by Bobbi Barbarich / Photographs by 3ten and Tim Fath
6:59 a.m. I should get out of bed.
7:00 a.m. I should be dressed in my department-approved, ankle-length pants, long-sleeved, button-up shirt, sensible earrings and makeup, flat shoes and boring hair.
7:09 a.m. Roger, my cat, is pacing. He’s hungry. My other cat, Chester, bounces over my head to the floor.
7:18 a.m. I stir. My back is sore, my legs are stiff. There is a wheel-shaped bruise on my thigh.
7:27 a.m. I should be on the train.
7:29 a.m. The bags under my eyes are suspiciously dark. I ponder what management will think.
7:34 a.m. I check the mirror. Ponytails, capri pants, dangly earrings and a short-sleeved button-up shirt are sufficiently rebellious. My tattoos peek out from under my sleeves.
7:47 a.m. Cats fed, coffee in hand and iPod loud, I board the LRT. I will be 14 minutes late for work. Tiger Army’s psychobilly charges me to the Health Sciences station.
8:14 a.m. The office is quiet. The other members of my clinical research team are not here. Yawning, I slouch in my ergonomically correct chair, enter my password and open Outlook. Appointments, consultations and meetings fill my day.
8:22 a.m. I open my Hotmail account. Five messages from my roller derby team. “Thanks for the practice – I hurt.” I decide which team I prefer. My stomach leaps.
I ENTERED THE FULL-TIME workforce two years ago. I am forced. Forced to be productive when biological cycles say I should be sleeping. Forced to fill out forms and obtain approval before I can go to the dentist. Forced to remain at my desk until 4:15 p.m. despite finishing my work at 10:30 a.m.
Shaking the crumbs out of my keyboard, I squint at the screen. It’s covered in a thin film of black dust. Perhaps this is the culprit for my third debilitating migraine in as many months. Perhaps it is the fluorescent lights buzzing above my head. I’ve put in a work order to remove some of the bulbs, but the maintenance department says I’m not allowed.
“Why do I need permission?” I ask.
That’s the Policy. They need things to be fair. They need to know where I am. They need to answer to Others above Them. Who are these People? I sigh in defeat and change my screensaver.
That afternoon I meet with Denise (not her real name), a teenager in the midst of a weight management program. She has lively green eyes and satin red hair and is laughing gregariously. We sit side-by-side, brainstorming ideas about how to curb her emotional eating. Her body mass index, a ratio of height to weight used to define obesity, is 32. Anything above 25 means you’re overweight. She worries about boys. Her parents are getting divorced and sometimes she’s so depressed she stays in bed all day crying.
“Buy the groceries yourself if your dad won’t buy fruit,” I say to her. “You’ve got a car. You can take care of yourself.”
She hits me on the shoulder. “You’re kidding!” she squawks, incredulous.
In a rare moment I cherish as a counsellor, I look her straight in the eyes, poised to say something that may permanently alter her perspective. “It’s your choice what you put in your mouth and what you do with your body. You will never change until you accept that you are in charge of your life.”
She pauses, her comedic composure altered. “But I don’t want to,” she mumbles to her thumbs on her lap.
“Then you won’t, Denise.”
I wanted so badly to see her reach the tipping point, when you make a change and never go back. I knew personally how powerful that change could be. I saw so much of my teenaged self in her. I had done it, why couldn’t she? That’s why I became a counsellor – I thought I could pull change out of people. But my perspective was slowly changing.
I’d been playing roller derby for six months by then. In the beginning, when I was still shaky on my skates, it was a diversion, a type of aggressive workout I hadn’t experienced in 15 years of running and elite cycling. But the more I played, the more I wanted to shape how the league was organized. It felt like running a business, which illuminated the frustration I was feeling at work.
Denise lost nearly 20 pounds over six months. And she taught me that despite the similarities between the two of us, we’re all on our own path.
Category: Career Track, Profiles, Work
