it’s the end of a very long week at my corporate job and i am holding paige gently in my arms because i know what it’s like to be a cog in a machine that doesn’t care that you exist, that ultimately doesn’t care at all that you’re a human being, because as an employee, no matter how well loved you are by the people around you, you’re either the answer to a problem that needs to be solved or you are a problem that needs to be solved
and the gears of the machine will break every shred of stability you’ve tried to gather carefully around yourself over the years into rubble the moment you become a problem
and once it’s done, and the core routine of your life has been destroyed and the bonsai shape you’ve forced your habits and so very many days of your one precious life into for them has been rendered obsolete, once you have been discarded, afterwards the leadership you worked so hard for will sit back and call it a good day’s work
and i know too how the screws holding you in your place feel so different, so much tighter when your life doesn’t have any other stable anchor, when the job you do is the one tenuous lifeline you’ve been able to grab ahold of in the vast dark sea of adulthood responsibilities that the neglected child inherits, and you have to pretend, day after day after day in the cool air conditioning of your office building or your work from home space, as the seasons go by on the other side of the windows, that the job is a choice
i do, for what it’s worth, hate myself a little bit for knowing that i also wouldn’t have stepped forward at the sacrifice. what good would it have done? a moment of struggle, of defiance, ending in one more body up in flames in the name of progress
but i’ll tell you something else
and that’s what happens when you trap people, reasonably intelligent and capable human beings who would if circumstances were otherwise be good people, in situations where they can’t go on ignoring the monumental, meaningless cruelty of this horrible thing we’re trapped inside of
if you push your people far enough
something new begins
