perfectionism, and being cursed with bad jobs
I think that the central drama of an artist's life is of how they will reconcile making art with making a living. We are gullible enough to disembody the actual works from the artist because our limited viewpoint, hindsight, excludes the complexity of the artist-in-situ who cried and moaned at the actual pain of living through these times the works were made.
I wonder this for myself. Will I ever reach a point in my life where I can just easefully make what I want to make according to my own image and dream? I don't think so. I think that the dream itself is just the carrot in my head. It's a mirage. It's just a concept designed to motivate me from my own self. But it can't actually be reached. Or maybe that's a cynical way of viewing things.
But I can't imagine a future where I'm not struggling to figure out how to exist in the world of commerce, material constraints, and money. And I mean I am STRUGGLING. I've never not struggled. Except for one period of time where I had enough money saved up after the COVID lockdown to go down to working part-time, and my part-time job was at a really nice, chill restaurant that fed me really well. That was maybe the only time.
I've always had a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to my jobs. It's weird. Like, for some reason it's felt like my ultimate narrative enemy. It's like the specter haunting my life. I have been cursed to have bad bosses and bad jobs. Maybe objectively, they aren't even that bad, but my subjective experience of them is bad. Whether that's due to a sensitive nervous system or just a love of drama, I'm not sure.
The first job I ever had was something called a “consultant” at the library's computer lab at the college I attended when I was 19.
It’s embarrassing that they called it being a consultant. You were a front desker. It was so self-inflated. They created this false hierarchy that it was the best job on campus, because you’re making 13 bucks an hour relative to everyone else’s 8 bucks an hour so somehow that makes it justifiable that you can feel superior to everyone else, I guess. That said, it was actually superior, because you didn't have to do anything except scan people's IDs at the door. It was great for doing homework.
Sadly, even as I continue to accrued much more real life adult job experience, it would remain as one of the better jobs I ever had.
The second job I ever had was as a math teacher at an iconic, shitshow of a charter school in Los Angeles that will not be named.
Historically, it was one of the worst performing schools in California. It had its accreditation revoked by the state department of education and then split up into three smaller schools that were administered by three different charter school districts, one of which I worked at.
It felt like the hardest and worst job I thought anyone could have. It was like the worst of the corporate world mixed together with the worst of the schoolteaching world. Everything was talked about in business language. Students were measured with “KPI”s. I had to stay two hours after dismissal to launder uniforms. Students would throw objects at me (pens, books, even furniture). Everything about the school felt surreal and hostile, like a prison. Remembering this time, August to December of 2015, feels like a fugue state, or someone else's memories. The character of each day was so intense that there was zero time for thinking or feeling. It was like pure, moment-to-moment action, decision, reaction. I cried multiple days a week. Every morning I would get McDonald's for breakfast, a sausage McBiscuit with two hashbrowns, and two 16 oz. black coffees, one to be drunk on the drive to work, and the other to be put in my thermos for the workday.
One of the worst aspects of this job was a coworker named Ms. E. She was an extremely unpleasant person who was also the math department chair. She had a weird habit of stalking the students’ facebooks, and one time she cornered me in the teacher’s lounge after a low point for me where I had already been crying, and she told me that “if I can’t handle my classroom, then I need to get out of this profession.” As much as I hated her for this moment, I definitely ended up taking her advice in the end. She also had a mugshot from when she got arrested in Florida that another teacher showed me. I looked recently and you can’t find it any more. I did have a fellow first year math teacher named Gina who was my lifeline, she was super sweet. We supported each other.
On Tuesdays, many of the teachers would meet up for Taco Tuesday at this place near the school, getting absolutely plastered off incredibly strong and cheap margaritas. I often drove home still drunk, taking an hour to come back to Koreatown from Watts. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to just drive my car off the freeway ramp and kill myself in a ball of dramatic fire, but the mind-numbing boredom of standstill weekday LA traffic stopped me from any sort of adrenaline inspired suicide attempts, and besides, I didn't have the requisite space needed to accelerate fast enough. When I drove drunk, it was like I had to use all of my brainpower to focus on the singular task ahead of me. I focused so intently on staying on the road and obeying all traffic laws, my blurry vision and fried neurons working as this comical duo to get me home without a DUI. The average velocity of my car never exceeded 15 miles an hour anyway, so it was mostly just me straining my forehead muscles to keep my eyes as open as possible to receive the signal from a red taillight ahead that it was time to start pumping, PUMP, PUMP! PUMP THOSE BRAKES, and then after a few moments, to start going, GO GO GO, but SLOWLY! It was like there was a little man inside of my head, who was not drunk, maybe wearing a tiny suit (I voluntarily chose to wear a shirt and tie as my teacher uniform), his imaginary body absolutely pickled with cortisol, screaming commands at this useless, heavy shell of a physical form which he was strapped into like the pilot of a mecha, a big fleshy 22 year old mecha that is falling apart due to unresolved trauma, repressed anger, and a shit job. You know when you have to pull a super heavy wheelbarrow or wagon, you have to put so much effort into getting it going, and then you have to put in so much effort to get it to slow down, if you want to stop or turn. It was kind of like that feeling for the whole hour I drove home.
