my 5,000 jobs
have you filed your taxes yet? W2s, capitalism, and work-as-worth during This Pandemic Year.
It’s tax season and the government is asking me to quantify my worth by my work. The W-2 asks me if I’ve been a good capitalist. The 1095-A and 3895 ask me if I’ve worked hard enough to be healthy this year. The 1098-T asks me if I did anything with my degree. The 1099G used to ask you if you were ‘lazy’ but this year it just asks if I was unlucky.
I file my taxes and I look at all the ways I tried to fill my time during This Pandemic Year—where pleasure and family and friends weren’t an option, so the only way to exist outside of my apartment was work.
I was (and still am) an instructor at a flying trapeze rig. Then a web developer for my city’s IT department, then a bike courier, then a bike rental associate, then a one-day cashier, then (and now) a soup kitchen/ food pantry programs assistant.
I was either working three jobs or unemployed. I was re-writing my resume every other month. I kept looking for work that would make my life feel worthy. I cried at one job about a job that I had just come from. I was overwhelmed, unsatisfied, and had no answers. And I didn’t really do anything with my degree.
I thought I could make it as a computer programmer; escape the financial anxiety that had been following me around like a soft-footed dog ever since I decided to be a teacher. I thought I would be able to use language to alchemize digital worlds, bend code to my liking, make something exciting and then leave it behind to be at home. Instead, I just found myself staring numbly at a series of perpetual software updates, shivering under the winter air conditioning, wishing someone, anyone would come into my cubicle and talk to me.
I thought bike delivery was going to save me. It got me outside and moving, gave me tasks and a sense of purpose after I left programming and lost my job at the trapeze rig to the pandemic. I was going to write THE essay, “How biking for Postmates saved my mental health during Covid-19.” I didn’t; it didn’t. It gave me pennies on the hour (costing me more money to file my taxes from this income than I actually made). It gave me an app I kept desperately refreshing to find deliveries, competing in market now oversaturated with freshly-unemployed wannabe-bike couriers like me. It gave me this feeling, “there’s something better I could be doing with my time”—not anything that would make me happier or more fulfilled, but something that might better help me forget how many damn hours there were in a day to be filled.
I thought the bike shop was going to be—cheesy—the dream come true, practically levitating all the way home after being hired. My co-workers—aged or aging bike-bros with a taste for beer and not giving a shit—slowly dragged me back down to earth, chipping away at my self-worth as they condescended; gatekept; cussed me out; and gave me conflicting tasks and information, lecturing me if I did one’s bidding over the other. I took it, standing at the front desk for months, crinkling my eyes in my best half-faced smile to still say, customer after customer, “would you mind pulling your mask up over your mouth please? Thank you so much!”
I work now at a soup kitchen, and again at the flying trapeze rig. I love it—the work, the people, the progress, the purpose—which is dangerous for me. I leave one job and go directly to the next—to work, to play, to spend the rest of the hours in my day. The dust gathers up in my apartment and I am no longer lonely at home but I am also always at work.
Toni Morrison writes in her 2017 essay “The Work You Do, The Person You Are” that “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” She concludes that a job is never important enough to make you lose your sense of self; that your work and your life are two separate beings; that your family and your people is where your “real life” lies.
It’s a nice idea, it really is. It would have been really nice to have had a real life to come home to. I would have loved, this past year, to work any of these jobs and come home to a family, to friends, to purpose in my personal life. But I live alone in a studio apartment. I loved my friends and family too much to risk their lives socializing before it was safe. Almost all of my hobbies had shuttered their doors, and I was alone, behind mine—except for when I was at work.
This past year I have been turning this question over in my head: How to extricate myself from the capitalist notion that I am what I do—something I have been working on unlearning for years—when the only thing I have been able to do this past year is work? When if my worth isn’t my work, I’m faced with… being worthless?
Not enough joy to make the next day one worth looking forward to. Not enough skin to touch or tables to share; not enough strangers to walk amongst on solo ventures or discoveries. Not enough energy to create, stress- and depression-fueled fatigue and chronic pain sapping all my motivation. No need for a personal life; no need to do anything but disappear into work. This Pandemic Year has re-energized the workaholic, deified the chasing of a career all over again.
As the world (i.e. California) begins to open up, we are facing the possibility of rediscovering our worth outside of work; of relearning The People We Are separate from The Work We Do.
It will be a slow, scary process. It will be strange to see friends’ faces in meatspace instead of a screen. To see them in a museum, at our dining tables, sitting next to us in a car. It will be unsettling to step close to them, breathe their air. It will feel for a while like we’re doing something wrong, even though this is the most right thing we can be doing for ourselves and others—(safely) finding ways to “‘live here. With [our] people.’”
To “‘Go to work. Get [our] money. And come on home.’”