Work

Written by: Elise Ghitman

From the time you get up to the time you go to bed, you are hard at work.

There’s no free-loading. You are constantly doing the work of being alive, whether you sign on or not.

A college student might wake up when the alarm goes off, exercise, shower, groom herself, make herself a healthy breakfast and check her email.

A drunk might awake and find herself presented with the task of figuring out how she got on a particular couch, how she is to catch a bus home. Perhaps she must work through a tremendous headache.

Who is working harder?

Perhaps one of the reasons ensemble movies are so appealing is that we witness the unique work of each character, side-by-side.

Take The Breakfast Club. In the film, we realize that characters like Claire, the “popular girl,” and Brian, the “brain,” are tasked with living up to their parent’s impossible expectations, where Bender, the “delinquent,” is tasked with survival in an abusive home.

Or in American Beauty, we see Carolyn, a neurotic real estate dealer go to great pains to sell a house, while Ricky, a zen drug dealer initiates contact with a new client: Carolyn’s husband, Lester.

Work starts when you’re born. In the rare, ideal situation, the work your family demands of you is reasonable and appropriate to your skill level. Maybe participation in family chores, or comforting your sister when she skins her knee.

Just as often, children must perform emotional labor, raise their siblings, survive violence.

In the words of Charles Bukowski:

“Have you ever been beaten with a razor strop three times a week from the age of 6 to 11? Do you know how many beatings that is? So you see this was very good literary training for me. Beating me with that strop taught me something.”

“What did it teach you?”

“How to type.”

“What’s the link?”

“The link is: when you get the sh*t kicked out of you long enough and long enough and long enough, you will have the tendency to say what you really mean. In other words, you have all the pretense beat out of you. My father was a great literary teacher. He taught me the meaning of pain. Pain without reason.”

—from the documentary film “Born Into This” (2003)

 

The work you do makes you who you are. When you’re lucky, your work is your choice.

But a lot of the time it just isn’t.

Work you don’t choose ranges from cumbersome to excruciating. Kidney stones. Trimming your eye-brows. Getting laid off. Jury duty.  Calling your aunt. Planning your parents’ funerals.

Then suddenly the winds change. Just like that. The funeral you had to plan is over, and paid for. The kidney stone has passed. You find a new job. Case closed.

You’ve done the heavy lifting, and now you find yourself empty-handed. Everyone talks about the calm before the storm, but what about the calm after?

Getting through the empty feeling is its own kind of arduous work, but the thing about emptiness is, it makes an excellent canvass. You can impose a whole life on it.

The most painful or sad work you’ve had to do may have equipped you with your best skills. For example, those who get bullied in middle-school have to do the work of occupying themselves at recess. They have to sit alone and suffer public humiliation. But in adulthood, they tend to have stronger interests than others. Music, baking, writing, whatever. Hobbies were not just hobbies, they were refuge.

This is not to say that pain makes you a better person. That may or may not be true. But work, the repeated performance of an action, always amounts to something. Bearing pain is a kind of work. It stays in your muscle memory. It shapes who you are. My “writing career” started at recess in the welcome privacy of the school bathroom.

The same skills we use to bear our burdens can be of great use in performing our labors of love.

Author Bio: Elise Ghitman