Years ago (decades now), I had a coworker who told me, explicitly, that I was going to burn in hell.
She meant it, and reminded me of it every once in a while. And sometimes she would return from her lunch break red-faced and shiny-nosed, and inform me that she had just spent a significant amount of time praying for the salvation of my soul.
I had never really considered my outward-facing morality before — my dad was a Lutheran pastor (and arguably still is), I’d grown up going to church, and I considered myself a Christian — but in this case, what was inside didn’t count.
This particular coworker was of a charismatic Pentecostal persuasion I had never encountered before moving to South Dakota. In her tradition, women were not allowed to cut their hair, or wear pants or makeup. When I first met her, I had honestly wondered (in all my ignorance) if she was Amish.
“A woman’s hair is her glory,” she informed me one afternoon — our desks were in a little pen less than 10 feet apart, and the printer was between us, so we were in a state of constant interaction. She had been eyeing my new pixie haircut. “Have you ever thought about growing yours out?”
I think Cleveland (where I grew up) is considered part of the Midwest, so of course I was too polite (and honestly, too baffled) to say anything to her that might come off as rude (which I will jokingly refer to here as the ultimate Midwestern sin).
I brought all of this up tentatively with my boss, who waved a hand and said, “Oh, she’s always been like that. Don’t let it bother you.” The implication being that, if it bothered me, it was my fault.
And maybe she (my boss) had a point — I knew then, and I know now, that I shouldn’t care what other people think. That, as the saying goes, someone else’s opinion of me is none of my business. That I didn’t value the things my coworker valued, so what was the big deal?
But I did care. I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but I think now that sharing most of my waking weekday hours in a small 10-foot space with someone who was tangibly judging me may have had a negative and/or oppressive effect, whether I welcomed it or not.
I put up with it for a while — for more than four years — and even tried my dogged best to be friends with her.
Until I didn’t know what to do with the anger I hadn’t realized had begun to build up.
“I don’t know why you listen to music like that,” she said one day in a huff as some rock music trickled from the earbuds I’d removed from my ears. (It might have been Muse or Paramore — I know, I’m such a rebel.) “I’m gonna pray for you over lunch. Again.”
I never knew how to respond when she said things like that. I wonder if I would today. I wonder if today I would be able to tell her, “No, thank you, that won’t be necessary. I can’t stop you, but I don’t really want your prayers… and no, I don’t want to go to your church, either, because (from what I’d heard) it sounds like a really miserable, oppressive, and hate-filled place.”
(She had invited me to her church multiple times as well. I had never gone, as thankfully, I had my own “not Christian enough” church to attend on Sunday mornings.)
But at the time, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, or commit the ultimate sin of rudeness. So I just responded with a polite smile and something vague, like, “Thanks, that’s really considerate of you,” and went about my work.
And then there came… one day.
One day, I just couldn’t suppress it anymore. My already threadbare patience had finally worn through. I logged on to my Twitter account (Twitter was, at the time, new and anonymous and cool) and I vented some of that overwhelming grief and anger into a passive-aggressive tweet.
I’ve since deleted the tweet out of shame and regret, but at the time, it read something like, “I don’t care [something something something], so deal with it, b****.”
Yes, I called her the b-word (it rhymes with “ditch”) in my tweet. In the moment, it felt cathartic. But of course, you know where this is going.
Inevitably (though not until months later when she joined twitter herself), my coworker found it. I hadn’t used her name, but it was pretty obviously about her.
I wasn’t fired, but I was confronted by my boss and written up by HR. I ended up crying, apologizing, and starting the search for a new job.
After I had been at my new job for a couple months, I was still feeling really rotten about the whole thing, so I invited my coworker to lunch, where I apologized to her personally and sincerely. She had been very hurt, but she forgave me because that’s what Christians do.
I haven’t seen her since that day.
In the years since, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect. Obviously, what I did was wrong and hurtful, and I definitely learned my lesson. I do not post anything negative about anyone else on Twitter (or other social media). I don’t subtweet. I don’t even really use social media at all anymore (per my last email). If I don’t have anything nice to say about someone, I don’t say anything at all. Even (usually) in person, in private, with friends I trust.
I’ve even given talks since then on social media etiquette and personal branding, using my own faux pas as one of the examples on my list of “DON’Ts”. (Though in that case, the story gets shortened to, “I called a coworker a bad word on Twitter, got in trouble, and felt horrible about it for years. Don’t do that.”)
But I wonder, now, why the way this coworker treated me for more than four years was okay in the eyes of HR and my boss. Why what I did was “worse” than what she had done, and what I had done demanded an apology while what she had done did not. (Again — not that what I did was justified in any way, and not that I want to tally up a scorecard for The Biggest Victim here. “Hurt people hurt people,” as they say, and I can’t help but think that my coworker had passed a mere fraction of what she received from her church along to me.)
Hilariously, the whole reason I thought about the whole debacle this morning is that I’m thinking of growing my hair out. Seriously — I’m tired of my bangs getting in my face, and I hate dealing with all of the fussy little cowlicks that stick up Alfalfa-style when my hair is short.
But the very moment I thought to myself, “Huh, maybe I should grow my hair out,” immediately, like a mental knee-jerk, my brain spat back, “But that’s what SHE wants you to do.”
Okay. Obviously, it’s been over 10 years and I should just let the whole thing go. Right? I mean, she might be dead by now. Or she might think I’m dead by now (and burning in hell).
But sometimes things get programmed into us, or become a part of us, no matter how much happier we would be, or how much more sense it would make, if we just let it go.
Even now, I think about this coworker whenever I drive past a church (any church), or walk past the restaurant where I apologized to her over lunch (which honestly, I consciously avoid). I feel a weird mix of dread and disgust whenever I hear someone say, “I’ll pray for you,” even if it’s not intended maliciously.
When something becomes part of us, it becomes part of our lives, and part of our stories. I wish we had more control over this sometimes — the things that we experience in life, and what we/our brains hold onto from those experiences.
But while we can’t control everything that happens to us, curating the experiences of our lives like Pinterest boards, we can choose how we want to deal with it. For my part, I choose to deal with my story by sharing it, by writing it down, piece by piece.
It also raises the larger question of what aspects of our own stories we’re “allowed” (for lack of a better word) to share with the world, and when. I haven’t told this story publicly before for a number of reasons — I didn’t want to say anything else negative about my coworker, I didn’t want to turn off any readers by writing about religion, and I was reluctant to share a mistake I had made — and an embarrassing one at that.
And honestly, I wasn’t sure precisely how I felt about the whole thing. I couldn’t be, until I wrote it, until I used words to explore the situation inside and out.
I’m often reluctant to write about things like this, and in my reluctance I often think of this quote by Anne Lamott:
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” — Anne Lamott
Now, this isn’t carte blanche to put everyone who has ever hurt you on blast. Rather, it’s a reminder that our stories are our stories, and if there is a truth that needs to be told, it is ours to tell.
We often can’t control what other people do to us, just like we can’t control the weather or the rising price of eggs. But we can control how we respond, and what we do with the truest parts of our lives.
Thank you for letting me share this part of my story with you today.
Also, I’ve decided — I’m totally growing my hair out.
Words & warmth,
Sarah