Pick You, or Pick Rent
Grief, paychecks, a podcast, and the ways in which Western work culture makes it next to impossible for anyone to be okay.
CW: Suicide
I don’t like April very much.
To be clear, it has plenty of good going for it: the birthdays of loved ones, the promise of sunlight returning after eighty-three months of winter, baby things getting born, buds swelling into blooms. But April also is an annual emotional slog. At least for me. Because it turns out that, for once, what the internet has to say about something has been proven true: suicide happens much more in spring.
In the same way that a new dose of an antidepressant can give a person who is in a lot of pain enough energy to take their own life after ideating for a long while, the annual return of the sun can trigger something similar. So for many of us, that season is thus laden with hard anniversaries. April in particular, above the equator, is ripe for some of the worst sorts of loss.
A few Aprils ago, I was in my second month of a preliminary three at a new job. This, I now understand, is de rigueur for most professional positions. But at the time, I was just crawling out of a multi-year stint of doing hourly wage work, contract gigs, and 60-hour weeks at a youth program, and had never run into this three month thing before. So as the HR person overseeing my onboarding droned on about the stipulations of said trial, I fell down a panicky internal spiral. Was I going to just get let go in three months? Sent back out into the disastrous world of three jobs at a time in order to live paycheck to paycheck? WHAT WAS I EVEN DOING HERE?!
I called my parents that night, already convinced I would be fired, that I would never be financially solvent, that I was useless. It took awhile, but they talked me down: Abby, it’s fine. They just want to be sure that they hired someone who can do the job. This is normal. Still, over a month went by before I started believing that maybe I would be able to remain employed after the trial was up. By the time April arrived, I was only just getting the hang of trusting my supervisor. But also by then, I was realizing that the new (regular! Dependable!) salary I was earning was not going to offer anything close to financial security. After insurance and taxes took their bites from each paycheck, I had barely enough to cover my bills. So I started picking up childcare gigs. After I got done at my salaried job, I would take an hour, sometimes hour-and-a-half long, subway ride to wherever I had been asked to show up. I’d babysit, stumble home, then wake up a few hours later and return to the office. Rinse, wash, repeat.
I remember my fatigue being all-encompassing that particular April. Beyond the quicksand quality of the month’s emotional landscape, plus the strain of proving myself at the new job while trying to make some extra cash on the side, two different people in my life died within a week of each other. First, a peer from college via suicide. Then, an extended family member from age and illness. I can clearly remember pulling my supervisor aside after the second loss and telling him, somewhat deliriously, that I needed to call out of work the next day. “You’re going to think something’s wrong with me,” I said, “but someone else I know died.” To his credit, he didn’t argue; he didn’t say much of anything. I was granted a day off to travel for the family member’s funeral, and then sent back to my desk, where I counted down the thousands of seconds remaining until 5pm.
A few days after that funeral trip (it was something ludicrous, like 800 miles in three days), I had a babysitting commitment after work. I left the office, caught my first train and then my transfer, and settled in for the hourlong trip. S-Town, the podcast from NPR and the creators of Serial, had just been released, and I had downloaded the first few episodes earlier. I got through the first, arrived at the babysitting destination, and spent a few hours with two of my favorite charges before putting them to bed and doing some writing as I waited for their mother to return. It was a late night, so I probably finally caught the subway back towards my neighborhood after 11pm. I got through episode two of S-Town, got home around 12:30am, and passed out.
When my alarm went off six hours later, I lurched out of bed, and went through the motions of making breakfast, packing a lunch, and preparing coffee like a fatigued robot. My walk to the train, I do not doubt, was probably just as odd to witness. Once I found a seat on the subway, I replayed episode two of S-Town. I had been so close to falling asleep on my way home the night before, I hadn't absorbed much of it. I leaned against the window and watched the tunnels streak by, then the city itself once we got aboveground. The day was going to be long; I made a mental note to lie down immediately upon returning home that evening. S-Town, episode two, wound down. Episode three began.
If you have listened to S-Town, you might remember what happens in the series at this point. It’s been years since the show first aired, but I can still return to the moment I first listened to episode three as if no time has passed. The loss that occurs is so seismic, so painful, that it shifts the entire narrative. And for me, at least, it’s a twist in a true story that I’ve never been able to forget.
