Fiasco

I had an absolutely awful day at work yesterday. Almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. In hindsight, it was mostly due to lack of foresight (and accompanying preparation), but I’m also learning that my strengths do not lie in organization or administration. The details are boring unless I’m telling the story in person, so just know that, in the world of Panera Catering, my failure was catastrophic. Never in my working life have I been so directly responsible for such an unmitigated disaster.

The subject of this post is what happened in the middle of it.

If you’ve read my blog before, you know I’m a Christian. You also may know that I’m rarely good at it. Very often, I’m a gossip, a manipulator, a liar – “hypocrite” is a good summation. So yesterday, I was trying, again, to walk in the Spirit (the lifestyle to which we Christians aspire), and I was singing songs to myself in order to remember that “My soul finds rest in God alone” while delivering orders which would arrive unthinkably late, anticipating getting reamed by the people kept waiting for their food, when I started thinking about movies.

The first one that came to mind was Cameron Crowe’s feel-good drama Elizabethtown. Orlando Bloom plays Drew, a designer for a shoe company who, through poor planning and execution of a new shoe, loses his company $900 million. There’s a scene in which he’s telling his love interest, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), about his failure, trying to explain to her the magnitude of it, and she says, “SO WHAT?!” Then she says nice things like, “Have the courage to mess up big and keep showing up. Make ’em wonder why you’re still smiling.” And I thought to myself, That sure sounds nice, but man, that’s not easy. Then I thought, Actually, Claire doesn’t give Drew a foundation for her sunny outlook. How is he supposed to react any differently from contemplating suicide if he doesn’t have an identity alternative to that of the successful shoe designer? More on that later.

The next movie was the comedy Meet the Parents. I have never liked Meet the Parents for the following reason: I become extremely embarrassed on behalf of people who do embarrassing things and to whom embarrassing things happen.* At least, I used to think that was the reason. But yesterday, while everything was going wrong, I realized that it’s not embarrassment I’m feeling. It’s terror. I am terrified that everything is going to come unraveled like it does for Ben Stiller’s character, Gaylord Focker, and for that reason, seeing it happen to other people is almost unbearable. It feels like watching my own inevitable end.

(Another common occurrence in which I feel very uncomfortable is being in the audience when someone is singing or playing an instrument and they don’t quite hit the note or series of notes they’re looking for. They’re flat or sharp. This happens a lot on music reality television like American Idol, which is hard for me to watch because, unlike Meet the Parents where it’s mostly about bad things happening to a person, these are poor performances given by people who think they’re performing well. I am also terrified of that. I am terrified of thinking I’ve done well when, objectively, I haven’t. I haven’t measured up. I’ve shown up to school wearing only my underwear or walked out on stage naked. Terror.)

There’s a lot for me to deal with, here. I mean, this is raw revelation you’re hearing, not some well-thought-out past experience, my preferred writing fodder. Some things do immediately occur to me, like how my identity/acceptance/sense-of-belonging is found in Christ, not in my ability to accomplish a given task or my job title or the group of friends I have. This is, of course, the alternate identity Drew needed in Elizabethtown. Taking hold of that truth in the middle of messing up big time is hard, but I already knew that. In fact, I talk about it so much, I’m afraid it’s starting to lose its meaning.

I am sure that this fear of devastating failure, unwitting inadequacy, or just plain embarrassment has knotted together and stopped up many channels in my metaphysical world – creative output, to be sure – and I just know that if I can beat it, if I can stop being afraid, there’s a whole new world on the other side.

Two other things happened aside from this revelation which were also good: (1) I didn’t quit my job, and (2) I showed up to work again today. Those might be a given for you, and though they are for me now, too, it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when such failure would have been too much and I’d call in sick the day after and then again the next day and on the third day I just wouldn’t show up. (An interesting juxtaposition.) So I guess that’s some sort of proof that my identity issues are slowly but surely being dealt with.

*This is sometimes referred to as Second- or Third-Party Embarrassment syndrome. Second-Party Embarrassment is the embarrassment felt when an embarrassing act is witnessed, like Person A witnessing a speaker fart on a stage. Third-Party Embarrassment is the embarrassment experienced by Person B when Person A tells Person B about the speaker’s outburst. (I couldn’t resist.)