03.26.06
6:30 p.m.
Appreciation
I've been developing a concept around appreciation in the workplace. It has been very hard to sit down and write about it. 1) I haven't had much time over the last few weeks to sit at the computer and write. 2) Different ideas keep coming up, and every day is a new revelation for me.
I've been a bit flabbergasted as to why this job is working for me, when even the last Country Club didn't quite work out. I've been trying to point fingers, deconstruct, and pinpoint EXACTLY why this job works for me.
I went into working for this kitchen with Zero expectations. The only desire I had was to get in, do the job, get out. And hopefully not get caught in any crossfire. We were supposed to be returning to Phoenix by now, so absolutely no emotional investment in this job for me.
I went into this job knowing that the guy who hired me actually, genuinely liked me when we met. I get along with the sous chef. We aren't great friends, but we work well enough together. The servers are tolerable enough, and no one is throwing a burger back in my face stating that it is cooked wrong.
I show up on time, I'm dressed, I work, I volunteer to do stuff. I took an extra shift a week to help the Chef with his work load. I do the best I can within my frame of knowledge.
This has translated into appreciation of the job I am doing. I was on a carving station the other night, for a pretty important event, and the Chef who hired me who is now Food & Beverage director, looked over and was grinning ear to ear at me, giving me a thumbs up. Wow, when has that ever happened, that a Chef really liked what I was doing.
I felt very appreciated that night.
The next couple weeks go by, and the new chef is hired. Someone who was working there already. He sees my skills, my talent, and my ability. He decides that I'm going to night time saute and banquets. In other words I get to do his job, and he is the one teaching me. He appreciates that I have skills, that I am teachable, and confident that I won't fail. Wow, again!
Then, the prep kid/dishwasher who has kept an eye on what I do, finally comes over and starts asking if I can teach him how to cook. I already know that they want to move him to daytime line cook. So, I start teaching him. He keeps commenting that I really know what I'm doing, that he hopes one day to be as good as me. He saw something in me and can appreciate that I will take the time to teach him.
And so I fit into this kitchen, I have been recognized when all I set out to do is burn a few burgers and make a couple club sandwiches. I was perfectly fine with daytime line (though a little bored with making sandwiches), now, I get to learn more, do more, and gain some new skills in the process.
I'm grateful that I got this job, and that the guy who hired me saw that I would fit in. Now, I'll be here in Topeka for a while. Jobs like this don't come around very often. I need the skill set that I am going to gain out of this. Then we can leave.
Master expects that we'll be able to leave sometime in the summer. My problem with that is that is the height of season, and I would feel really, really bad abandoning this job during that time. If we can wait until August or September, that would be better.
Not that it is my choice to say when we go home or not. Again, this kind of job, and job environment, and appreciation are so hard to find anywhere. I have so many friends struggling in their work places. And my last job was beyond horrid. (the one between the two country clubs, that now seems like a very bad dream).
I know it will dissappoint all of our friends. They want us home yesterday. But they also know my thirst for knowledge, and my passion for food. Combine the two and that is where I am at right now. So yes, I know all of our friends appreciate both Master and myself. And we will be home as soon as possible, but know that the time away and the journey I am on is worth it!
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03.06.06
12:00 p.m.
Today I have to go grocery shopping, have dinner ready by 6 p.m. have some boy time, and get the laundry sorted. I really don't like doing laundry!!!
I have the house to myself. Mamasita went back to work today, this is a good thing.
Master is back on her journey of soul-searching, She wants to find what it is that She is passionate about. She started working out of The Artist's Way book, and is really commited to it. This was facilitated by the job she was placed in two weeks ago that she really cannot stand. Processing, ugh!
I am attempting to help facilate her journey. I did the soul-searching find-what-you-love-to-do stuff way back when. I don't make a lot of money but I love what I do. I like the kitchen environment, and I really do enjoy feeding people. There are certain kitchen places I don't want to go back to, thus the building of the personal chef/teaching aspect of my career. I want to say "of course" and "Sure it is that way" when She talks to me about self-discoveries. However, what she needs is conversation, and maybe not input, but validation of her quest.
And it is a quest. Anyone attempting to break out of the 9-5 boredom box. The office environment, the "good" paycheck. The you-have-to-do-this-because-society-says-so mentality. I fought the sociatal upbringings, the breaking out of the box. Getting rid of caring about how people viewed me. I am an artist/poet/chef/transgendered strange kind of being. A warrior-shaman who cares little about the material things in life, and cares a whole lot about being comfortable in my own skin.
My journey was long. 10 years of childhood sexual abuse that resulted in a journey through therapy and self-re-evaluations. Restructuring my life so that the ghosts of my past would stop haunting me. I yearned to LIVE not just to exist. And I found a way to do that. The abuse left me scarred. I live with a clinical diagnosis, that Master puts up with on a regular basis. Underneath that one diagnosis are several others. The post-traumatic stress has been alleviated for the most part. But there is still the manic-depressive states, the reverting to being little, the edges of the haunting, and the fact that my father has been extremely ill over the last several weeks. The F.O.O. refused to believe my story, tried to tell me it didn't happen, and kept trying to shove me back into the Mormon box, long after it was noticeable that I would never fit the mold of the good mormon wife.
My journey took me through fire and flame, street performance in Tucson that spoke of the abuse and my healing. I put together video poetry of some poems that talk of my abuse and diagnosis. I had friends who held my hand while I screamed the monsters away back into nothingness. This journey brought me, finally to Master, to my life today, and helped me live with some form of sanity and stability in my life.
