaper doing manual labor, probably messed up, isn’t where he wants to be in life," (yeah, my inner monologue is kind of an asshole). I would have created an entire commentary on a life I knew nothing about. Just a bunch of surface level judgments and creating narratives that are wildly inaccurate. It honestly bummed me out. Not that they may have been making those assumptions and not even that I used to make assumptions. But realizing that I still make those assumptions to this day, totally involuntarily.
I like to think that I’m a pretty multifaceted person, I’m a college graduate, I have a steady job, I have side income, I write an unsuccessful blog, on a good day I’m mildly attractive, there’s a lot of layers. But there’s no way to know that, when you see me spreading mulch, covered in dirt and pulling weeds out of a tree bed on a Saturday afternoon.
It’s sad that even though I recognize that flaw in thinking, I still do it. Everywhere I go I have these little narratives that I create for people I see and they’re purely surface level assumptions. A person working the drive through on a Friday night might be working another job during the day or is in school but needs a job to pay for it on their own. It doesn’t mean they fucked up or that no one else will hire them. As many layers as I think I have, it always seems hard to recognize those layers in other people.
I’m glad I was able to walk away from Saturday with a fresh perspective (as well as some sore feet and pretty serious sunburns). It’s not everyday you get re-calibrated and can move forward with a clearer state of mind. People are complicated and their current situation isn’t always indicative of their situation overall. Hopefully you don’t need a whole day of landscaping work to realize that, like I did.