Less Than
A blonde woman in her forties delivers the mail to Wolfe Lake Condominiums. I see her in her official post office jacket and shorts sorting through the catalogs, bills, and greeting cards at 2:30 every afternoon except Sunday and dragging the daily drop of deliveries from Amazon across the parking lot to the package room. She is invariably upbeat, as well as very good at her job. Fast, efficient and friendly. Things weren’t quite right for a stretch during the summer when she was probably at her family’s camp on the lake. Her vacation fill-in, a nondescript postal dude, just didn’t cut it for me. I was aware of missing her.
On 83rd street, my parents gave Christmas bonuses to the mailman, as well as the doorman, Little Eddie, and Bill Green, the butcher. We wouldn’t have delivered a Christmas bonus if we had frequented the kosher butcher, but our chickens were non-sectarian. All of these people were regular players in our lives. When we came home from our vacations in the mountains, they were still there delivering our electric bills and serving up lamb chops with little pastel skirts to hide their body parts. They were important and valued. This memory made my recent encounter with the Wolfe Lake mail person particularly cringe worthy. Earlier in the day, there had been two long, very loud sirens. When I saw her working at the brass mailboxes, I asked if she knew what that was about. She said “Well, they always test the tornado sirens at 1pm on the first Wednesday of the month, but I don’t know why there was a second one.” And then after a beat, “But I’m not very smart. I’m just a mailman so I don’t really know anything.” I was crushed, speechless, and felt the hurt that I often experience when other people’s suffering is revealed to me lurking behind a smile. It made me think about all the self-loathing people drag around with them like a heavy sack of mail day after day. Women and girls especially, although I’m willing to admit I’m just more aware of that flavor of suffering because it’s more familiar.
It’s all the I’m not beautiful enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not successful enough, I’m not sexy enough, I’m not spiritual enough self-loathing that festers out there. If you imagined it having size and shape and lining up end to end, it would extend to the farthest galaxy, 13.3 billion light years away, and because space and time are interwoven, it would mean that all that pain originates a very long time ago, In the Beginning. If I wanted to stick with the biblical theme, I could attribute it to the serpent making life very difficult for the naked Eve, running around Gan Eden barefoot before she bought her first spike heels, while she could still run. She must have been anticipating all that pain in childbirth that was her punishment for eating a piece of fruit that was probably mealy anyway. But my memory doesn’t really go back that far.
What I can see right in front of me are legions of undereducated girls in rural America with pink collar futures looking at years of fast food and retail work and tight skirts and pregnancies, trying to get lucky with the right boy so she doesn’t have to do it all on her own. What I can see right in front of me are offices packed with highly educated girls with eating disorders working sixteen hour days in law firms thinking about having children in some vague unspecified future when they can take enough time off. For some reason, even though I’m not normally a stickler for politically correct language, I was particularly pained by the Wolfe Lake postal employee referring to herself as “just a mailman.” Self-deprecation on so many levels. This is not some glossy magazine lack of self-esteem. This is the real deal. A sense that at the end of the day, you just don’t matter. You are disposable like the advertising fliers she dutifully distributes and watches us toss into the recycling bin.
I wonder if any social scientist has ever designed a research project to look into the correlation between people’s feelings of self-worth and their more measurable life circumstances. Sometimes I think that feeling as useless and undervalued as yesterday’s papers is endemic in the culture, that people at all levels of income and education experience the bright lights of judgment shining on them, revealing them to be inadequate and insignificant. But I also suspect that there are people out there who carry an inflated sense of self, completely disproportionate to their actual value, which propels them around like wind-up toys and sometimes encourages them to run for president.
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You are becoming the master of last sentences. Like wind-up toys--perfect.
I often wonder to what extent our hyper-capitalist culture--which is only mostly based on making money and consuming at hyper-speed--is responsible for the low opinion of ourselves so many of us feel. Afterall, few of us can win in this race to be wealthy and important.
As a therapist, I can say that circumstances and self-worth don't seem to correlate. Most people seem to think that they're not ok the way they are. Sad. Hard to just experience life when you have to doubt yourself all the time.