RUNNING OUT OF MONEY

     I'm running out of money. My anxiety is growing, the kind a friend once described as like a wasp in a coffee can, frantically trying to find a way out, pushing up against rigid walls that simply won't give. I'm working on a couple of projects but even if they sell money is distant and my need is immediate.

     Someone suggests I sign up with a temp agency. I've never heard of such a thing, but evidently I can register and with a little luck they'll send me out the next day. It’s a certain way to quick money. But I resist: the jobs are secretarial and to work in that way feels like abject failure. To have to report 9 to 5, to be subservient, most especially to need a "day job" because I'm not making it from my writing - it feels like confirmation of all my worst fears, the end of everything. But the walls of the coffee can simply won't give, anxiety is verging on panic, so I make an appointment and show up at the agency.

     There are many women like me signing up, all of us filling out forms on clipboards as we crowd the small reception area, with its lone scrawny ficus reaching up toward the fluorescent lights. I’m certain all of them have taken extra care about how they look. I myself am wearing a dress, something I rarely do, but it's my favorite thing in the closet, a conventional rayon blue and black plaid cut in a very fashion forward shirt dress style, narrow waist, very full skirt. I love the way it swirls around me.

     The agency woman who takes my application looks like someone I might actually know; I recognize the signs of similar background, education, class. I smile as I sit in a chair beside her desk and look directly in her eyes. I want the frankness of my gaze to make a unique impression, help her see that I'm not a run of the mill applicant. I want her to realize I'm special. Much later, it will occur to me that she's probably seen this behavior a thousand times. It's a cliche – who of us doesn’t want to be seen as special?

     All applicants must take a typing test (I'm definitely average) and a short math and grammar quiz. I finish the grammar section in little more time than it takes to read the questions. I look down the list of math questions - basic fractions, multiplications and divisions, nothing I can't handle. I finish this section quickly, too, with minutes to go until time is up. I hand the pages in and watch as they're graded - I get all the grammar questions right but I'm amazed to see that I get a few of the math problems wrong. I don't understand it - they looked so easy, so doable.  But it isn't anything near enough to disqualify me. I’m told to call in early the next morning to see if there’s anything for me.

     That night, I set the alarm for the first time in months. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I say, there’s nothing shameful in having to earn quick money. I’m lucky there’s a way for me to do it. Don’t worry, I say, the key word is “temporary.”  True, all true – but just words. They don’t put much distance between me and the full blown despair I sense only millimeters away.

     The next morning I’m told to report to an import-export office downtown, in a side street east of Alemeda. There are two small rooms and both of them are crammed with stacks of binders and bookshelves sagging under the weight of files, loose papers and pink, green and yellow forms. A man and woman, the owners married to each other, sit at desks in the larger of the rooms while a secretary and I are in the smaller. My job is to sort stacks of the color forms, then file them by invoice number into a rank of old metal file cabinets against one wall. Once the secretary has explained this, she pretty much ignores me for the rest of the day. That suits me. I don’t want her to know me at all. I want to be invisible. If no one sees me, I am not here.

     I’m caught in rush hour traffic on the way home – more grist for my mill of self-pity – and find myself thinking about the math problems I got wrong. Something about them is bothering me. I've kept the page and, when I get home, I go over the answers; I can see that I made very simple mistakes, which no doubt I would have caught if I'd taken the time to go over my answers. Instead I basically twiddled my thumbs until time was up - I'd decided the problems were easy, I didn't need to check my answers...

     Why is it still bothering me? Why am I holding on to - what? - embarrassment? - that I answered a few questions wrong on a very easy test? A kind of humiliation because after all I'm so smart, so well-educated, so well, why not just say it, superior -- and that's when it comes to me. I'd sailed through the whole experience as if I were superior to it, visiting royalty waving from a slow-moving carriage. Of course, I didn't take time, time I had, to check my answers. There was no need. I was superior and I'd already decided I couldn't get anything wrong...

     A word floats up out of the vast magic eight ball of my consciousness: arrogance. I don't need to do what other people have to do… and even as I say the syllables I feel them crack open like the spine of an old book and I'm staring at what my arrogance is meant to mask - my terrible fear I'm a failure and always will be.  

     I want to snap the book shut. This is too much information. I’m fully aware of my insecurities and self-loathing, they’re old familiar friends. But the idea that I’ve been unaware of their full workings in me, that I haven’t seen the defenses they’ve generated, unattractive character defects, ultimately self-sabotaging – a protective covering has been ripped off and I’m lost in a shameful exposure. I'm still at a point where to see something about myself that isn't flattering, that means I'm not perfect, that above all is something I don't already know, doesn't feel like the starting point of change; it feels like confirmation of every terrible thing I've ever thought about myself. I'm not strong enough to look. Not yet. Not yet…

    …and yet. Flashes of insight, even those I want to turn my back on, leave their traces behind. I know I’ve seen something important – my arrogance and how it works against me is something I stand of chance of changing. In the coming days, driving to that temp job and the one after it, meeting strangers who know nothing about me, and at night, making sure I have clean clothes, setting the alarm clock, doing things to get ready to do something I don’t want to do, I’m surprised to find myself looking for that arrogance, not dreading that I’ll see it but wanting now to see it so I can try to let it go.

     The first check arrives from the temp agency. It's a small sum in the scheme of things but enough to get me through. I'm at the bank, endorsing it, when I see the letters of my name as they flow from my pen. That's who I am, that's me - and on this day, I'm the person who is taking action, doing what needs to be done. There's no shame in that...I'm smiling as I walk to my car. I'm the person who is doing what needs to be done.