In the opening moments of the episode, the host and narrator of the show receives a phone call from the neighbor of John B McLemore, the man who is the central figure of the podcast:
Neighbor (on the phone): Has anybody called you?
BRIAN REED (narrator): No, not that I know. I have a few missed calls, but don't think that they're from anybody down there. Why?
Neighbor: Well, we have some bad news to tell you.
BRIAN REED: OK.
Neighbor: John B. killed himself Monday night.
BRIAN REED: Are you kidding me?
Neighbor: No.
BRIAN REED: Oh my gosh.
Neighbor: With everything that happened, we wasn't able to call yesterday. His body was found yesterday morning, and it happened yesterday morning. It happened between last Monday night and Tuesday morning.
BRIAN REED: Oh my God.
Reed was not expecting this call. He’d probably just seen the neighbor’s name pop up on his phone, hooked his phone to his audio equipment, and answered, as he had every other time he’d spoken with John and folks in John’s community over the course of the show’s recording. So the response that he gives to the neighbor is completely raw. Listening to it transports you in a way that is hard to describe; I certainly was not prepared for it. It felt like I was reliving phone calls that I myself had received in past about someone’s having committed suicide. In real time, you hear Reed dissolve, first in shock, then into anguish. As the neighbor details the situation over the phone, we learn alongside Reed about what happened, who had spoken to John in the hours and days prior to his death, and exactly how much pain his loved ones are now in. More than once, you hear Reed doing his best not to cry into his microphone.
I do not remember how I got from the train to the office where I worked. I remember wanting desperately to pause the episode, but being unable to, and thinking distantly about how maybe auditory disaster porn can be just as absorbing as visual. I felt dirty, like I was listening in on something that was private, and should not have been released to millions of listening ears for the sake of “art.” I felt like I was drowning, my chest too full, my head too full. About ten minutes after I got to my desk, I realized that I was crying. Ninety seconds after that, to my horror, I realized that I could not stop.
I tried, first, to shut myself in the bathroom. It didn’t work. I was doing the ugly crying that does not lend itself to private emoting in a tiled room with no sound proofing. Sobs were emerging from me like earth from a hole being dug by a backhoe. I stumbled out into the hallway and over to the elevators that would take me to the ground floor. Blessedly, the elevator that arrived was empty, and made no stops; I hustled through the lobby and out onto the deck where all of my smoker co-workers congregated on the hour for their rendezvous with big tobacco. I huddled in a corner, on one of the wide concrete steps, and bawled.
Why was I crying, really? Was it the fatigue from the late night and long working hours the previous day? Was it that, plus the exhaustion from the recent whirlwind trip for the family funeral? Was it the suicide of the woman I knew in college, her death barely two weeks old? Was it hearing Brian Reed hear that someone he cared about had killed themselves, and experiencing playbacks of the times when I had been in his shoes? Or the times when I was the one making the phone calls? Was it despair— who might do it next, what inevitable grief was coming, life is long and death is inseparably bound up in it? Was it fear? Grief? Was I wishing that I could protect the people I loved most in the world from the amorphous creature that is not just suicide, but also what comes after it? Was I angry at Brian Reed for giving no warning of what was to come on his show? For how detailed his discussions of John’s pain and death were? Was I feeling too cripplingly alone to withstand the reality of what I had listened to?
I don’t like April— I didn’t like April— for reasons of losing. And to have it all come to a head in this way was too much to bear; I still couldn’t stop crying. There was no singular thing demanding redress, like one memory or one source of grief. It was the enormous infinity of death, and losing people before they should be lost. I understood that I would not be able to get myself out of that hole for the next seven and a half working hours. I needed to go back upstairs, gather my belongings, and leave.
My privacy luck ran out in the elevator. A very concerned woman asked me if I was okay, and I didn’t know what to tell her. No, I wasn’t okay, but what on earth would come of that? Unless she had a Lamborghini, the freedom to leave her own job for a few hours, and the desire to drive me home so that I did not have to take the train, there wasn’t much she could do. And if she said, “I’m sorry you’re so upset” I would just cry harder. We were alone in the elevator though, and I couldn’t get away without saying anything. “I, uh, I’m worried about some family,” I mumbled wetly. That seemed like a concrete thing, a reasonable reason to be crying on the clock. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, so then I cried harder while also mumbling “thank you” because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and then, thank fuck, she got off two floors before me and I had a moment of solitude before returning to my own office. Keeping my face basically parallel to the floor, I speed-walked to my department, and crouched down in my supervisor’s cubicle.