I broke those chains and bonds because it was the 9-5 mentality, the do-what-you-have-to-for-your-children, that I resisted and resented. As I watch Master struggle to come free of the sociatal bonds, it reminds me of the struggle I came through, and how supportive she has been of the way I live. I didn't have a job for a long time. I had an injured ankle and something yucky on my hands that wouldn't go away until we discovered my food allergies. I've never kept a job longer then two years. Still, I love what I do. I love the way I live my life, and when people look perplexed at how I live that life, I don't even try to explain it.
I must be supportive of Master as she discovers who She is underneath all the cloaks She wears. There aren't many left. I love her, I adore Her, I am devoted to Her. I want only the best for her, us, the cats, the iguana, and our life together. I want to see Her happy. I can't MAKE Her happy, but I can help Her along the road to authenticity.
Some people might say it isn't the slave's job to do this for a Master. Some people would not align themselves with such a person. We've been in this together going on four years. I'm not about to back out now, and say, "hey, good luck finding yourself." As a shaman, part of my responsibility is helping people at this level of their journey. It just so happens that the person is the Master I serve.
I just finished reading a book by Martha Beck about her journey through Mormonism. I found similarities to my situation in the Church. Her story speaks of the time frame that I was going through a two-year intensive therapy period in my life. There were people following me. There were clicks in my telephone line. "THEY" were watching me. Sometimes I felt over-paranoid. I had smoked too much pot maybe. Reading this book confirmed that the religion is that fanatical about keeping their "members."
I sometimes wondered why the doctors whose care I was in always believed me. They never scoffed at my ranting about being followed. I wasn't paying attention to the news at the time, but between 1991-1993 apparently there was a huge crack down in the church. I was a bypass victim because of who my grandfather was. They wanted me back before I told anyone else what happened. The crackdown made some of the news. And those doctors who help people heal from religious/spiritual abuse make that kind of news their concern. Which is why they believed me.
In my search for validation of my story, corraberated by other "victims", this book came to me. Master found it at the library, and read it in two days. It took me a month. And then it was hard to finish. I am thankful someone else understands how insidious fundamentalistic Religions can be. How they attempt to trap and keep people. I am just fortunate that I escaped, that I am alive today, and that I do not believe what they do.
The validation of this book confirms that I really wasn't crazy around the time my mom died. After going through the funeral process, and re-connecting with the members of the local church, I was visited by church members in my area. Our phone would ring, and there would be tones on the other end (the tones they used to program me with). This happened frequently enough that Master had our telephone # changed, and it facilitated Her research to find out how to get me out of the church once and for all, without having to go through ex-communication by a jury of stuffy middle-aged men in white shirts and ties. I wrote about all of this in the earlier journals. You can check out the Past pages to read of this scary time.
So. I wasn't crazy, they were watching me, they did want me back, and I had de-programmed myself far enough to know that I was never, never, never going back to their life!
And today, our neighbors are mormon, and Mamasita is friendly, and talks about us. This scares me, puts back into the defensive stance. But this isn't Phoenix. I've got my walking papers, and if they start coming around, I can pull it out and say, "take a hike". Been there done that, and I'm done.
For those of you who don't believe that this level of abuse happens, that there are people out there who program small children in order to make them drones, get over it. These people exist. And they are real. And sometimes I wish it never happened to me. But it did. It makes me who I am today, and that I wouldn't change.
I will help Master all I can. I will walk with Her as she finds her passion. At age 18, I expressed to my mom that I wanted to go to Culinary School, she offered modeling school to model the clothes she was making. Thanks mom...I'll never be 5-9 or 5-10, and 102 lbs.
Today I am a chef.
I watched horrified as my father ripped up my poems and called them crap, and continued fighting with me (when I was trying to move out of the house at age 18). I cried, and I got away.
Today I have four self-published books that You as my reader, can purchase. I read poetry at open mics, and I have this website-journal that I maintain. I am an artist in every sense of the word.
My mother was an artist, one of my cousins is a book-maker, another works in Ceramics, because of my mom. It took me years to own the word Artist for myself, because even though she instilled those values in her neices and nephews, when it came to Her daughter, me, I was supposed to go off and be the "good" mormon housewife, have lots of children and give my talents to the church...not make money at them.
I guess there is still a buttload of anger about this. Lately my life has been pointing to the fact that I need to start telling my story again. I need to write that book I haven't written yet about my experiences. I need to write here, about what it is like to live with the diagnosis I have, and how it affects the M/s dynamic with Master and myself. Without expressing that Here, I am doing a disservice to myself and my readers. and while you may ask, what does this have to do with being a slave boy? I say: Everything! Absolutely everything. Because the experience of childhood sexual abuse, and the consequent therapy; the lack of validation growing up as a child, and the finding myself in my thirties made me what I am today, gave me the ability to shed the programming I grew up with, and learned to express it in the value of being a consensual slave. I know so many people may have a similar story, may wonder for themselves, "how can I be a slave growing up with what I grew up with?", and I am here to say, that you can be, it just takes some work to get there.
And all of this is from my gut, and there won't be any editing, and this is the longest post I've written in some time, but it needs to be said. I have to forge ahead in life, and in being authentic to myself, I have to express myself. This is my journal, and where some of my most distressing thoughts need to be put. It isn't about how comfortable I can make my readers, it is about what I need to say in order to get on with my day!
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