Something I now know about myself that I didn’t know back then, is that I have a perfectionistic side of me. This perfectionism is extremely powerful, and was created in my body and brain when I was a preteen, primarily due to the fact that I was a sensitive, queer Korean child at the center of several concentric circles of increasing hostility to social and spiritual difference. Well, that’s the short way of saying it at least. The perfectionism was created so young, and I relied on it so heavily in order to survive as a teenager, that it became something I acquiesced to unconsciously, incorporating it into my sense of self as an inherent personality trait I assumed would be a good way to be, forever.
I directly attribute me ending up at this school to my unrestrained perfectionism. I was a math major in college, and the decision to become a teacher at all was led by a perfectionism. It was the perfect career for me. It was watertight, because with teaching, ostensibly, all you had to do was input sacrifice and hard work, and out came the prestige of being selfless and giving, but it was also not like those other subjects, like any idiot could teach social studies, but math was for people who were smart, therefore that meant I was not only more virtuous than other people, but also smarter than them, therefore I was unassailable for any reason including being a sensitive, queer, Korean child, which I still was despite being a 22 year old approximate-man, and this child would also continue to be precisely the unprotected soft underbelly that absorbed all the pain and abuse from my work environments moving forward.
But I think a part of me also knew that it was all bullshit, this perfectionistic narrative, because you know that saying: those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach? That was like a sinister cloud that tormented my perfectionistic part, who chose to put its head in the sand about it, because acknowledging that would topple its entire worldview and decision-making process. Then we’d have to actually come to terms with the fact that being the best was not an effective long-term strategy for life.
Nonetheless, I tried to problem solve. If teaching math was ultimately, deep-down, a sign that I was a failed mathematician (the actual sign of being perfect) then I would have to settle for being the best math teacher possible. I was already at UCLA studying math, a relatively unambiguous sign of being the best (it would have been better if it was an Ivy League, but it’s too late for that now). There was an option to get a master’s degree in education here too, so obviously I would be doing that (as opposed to just getting a teaching credential, which would have been sufficient to start teaching). Oh, and even better, the master’s degree option would be accelerated, so that I could finish it in one year instead of two. The first of two years would be squished together concurrently with my final year of undergrad. Acceleration! (I’m perfect.) The accelerated program meant that as soon as I graduated from undergrad on a Friday in June, I started student teaching for summer school that following Monday. Meanwhile, my body was in a 24/7 stress response, because the fear of having to make a living and survive was saturating every cell in my body.
This feeling is, fundamentally, the fear of death. It's a feeling that I started to feel around that time, and have since felt more often than not. The times I have NOT felt this feeling, I can count on one hand, and I treasure them, I look back on them fondly, I wonder if I'll ever NOT feel it again.
The feeling, fearing death, stressing about making a living, is the archnemesis, the narrative rival, of the artist in me who strives not to make a living, but to live and make art, but for whom the art comes of, through, and from the living and the life which needs to be made.
The first time I felt this feeling was actually when I was working at my previous job at the college library. Before I had gotten that job, during my freshman year, I felt like I NEEDED to have a part-time job as a college student. This pressure I put on myself was more extreme than the pressure I ever put on myself to study, which was also there, but didn’t feel existential. Then, during my sophomore year, after I had gotten the job to much self-congratulation, I was afflicted by a compulsion to shift from part-time to full-time during the summer between my sophomore and junior years, in order to live independently (move in with roommates, not receive any money from my dad, and support myself entirely).
Despite knowing that this would have to be temporary, because I wouldn’t be able to work full-time during the school term, it felt so imperative that I achieve this. It felt like I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I still don’t know quite why I felt that. But it was a crazy, single-track tunnel vision obsession I had. Was it due to a real material anxiety? In that I needed to know that I could survive in a capitalist reality: of having to labor to put a roof over your head? Was it out of a desire to sever any reliance I had on my parents financially? Was it again my perfectionism wanting to show that I needed to be better, and therefore good?