“Hey! Hey— uh, woah,” my supervisor said, turning as he registered my arrival and realized who was there and what was happening. “Woah, uh… Are you okay?”
“I can’t… I’m really sorry, I just…” I still could not stop crying, so there was a sort of hiccup between every word I said. “I can’t work today,” I finally managed. “Things are too much.” This man, to whom I had said a week earlier, “you’re going to think someone’s wrong with me, but someone else I know has died and I need a day off,” was totally speechless. For an excruciating moment, he just stared at me, an expression of what could only be described as terror on his face. then, finally--
“Uh, uh, okay.” He cleared his throat. “Are you, uh, going home?”
“Yeah I’ll clock out, I just gotta… I’m really sorry, I have to go.” Before he could say anything else, I rushed back to my desk. My deskmates swiveled as I passed, bewildered by my disappearance, return, and bright red eyes. I avoided looking at any of them.
“Abby, are you—?”
“IhavetogoIllseeyoutomorrow,” I blurted out, grabbing up my coat and backpack and phone and running for the exit before anyone could stop me with some sort of nice, “I’m concerned” comment. I caught the next train, and cried the forty-five minutes back to my neighborhood. I cried for John B McLemore, I cried for John’s loved ones, I cried for Brian Reed. I cried for my loved ones, I cried for the pain that the people I loved were in. I cried because the disconnect between the wreckage that a suicide leaves behind and the relative simplicity of S-town’s reporting of it felt too jagged, too wrong. How could something so unlike anything else just be said? On national radio? How could it sound so normal? No. NO. Nothing was normal. Nothing about this was normal, and I wanted to scream so badly, it felt as if the sound was trying to tear its way out through my skin. By the time I unlocked my apartment door, my throat and eyes were raw. I dropped everything, changed into sweatpants and a tee shirt, and crawled into bed. I barely moved for the next sixteen hours.
By the grace of some divine power, no one at work asked me if I was okay the next morning. We all carried on as if nothing had happened, and Abby had never shed a tear in her life. I got through that day, then the next. By the end of the week, I felt almost normal again. I finished listening to S-Town and wrote about it; the reactions I had had to it, the anger and despair it had triggered. I reached the final week of April, and it felt like a victory. I stayed late that final Wednesday of the month, putting in some overtime on a project, and found myself thinking about how my third trial month would be done in the coming weeks, and how I was probably not going to get summarily fired on day 90. I was feeling relieved, in control of things, by the time I clocked out and made my way to the elevators. I was just reaching to press the “Down” button when someone called my name.
I turned to see a woman I vaguely recognized hustling towards me. I knew she was in HR; I passed her cubicle en route to the break room every day. “Abby! You’re Abby Conklin, right?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, hi, um—?”
“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you.” She was huffing a little as she came to a halt before me. “Listen, I wanted to tell you— you took a mental health day two weeks ago, right?”
“Yes?” I said. “I cleared it with my supervisor, though.”
“Right, um,” she came closer, her voice lowered. “The company is taking that out of your paycheck. Because you’re still in your first three months. I didn’t want you to be surprised.”
I looked at her like she’d grown a second head. “But I… I got a day off for a funeral and that was okay. Why isn’t this?”
“I’m really sorry, honey,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry. They only pay for a day for a funeral or grieving during the trial period. Not for sick days or anything. I’m really sorry.”
“Fuck,” I whispered. She jumped a little, and I put my hands up in apology. “NO, no, not at you. I’m sorry. I’m not angry at you, I just…” I looked around in despair, tears welling up. “My paycheck isn’t enough to begin with, and now I’m getting punished because I couldn’t work for a day and I just— fuck. FUCK.”
“I’m so sorry, Abby,” she said again. She scurried off, leaving me in the lobby. I stood there, frozen for a few moments. Then a voice came from behind me.
