For this blog entry I give the honors to my coworker and friend Shosanna who has been crying along with me in the above room since 10 a.m this morning:
According to Kelly Cutrone of Bravo’s “Kell on Earth” new book, If You Have to Cry Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You, if you are a professional woman at work it is best to not sit at your desk with a quivering lower lip and blotchy red face. Rather, buck yourself up and gather all dignity and hurriedly walk to the nearest ladies room. You must put toilet paper on the toilet seat first since you are a proper kind of girl and then sit down making sure your H&M business dress does not fall in the toilet.
The tears are streaming down your face now. Ahh, that feels better. Go on, grab some toilet paper and blow your nose, but be careful not to wipe your eyes since it feels so good as they fall off your face, onto the sludgey floor and into the toilet bowl itself. Now your head is in your hands grabbing fistfuls of your pony tail you carefully blowdried this morning.
Someone just walked in. Is it a coworker? Is it someone else who works on the floor? Can they hear me? Does it matter? Please let them hurry up doing their business and leave. You are holding everything in, and can’t breathe. You wonder how Sting can have tantric sex with Trudie and dozens of groupies for 8 hours straight while your brain is going to explode as you hold in these tears.
She finishes washing her hands. You hear the clack-clacking of her heels as she leaves. This time it is full on sobbing. You feel like Matt Damon when Robin Williams tells him it wasn’t his fault and he is finally ready to let go of his past and move to California to love Minnie Driver.
You brace yourself. Maybe this is your Come to Jesus moment. The low point. You walk back to the sea of boxes and in the distance you see the Statue of Liberty. You think about your Great Grandparents coming to this country with an aching hope in what was to come ahead, years from then, after the tenements and sweatshops and meal after meal of the most depressing parts of the cow that were edible. You thought about their dreams for your parents and for you. And if they came to this country so you could end up crying in the bathroom of a Wall Street job. And like your ancestors before you whose only legacy lives on in stoic wedding day pictures in basements and in your middle names, you too will be largely forgotten. And all these boxes and filing and Excel and sweating and jumping when your name is called will have all been for nothing.
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