In recession-era 2009 I fell into the employment pool, with something that definitely sounded like a splat. Since then, I've had four full-time jobs, triple the number of job interviews, exponentially more job applications, and a brief part-time stint at a butcher shop on Roncesvalles, where I quickly became famous as the clumsiest person to ever work there. All of these jobs were a little different, but it didn't matter what city I was in, or the sort of work that I was doing. I always cried.
I cried at desks, and I cried on park benches, but most of the time, I cried in bathrooms.
Yesterday, I found myself in that most familiar place: trying to sniffle softly enough so that the person in the stall next to me wouldn't hear (horror!), try to investigate (no!), and then attempt to console me (I'll just drown myself in the toilet, thanks.) Sensing a pattern, I was forced to confront my own failings.
Eh, no. That would have just made me cry harder. Instead I thought about all of the bathrooms I have cried in.
First, there was the rather dingy affair of my first job. This will forever be known as "the porn job," though it was more of a writing gig and no cameras were ever, ever involved. Shared bathrooms are bad enough for crying - everyone must hear, but pretend not to know, your shame - but this one smelled of urine and was perpetually out of toilet paper. Colleagues would head down or up one floor just to crap in nicer surroundings. Clearly, not ideal. In fact, most of my crying was eventually done in a parkette across the street, the traffic of St. Laurent hypnotizing me back to calm.
My next job, a publishing internship out in BC, was an improvement in both prestige and weeping areas. A floor above, in a barely tenanted area, was a solo bathroom. The ideal workplace cry, in the ideal bathroom. Unfortunately, with the next job, at a university bookstore, it was back to the stalls. Worse, these bathrooms were shared with the very customers I had to serve, and I didn't want to show any more weakness than I already had. A weakness probably shown by crying at my desk. Here's a platitude for you: Sometimes you don't need a bathroom to cry, because you carry the bathroom inside your heart.
The stalls have also followed me to my current occupation, where I work in sales and customer service at a publishing company. They are better than the other shared bathrooms I have known - cleaner the first, and customer-free compared to the third - but we share the floor with two other offices. So I am perpetually scared of roving bands of stray women, practising a kind of tissue terrorism with their sympathy and concern.
I should let them in. But I would rather be alone behind the metal door, please and thank you (it's just some allergies!) Not just because I'm bothered when others see me cry, but because all the tears bother me. I feel like I've gone past the stereotype of the emotional working woman, crying in between bites of desk-drawer granola bars, and all the way back to something real: a girl, the tearful child I used to be, again reacting childishly to what is only a regular, and pretty manageable, life.
And so I always grab the rough brown paper towel (no matter the location, this has been constant), blow my nose, and get back to work. Because every time I hope this will be my last trip to this soggy geography, and at the very least: I've never had to cry it out in a port a potty.
