005: Can we ever really make up for it?
Hi friends!
For not being allowed to leave the house, my life has felt very hectic lately. I finished an Almost Final Draft of a novel last Tuesday, which felt surreal. I’m currently waiting for my writing partner to give me some feedback so we can finish stitching our favorite parts together; while I wait, I’m going through a list of agents we want to approach.
Meanwhile my new project, Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse, has taken up much more time and energy than I thought it would. I really shouldn’t be surprised. Writing three short stories a week is difficult, but I was so caught up in trying to do anything to help people that I didn’t think through the energy drain it would be on me. But I love doing it, and will continue to. If you want really short, cheerful stories in your inbox 2-3 times a week, you can subscribe here.
Over the last several weeks, we’ve seen an amazing response to GoFundBean, and we can see that the tip jars are getting so much support from people around the world. That’s been amazing to watch. It’s also kept me busy designing things and trying to figure out how we can best support baristas next.
Then, I got laid off from my museum job yesterday. I know that I’m in the same boat as literally millions of people, including many of you, so that takes the sting out of it a little bit. But it still sucks. I’ve never done anything other than resign; to be unemployed against my will feels so strange.
The hardest part (and I didn’t really realize this until talking with a coworker, so props to Lauren) is not being able to say goodbye to everyone. I will probably reapply whenever we’re allowed to, but I know many others won’t. There’s a good chance I’ll never see them again, a fact of life that becomes increasingly real to me as I get older.
I wanted to try to stay positive in these emails, but… fuck, it’s hard. It’s hard to stay cheerful and hopeful in the face of death and illness and the unknown. We are all struggling, and I think writing as if life is otherwise just… isn’t going to happen. Not this week. Not for me, at least. So, here’s something that’s been weighing very heavily on me for years now, but which I don’t talk about much. It’s kind of about what we owe to each other—yes, again. But different this time.
Back in February, when covid was still something that seemed localized to Asia and before whether or not travel was safe was even a question in anyone’s mind, the specialty coffee industry descended on Orange County for the US Coffee Championship. My friend Adam was competing, so I spent five days going back and forth from LA to OC, picking up milk and cheering him on and praying-but-not-praying in my car.
One day, a half dozen of us were piled into his AirBnB, killing time before announcements of the winners. We were talking, I wish I remembered about what, when I brought up something I’ve been trying to figure out for a while now: Emotional Penance.
It’s not guilt. I mean, it certainly has its roots in guilt, but it’s not the same as feeling guilty. Historically, penance is something very specific, right?
Penance:
(noun)
voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.
a Christian sacrament in which a member of the Church confesses sins to a priest and is given absolution.
In a lot of Protestant systems, you’re already forgiven and the act of accepting and loving God is enough to save you and forgive your sin. But in Catholicism, God is loving and mighty, but God is also the Father and He punishes. Just loving God isn’t enough to wash you clean, you have to confess your sins and then you have to make up for it. That’s how you learn, and don’t sin again. (Supposedly.)
In the Church, penance can be assigned by a priest. For instance, you confess your sins, and the priest gives you a prayer to recite a certain number of times. Doing that—doing your penance—is what grants you forgiveness.
I think I’m so fascinated by penance because I’m not Catholic, or really strictly religious in general. But I think the Catholics were on to something here. You don’t learn from your mistakes until you admit you made them and make up for them. Sure, some of the mistakes you have to confess to as sins in the Church are sort of ridiculous, but if you sidestep that… Hurting someone isn’t ridiculous. It is (hopefully) a mistake, and loving them is not always enough to grant you forgiveness. Sometimes you have to make up for it.
(Obviously, this gets into sticky territory, and I think “earning” things in a relationship can be dangerous, but bear with me.)
I think there’s sort of an ingrained instinct for this in humans. The desire to repair relationships after damaging them runs deep. I think it’s the same desire that allows us to forgive at all, and that especially drives us to seek closure.
It’s when things get left open-ended, when mistakes are made and never fully confessed to or made up for, that I think emotional penance sort of swoops in.