Anyway, I did that, I lived financially independent for a summer, then had to return to part-time as expected, for the final two years of my undergrad, which transpired unceremoniously until this feeling returned during the summer after I graduated and I was looking for a teaching job. After many months of looking, it was starting to dawn on me, that there was a possibility I might not find a job at all. The acceleration of the program I had done meant that as opposed to having an entire year of student teaching experience during which one could be gaining employability and have ample time to jobhunt, I only had two months during a single summer, which was already quite late in the hiring cycle for teachers, since most schools want to be staffed up before summer actually starts. I did not feel good during this summer. My student teaching was not fun, or helpful in teaching me how to teach, because who the hell gives a shit about summer school. Also, one of my students sexually harassed me, which was really embarrassing and scary. The whole experience felt shoddy, as if the School of Education scotch-taped together some program-managerial solution to get prospective math teachers’ tuition dollars and to get them to be nominally, legally able to teach, as soon as possible, with no regard for their actual preparedness and mental health, then thrown to the wolves to be eaten up by the frightening reality of the fundamentally broken K-12 system which no high-performing 22 year old could ever realistically hope to survive in. Acceleration. I’m perfect!
In this context, I interviewed at only three or four schools, and each time it felt like I was desperately faking any competence and exhausting the last mental resources I had to please, please, secure financial predictability for the upcoming fall. So by the time I interviewed at the school I would work at, I already had very little stamina left, and I was ready to take the first job that would hire me. The thought of turning down a job offer because something wasn’t right about it... could not have been less absent from my brain. I mean, the whole point of me going into teaching in the first place was to sacrifice, to disregard my entire wellbeing, to dissociate so far from even my most obvious human needs of rest and physical health, let alone the higher ones of purpose and spiritual fulfillment, such that I might convincingly portray an image of virtuoustic perfection to an exterior world that I still subconsciously perceived as fundamentally unwilling to find me worthy of love.
So of course when there was an inkling that I could get this job, I was in favor of moving towards it, despite the now obvious red flags that it was going to be an utter shitshow.
One of the main red flags was that the school had no principal. The new principal was to start at the same time as me. She herself was hired only a few months before I was, and she was the one in charge of hiring me. Her name was Jenn Garcia, and she had worked for a while as an administrator in some similarly rough neighborhoods in New York city charter school districts. But she seemed still pretty young, maybe in her mid 40s.
Jenn was a tough ass Filipina lesbian who did not take anyone’s shit, and it was clear that they had hired her on through a process of looking for someone across the entire country who could really handle a really hard job. She was hesitant to hire me for this job. She continuously warned me: this is going to be hard. I’m not sure if you are ready. You are a first year teacher.
I must have convinced her that I could do it, or that I was passionate or dedicated enough, because she decided to hire me on under special circumstances. What happened was, without making this public to the rest of the staff, she hired me on as a temporary worker, a long-term substitute math teacher, with the agreement that I would convert to a permanent, salaried employee at the end of the semester.
I liked this arrangement, because it felt like we had a secret mutual camaraderie. She, like me, was a newcomer to this school. She saw something in me, and wanted to take a chance on me. She was taking me under my wing, and making me feel special, which definitely fed my perfectionism. Like, if this job was so scary that I had to be hired on probationarily, of course I would take on that challenge against the behest of any other parts of me begging for me to slow down. I really liked feeling like she had my back and was a mentor. She would take me aside privately in the first couple weeks and check in on me. She would warn me about Ms. E., saying how she was “a difficult personality” and encourage me to let it roll off my back.
After one particularly bad day, I found myself in her office, and I started crying. The stress of trying to keep it together, to maintain the veneer of competent teacherdom, pretending like I wasn’t just a small, traumatized child myself, in front of all these small, traumatized children, had overflowed my 22 year old body. I remember this moment so clearly. I was flooded with the sorrow and frustration and disbelief that I was responsible for teaching geometry. Geometry. To a class that included three students who had arrived in my classroom during the middle of the school year, straight from their home country in Central America. They spoke absolutely zero English, and they had a single aide who sat with them but was only contracted for two out of five days a week.
The rest of the classroom was daily pandemonium. Every single student was trying to emotionally regulate in their own chaotic, destructive way, so no learning ever happened. Students screamed, tossed objects, or numbed out on their phones. But these three kids in the back corner of my room were so gentle. They were so attentive and they always had this wide-eyed look, wordlessly communicating to me that they wanted to be here and they wanted to learn and they would do anything I asked them to do. And I was completely useless. A total failure. I didn’t know how to handle this classroom, Ms. E. was right. I was a waste of space and a better teacher would be able to actually do something to help these three kids.
This was why I started crying in front of Jenn. It was a mixture of self-pity, and my own perfectionism finally depleted of energy. As hard as my perfectionism worked to maintain this image of having-it-all-together, there was a limit to its façade, and it was reached.