“Getting swindled by management, eh? Classic.” A woman from my department had seen the whole exchange, and was now half-grinning at me with a raised eyebrow.
“I, uh,” I stammered. “What?!”
“Happens to everyone,” she said, smiling a little more broadly. “Fucking swindled.” Then she disappeared down the hall.
I have taken sick days in my life. Not as many as I should have, but certainly some. I have taken mental health days in my life, but nowhere near as many as I should have. Generally speaking, I haven’t ever taken the time off that I should’ve, but I’ve taken some. Loving coworkers have even pushed me out the door on some occasions. But as I stood in that elevator lobby on that last Wednesday night in April, years ago, watching my coworker and the woman from HR disappear, I realized why I had never given myself the physical and mental time away from a job that I needed: the potential punishment, financial or professional, for doing so was too much.
It didn’t matter to anyone in that office that a dam of grief and fatigue had burst in me and rendered me unable to work two weeks prior. The trial period stipulated that I had no paid leave save for a day for grieving or a funeral until three months had passed, so that was that. I had been overtired because I was trying to make extra money to keep myself solvent, and look where it got me: shorted over a hundred dollars on a paycheck, a warning whispered after-hours in a hallway, and a smirking peer bearing witness to the scene of someone else getting “swindled” instead of them.
I had no allies then, or at any point during my time in that office; none of us generally do. We just fight it out alone, sandwiched between the people above us who mete out consequences for self-care and the peers who sit back in their schadenfreude. Because, really, this is how most employment in a capitalist society functions: to be an employee is to work in isolation, knowing you have no backup when the chips fall. That you owe your body and your labor to something much larger, which in turn profits off of the work that you do while offering minimal compensation. That you aren’t worth much, but that you should be grateful that someone is willing to pay you a fraction thereof.
I have worked in restaurants, schools, non-profits, small businesses, and corporations. I have seen my peers sacrifice wages for family leave, surgery, grief, and self-care. I have watched people in leadership roles attack those below them, including me, for “failing the team” by choosing to take care of themselves. So many of us have been harmed in these ways, and witnessed this harm, but still gone back to work the next day because the wheel keeps turning and we still need the money to pay the bills to live the lives that are predominantly spent working that then give way to the hours before bed where we try to come alive again and so on and so on and so on—
So.
The pandemic has offered many of us the opportunity to reclaim our work and income streams in ways that promote healthier qualities of life. But that’s heavily dependent on how many resources, how much privilege, we each have— a car, a marketable skill that can be used independently, good WiFi, childcare, no children, etc. The list is LONG. Where there has been no meaningful change in workplace policy, people are trying to carve out new spaces, but for the majority of folks, that’s not an option.
So we see wage workers picketing. We see gig workers demanding financial protections. We see people whose identities have been marginalized by white society demanding safer, more inclusive work environments at all levels, even when making those demands compromises employment. We see legislation for paid family leave get struck down, but get up and press on anyways, trying once again, because change only has a chance of coming if the majority demands it. That’s the crux of this, I think; the importance of not only turning inward, but outward, too. I can decide that I don’t want to be employed by yet another organization where I cannot take care of myself, where I get punished for being sick or being in pain, but that’s not enough. We all have to. Because everyone has an April.
Everyone has a season in which they are in an excess of pain, yet forced to pick between maintaining their income and trying to care for themselves. And for many people, April goes on for a long time. A backlog of hurt accumulates as we push on, unable to pursue healing without financial or professional consequences, and the suffering compounds. April becomes a year, or two years, or a lifetime. Lives become sacrifices to the societal machine, dragged out until a bitter end. It’s not enough to decide that you want something better for yourself. You have to want it for everyone else, too. Every drop in the bucket. Until it’s full. Until the handle breaks. Force the change, because no one is coming to save us, and we cannot keep living like this.
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts/self harm, know that there are resources NOT involving the police (some of which are listed below). You are loved, there is help.
https://www.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines
https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/suicide-prevention
https://suicidehotlines.com/national.html
https://www.dbsalliance.org/crisis/suicide-hotline-helpline-information/
Sources
https://www.mghclaycenter.org/parenting-concerns/teenagers/spring-suicide-an-unlikely-combination/
https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/3
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/suicide-rates-spike-in-spring-not-winter