Conversations From the Road – Nostalgia With Honesty

This morning I did three back-to-back drop-offs at one of the places I used to work, the place I worked at the longest before becoming an Uber driver. It’s a massive company campus and it was nineteen years ago this month since I first drove onto that campus for my first interviews and my first new-employee orientation. I have a lot of good memories of that place, along with a few bad ones, too. The first stint I worked there I worked with some truly awesome people, and though the second stint had good people, they weren’t enough to keep me there.

Do I have any regrets about walking away from my former life as I call it, my old life, if you will?

Not really. I know my past experiences helped make me the person I am today, and yes, gave me a ton of stuff to work through, too mentally and emotionally. What I thought this morning was that for the first stint I worked there, I had a raging case of Imposter Syndrome because that’s where most of my lack of self-confidence came from. I honestly thought I really didn’t belong there and was given a lot of opportunities by people who didn’t know how terribly insecure I was. But a few people, including the director of the unit I worked in during my first stint, could see past the façade I tried to maintain and sometimes even believed in. She wanted to help me grow my skills professionally but when she was reassigned that was the beginning of the end for me. I’m glad that I made the decision to leave when I did because of I was just smart enough to listen to my instincts telling me things were not going to go well from that point forward. Yes, it was true back then that my father’s health was declining and I needed to be there for him but I had other valid reasons to leave, too. So no regrets about leaving, or even coming back.

But I do have one big regret about my return for my second stint: I’d only been gone a little over a year when I came back and yes, there had been a big reorganization, but the nuts-and-bolts of what I did and the systems I’d worked on had barely changed at all. It was coming back to me quickly when I got on the systems along with my knowledge of how to train and mentor people that I’d been taught in my previous stint. And I honestly don’t think I came off as someone wanting to take over the class but my instructor sure as hell made me feel like the biggest ego-centric bitch when she raked me over the coals for wanting to help out people in my class. I actually had to tell several classmates later on why I wasn’t helping them when they asked me to. This was a red flag I tried to work through but it knocked me on my ass and I never quite back up from it.

At the last call center I worked in, in my first training class there, I decided to just keep my head down and learn what I could. I was very reserved with my classmates and in class in general. But my instructor, one of the most awesome I ever had, took me aside one day and asked me why I wasn’t speaking up or offering to help. I told her of my previous experience being raked over the coals for that and she was pissed off about that on my behalf. She then asked me to help her out and we became a heck of a good team. Later on, she became my manager and really went to bat for me when I needed her and though I’ve lost touch with her, if she ever did find me and need a favor, she’s got one coming.

In the eight years I’ve been unpacking and dealing with my past, I’ve learned not to have regrets. My dad used to say don’t do ‘would have, could have, should have’ because you can’t go back and change history, just learn from it as best as you can. And as he so often was, my crusty-old bear of a dad was right on this. For me, when I look back I will remember the good with great fondness. And I will remember the bad with great honesty.

And it’s been eight years this month since I walked (or better put, drove away) from my last call-center job. At the time, my reason for leaving was severe pain that I thought came from sitting on my ass for the better part of seventeen years. That ass-sitting wasn’t healthy for me of course, but I recently realized that I have NOT had that insane level of pain since then. And I don’t think it’s just because I walked away from that kind of job, but because I was really bottling up a lot of things and in the process, punishing myself for it. I mean, I’ve got messed-up and damaged body parts and I sit on my ass to do the job I do now and write, probably about as much as I did in call-center hell, yet I don’t have the level of pain like I had eight years ago.

If someone ever says to me that I should have known better back then and not made the mistakes I did, or walk away from things like I did, or any kind of bullshit like that I’ll say this: “Everyone else is just as full of shit as I am sometimes, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.” NO ONE has all the answers so don’t ever tell yourself you should have known better. Because my crusty-old papa bear of a dad was right when he used to tell me, “Regrets are useless.”

So as I drive onto the old campus, which I’m sure I’ll do as long as I’m an Uber driver, I might indulge in a little nostalgia, good memories, funny stories. But I know the bad memories will lurk on the sidelines, and I’ll acknowledge them and if asked, I’ll tell their stories honestly. But life is unpredictable, and we do the best we can with what we’re given to work with. The best thing I’ll always remember is the people I worked with, good people who were kind and generous and people I will always remember and wish them well wherever they are. And as for the jerks in my past, well… they’re just characters in the stories I tell now.