Jenn comforted me with a kind of stoic tenderness that makes me feel calmer and cared for even remembering it right now, as I write. She reminded me: we cannot do it all. Without spelling it out, she communicated to me what every single urban teacher comes to know so deeply: that this is a fundamentally failing system, that opening yourself up sensitively to the whole of what this work entails would crush you, so find a way to close part of yourself off, for your own sake. And I think I’ve come to know why I had to leave at the time, and why I could come to leave so many other jobs over my 20s, and that is because I cannot close myself off. I am at my core a helplessly sensitive being, and there is a child inside of me who senses the bigness of the world and lets it, wants it to penetrate him with its full force, because he wants to be alive, and I would continue to make choices between my child’s full, sensitive, aliveness, and the wellbeing of our shared physical body, and this dichotomy would prefigure that lifelong tension between making art, and making a living.
About a month into the fall semester, it was October (the worst month of the year, lovingly nicknamed “Shocktober” by the other teachers) and we had a routine professional development meeting (uselessly staying after school for an additional hour to justify some random administrator’s salary), which we had twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was a Thursday. Jenn was standing at the front of the room looking a little anxious and distant.
The meeting began and she told us all that she was leaving the school immediately.
The following Monday, she was literally gone. Despite how shocking it was that she left, I was too busy and concerned with my immediate survival at the job to even really think about it or care. But later, I would come to find this situation just stupidly funny. Like, this hardass who I exalted as my protector and symbol of me being worth fighting for, and who I thought I had a alliance with, was silently saying to herself: damn, no wonder you guys are struggling to hire a principal because this place is a fucking trainwreck, and I’m out of here!
I think it’s also funny that I was so young and naïve to believe that she was psychologically somehow so resilient that she would lead me through this, my beacon of hope, when in reality she was itching to get the fuck out of there without telling me, leaving me in the dust.
Every couple weeks afterwards, we’d email. I would tell her how much I missed her, and she would email me some words of encouragement. The school got an interim principal who was literally the most repulsive, haughty, white guy with an MBA I have ever met (I theoretically understood how racism manifests in the education system, but I didn’t actually believe there were racist principals, until I had to work under this man who literally once told me that I had to dumb it down for “these kids” and show them “order”). I stuck it out for the whole semester, totally beaten and battered, and the school (obviously) did not renew my contract.
The feeling of utter relief I experienced at 4pm on the last day of that job as I packed my shit into my car, never to return again, is an indescribably holy feeling I will truly never forget for the rest of my life.
I got a reference from Jenn to start at my new job in the spring, and she would continue to send out a mass holiday email to an un-BCC’d email list with me on it every couple months. Over the summer she sent me a photo of her and her wife, it was really cute and gay and she maintained her status in my heart as a mentor who actually cared about me, despite shattering my fantasy that we were a team who would weather this work storm together.
The series of decisions I made as an early-20s-something that landed me in this traumatic job were made by my perfectionism, undoubtedly. Perhaps the fact that Jenn left shows how wrong it was to let that part of me make these decisions at all. The choice to take this job was so bad, that even the person I was counting on thought it bad enough to quit mid-year. Maybe her leaving was a sign that I should have just left too. I stuck it out until the end of the semester, and that choice was itself a choice made out of perfectionism. If I believe that Jenn truly was looking out for me, and saw something in me that I couldn’t necessarily see myself, a core spark that many layers of perfectionism obscured from my own self-understanding, in an alternate timeline I might have followed her lead out of that hellhole immediately.
It's taken me up till my 30s, finally now, and only in the past couple of years really, that I’ve come to truly start to see the significance of the alternative. My perfectionistic parts of me were saving my life when I was a child. I didn’t know any other way to live, certainly not one where I truly trusted in others to help me. The start of my 20s, my jobs in college, and the job at this school was the beginning of many signs to come, that not only was perfectionism was no longer going to work, but that a much better way to live is out there: one where I don’t have to be perfect any more.
The truth is: I haven't really advanced from the experience of that job. I still feel totally lost in my career, stressed, and broke. I have no decisive idea what I'm doing. I feel like a failure and I feel like I'm behind.
But the difference now is that I'm practicing being okay with that feeling. Rather than convincing myself and others that I'm not, what if I told myself that it's okay to be a failure? That it's okay to be behind?
As I close this piece, I'm imagining what it feels like to just be okay with being a failure. Being okay that I'm behind. And as I do, the sensation of what this emotion is, it blooms in my heart and chest area like a warm light. It feels good. I... I feel the washing-over of this compassion, this generous wave of being-okay-with-it-ness, and to my surprise, it has a dimension of ... comedy? Like, a whimsical silliness. Yes. I'm a failure. I'm behind. I'm a loser. Like a bumbling comic relief character, lots of physical gags, the clown. Why not transmute self-pity and sadness and deep disappointment into this, whatever this is, it's sly, it's ironic, it's humor. In each moment of failure, in each terrible experience, there is a funny story to be told, no?