I used to be a manager of a coffee shop in Dallas. Things were great there for a while, but the owner sort of lost touch with reality. I say this very seriously, and with as much grace as I can give him. I truly believe he had a mental breakdown which led him to treating his staff—and especially me—like garbage. I left after a long and harrowing period of abusive work practices; my last straw was when he punched me in the face.
As the manager, I often felt like it was my responsibility to protect my staff from him as much as I could. (If you’re reading mother-protecting-children-from-abusive-father vibes in this, yeah, that’s a good analogy.) There weren’t very many specialty coffee shops in Dallas just yet, so there weren’t a lot of other places for employees to take their skills. The people that left usually moved to Austin for their much stronger specialty coffee scene, or out of coffee all together.
But, obviously, I couldn’t always protect them. I couldn’t do anything when he fired almost our entire staff in one day for the pettiest reason. I couldn’t force him to sign checks when he withheld them as punishment for ridiculous “infractions.” I did my best to stop him from manipulating one of them; luckily, she had a strong support system and those people got her to quit before he hurt her. Once I quit, the staff that were left were on their own. From what I’ve heard, things got worse.
It’s not my fault that he was like that. I know this. (Thank you, years of therapy.) But I often find myself thinking about the moments that I could have done more to support that staff and didn’t. I had been taught not to trust in government bodies, so it never even occurred to me to report him to the better business bureau, or the police, but obviously that would have done something. There were just so many things I didn’t know yet, so many ways I was younger and more naïve than I had any right to be, so many truths I couldn’t see. I was weighed down by my own suicidal depression and couldn’t always act fast enough. And it seemed like there were so many other factors; it would take a book for me to write them all out.
For the most part, I’ve forgiven myself for not knowing what to do or how to help them more. I wish I’d reached out to other coffee people and asked for help; I’ll never be entirely sure why I didn’t. I had (have) so many wonderful friends in the industry who I know would have leapt into action to help, had I only told them what was going on.
It’s been nearly five years since I left, but still I worry about the emotional toll that job took on my coworkers. If I thought apologizing would help, I’d do it. But I don’t reach out because I suspect they don’t want to hear from me; from their perspective, I was probably just as much a part of the problem. Unable to protect them, I was as good as hurting them too. Leaving when I did, when things were close to their worst, left them without any protection in the hands of an abuser. Hearing from me might not do any good at all.
So instead, I find myself doing a strange emotional penance. It’s not reciting Hail Marys or praying on my knees for hours. But there’s that same repetition to it, like worrying over a rosary. If I just hope for good things enough for all of them, it’ll come to fruition, right? They’ll heal, they’ll get better jobs, they’ll live happy and healthy lives. I lay in my bed or drive down the highway and find myself hoping (praying? manifesting?) that they were and are okay. Meanwhile, I worry about my own fitness to ever manage people again. I watch out for ways I can help my coworkers/fellow humans, to make up for when I couldn’t.
Does it get me anywhere? I mean, I’m a better person now, for sure. Which I guess is the entire point of penance. If the goal of penance is to learn from your sins, well, I can check that one off the list.
But I also don’t feel done. I think the nice thing about the way Catholics do penance is that it’s prescribed to you. Every priest does it differently, but if he says ‘read this section of Scripture and think on the goodness of God for an hour,’ you know exactly when you’re done. And since a priest said that’s enough to be forgiven, then it is. You’re forgiven.
Without a clear directive, emotional penance can drag on. Should I have cut myself off at one year? Can I be done at five? Will I ever really feel done, since there’s no one to actually grant me forgiveness, which is what I’m really seeking?
Some Things I Read And Loved Recently
Hedy Lamarr: Bombshell, code breaker… art thief?
As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on.
I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.
I write things! Most recently I did an interview with Abhinav Khanal, co-founder of Bean Voyage, a non-profit that supports youth and women coffee farmers in Costa Rica. Check it out here.
Stay healthy, friends.
xx,
Valorie
You’re receiving this email because you either subscribed at Substack or signed up for Valorie’s Dispatches From Somewhere series. You can unsubscribe below.