#3: Love Stuck
I believe I’ve mentioned a number of times how I got stuck in a 4-year relationship with a sex addict because I felt guilty, right? Yeah… I knew something was off when he told me he loved me only a week into dating… Most SANE girls would have said, “Ummmmm, bye boyyyyyyyeeee, I am OUT.” But me? I didn’t want to hurt his feelings…
After that, it was one guilty event after another. He told me he had a vision of me as the Virgin Mary. He said I was the only one who could save him. He converted to Catholicism for me. He got my family to like him. You know, all while he was jacking off to porn and other women, and trying to assault me by sneaking down to the basement of his parents’ house (which was the apartment I was isolated in for most of my college years) and rubbing up against my butt while I slept…
I was miserable, felt terrible about myself, was irritable all the time, and I most certainly was not feeling like a Bacon Boss. But I stayed. Because to everyone else, he was fun and sweet, and whenever I would get upset with him, he would “cry” until I forgave him. And when I was openly irritated with him, everyone was all like, “You’re so mean!” or “But he’s so nice to you!” So I let the guilt eat me up and take over, ultimately making the decision to give him a gazillion second chances.
I cried myself to sleep every single night in that basement. (And I didn’t have a cat at the time to squeeze to death and drown in my tears, so it was extra awful… Shout-out to my cat Shmoopy.)
(I also didn’t drink booze at the time, so that certainly didn’t help either…)
#4: Work Masquerade
After I graduated from college, my older sister got me a job with her company as a national sales support representative. In other words, I had to cold call business owners and try to convince them to meet with one of our ACTUAL sales reps. (Yeah, like ANYBODY really feels like taking a sales call, much less SCHEDULING a sit-down with a salesperson…)
I was anxious as hell doing it.
I never like to feel like I’m pressuring anyone to do anything. But I also didn’t want to be the ONE person on my NSS team to NEVER meet her quota. (Spoiler: I never met my quota.)
I had panic attacks almost every day. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. So I talked to my supervisor, told her what was going on, and I quit. It felt SO GOOD. But that meant I had no job. And I didn’t have a backup plan. My parents weren’t going to be too thrilled about that. So I DID tell them I wasn’t happy working there… …but I conveniently left out the part about quitting.
I felt so guilty and ashamed about quitting because I had always been the child who was hardworking and able to accomplish almost everything I tried. My parents would say, “Oh, you’ll be good at that job! You speak very professionally and people like you!” (Yeah, tell that to the guy who yelled at me to stop calling and the other guy who basically said he’d only agree to meet ME in person because I have a vagina and he wanted to f**k a bush.)
So I tried to ease my parents into the idea of me quitting. And I eventually got to that point… But I had already quit. So I had to pretend to go to work every day for at least two weeks. It was kind of nice. I’d pack up my laptop, drive out to McDonald’s to grab some breakfast and steal some WiFi, apply for some new jobs, and then drive out to the mall to hang out. Sometimes I went to the beach to walk around, I’d sit in my car and eat ice cream, or a lot of the time I’d just drive for hours, blasting my music.
I’d schedule all my doctor appointments during that time period. My parents thought I just had the most flexible job ever. (In reality, they really didn’t allow any vacation time until you worked there for like a year…) I could not bring myself to tell them the truth. Not only did I feel like I would disappoint them, but I was also ruining my sister’s chance of getting a thousand-dollar bonus if I had worked there for at least six months. Yes, they might have been not-too-thrilled had I told them the truth. But damn, I coulda saved SO MUCH money on gas and fast food…
#5: Coworker Crap
There was this on-campus restaurant called “The Shack” at my college that was separate from the cafeteria. I worked there during my sophomore year. (And it was awful and I hated it and we had to work 11-hour shifts and I wanted to slap a bitch with slices of salami every time I worked the deli bar.) Anyhoo, after I had been working there for a couple of months, there was this new hire. She was a woman in her late 30s/early 40s. She had three children and REALLY liked to talk… specifically to me, because I was the one responsible for training her.
She was nice, but damn was her energy exhausting. Plus, she didn’t really work very hard and conveniently “forgot” how to do things I had shown her a gazillion times. (Which obviously meant I ended up doing them for her…)
One night, when I was just hanging out in the lobby of my dorm with my boyfriend at the time, this woman came hobbling in wearing her Shack uniform. She had just gotten off from working a 4-hour shift. (Which was one of the better shifts, but you would think she had been working a 24-hour shift based on how she was acting.) She collapsed on one of the lobby couches across from us. “Oh, hey girl!” she exclaimed as soon as she recognized me. “I missed ya at work today, let me tell ya! I is EXHAUSTED!” (Translation: “I missed watching you work and not having to do anything.”)
I asked her why she was hanging out in the dorm lobby when she didn’t even attend the college. She said she was waiting for her nephew to come pick her up to give her a ride home because she “don’t do the ‘drivin’ thang.’” “He’ll be here at ‘bout, oh, prolly ‘bout midnight,” she told us. It was 9 p.m.
Naturally, my heart went out to her. She had three kids waiting on her, and she was working at The Shack to barely make ends meet. So we offered to give her a ride home. “Aw, y’all don’t have to do that fo’ me! It’s too much, just too much kindness!” She quickly added, already walking towards the door, “Where you all parked at?” Turned out she lived like 45 minutes away. But we felt good about being Good Samaritans…
Cut to EVERY SINGLE SHIFT she worked after that night… “Y’all pickin’ me up, or what?” she’d text me. “I get out at eight.” But did I ever tell her “no”? Of course not… I felt too guilty and didn’t want to be the reason she’d get home to her kids so late in the evening. But when I had a scheduling conflict with one of my shifts, I thought maybe she’d be kind enough to return the favor by working it for me. I even offered to switch with her and take one of her longer shifts.
This is what she texted back… “Sorry, I can’ts, I just too tired all the time, don’t really like this job anyways.” AND I DON’TS LIKE BEING YOUR PERSONAL CHAUFFEUR, QUEEN OF THE COUCH CUSHIONS. But of course I didn’t ACTUALLY say that… I’d like to say I eventually stood up for myself and told her I wouldn’t be able to give her rides anymore… But I just waited until she was eventually fired for not doing her job, which was after weeks of hours spent driving her around. (It wasn’t even just to-and-from work… She made me drive her to Burger King once or twice.)
There are many, MANY more guilt-driven situations I’ve gotten myself into that were just completely insane. And I’m sure there are still more to come. The lesson? Your Bacon has far more better things to do with its time than allow guilt to exhaust and/or humiliate you for absolutely no good reason.
That being said… If you ARE someone who’s extremely prone to guilt like I am (even when you are in the Bacon zone 80% of the time), don’t be too hard on yourself when you fall into those ridiculous situations.
Think of it this way: they make some really good stories. (Unless you hated the stories I just told, in which case you’re just plain rude.)
