My Third Prison - Part I

My Third Prison

Part I



Figuratively speaking, I had been imprisoned three times:  by doctors, spreadsheets, and an orange bottle—or was it vanity, love for Jimmy Choos, and an utter lack of self-confidence?—but I didn’t realize that until I was about twenty-seven and found myself in my third prison.  The realization, like most life-altering events, came suddenly, and, until that moment, I had remained unaware of my predicament. 

One morning, I was in a rush to get to a meeting with important people, still blissfully ignorant of the mechanisms by which one sold her soul.  All I wanted was a job.  I had just completed graduate school and an internship at the World Wellness Organization, a not-for-profit powerhouse that gave voices to the underprivileged throughout the world.  My feet were skipping across uniform-looking tiles of a long, narrow hallway.  I was in a hurry, and reams of fresh copies in my hands provided me with a sense of purpose. 

I glanced at the agenda.  Neatly listed on the cover sheet, its bullet points were jumping off the page one by one and exploding in my head like fireworks, each word full of significance and nearly sacred meaning.  I approached the conference room, deposited the copies in front of Meg, threw myself into an insanely uncomfortable chair, and frantically tried to eliminate smears of ink from my fingers without being obvious about it.  Jerry, my failed attempt at love, was already in the room.

“Hey there,” I heard.  My eyes met Meg’s for a brief second when she lifted her gaze to acknowledge my presence.  “Mia, right?  Hope you like your coffee strong—it better last you ‘till dinner.  It’s going to be a long day.”

I smiled politely, catching a juvenile, nervous snicker in time to replace it with a grown-up smirk.  I was nervous about my new job—what would I do if I failed to meet Meg’s expectations?  I looked up to Meg and if she wanted to, then, sure, I could subsist on coffee. 

“Yeah,” I said, “Lunch is overrated.” 

Jerry tilted his head back and laughed a little too loudly, showing teeth that were irritatingly white.  When we used to date, I would stay at his apartment overnight and thus become exposed to some of his private morning rituals.  Sometimes he would measure just the right amount of toothpaste onto his brush and complain when I would not do the same—instead, I would squeeze my paste out of the tube in a generous blob and fill my mouth with foam.  On those days, he would walk around in nothing but socks and boxers, methodically polishing his teeth to perfection and looking hilarious.  More often, he would wake up groggy and irritated, moving around the apartment in short, jittery sprints, and leaving every task, even the simplest ones, unfinished, and he would yell at me for forgetting my half empty coffee cup on the counter.  The cup’s contents would eventually get cold and filmy and would then go to waste, which drove Jerry nuts. 

Now, his goofiness and charms were being showered on everyone but me.  He looked overly comfortable in his chair, his six-foot body leaning back, arms resting on the backs of the two chairs next to him.  Despite the fact that he was seemingly at ease, his gaze kept avoiding mine.  His thumb was convulsing in perpetual agony, continuously releasing a trigger hidden in his pen as if discharging a firearm.  Tap, tap, click, let’s start this.  Jerry was all attention, ready to take notes. 

Fine, I thought, our dating days are over, so ignore me.  His behavior was hurtful, but I did not allow myself to fully process the emotions stirred up by his indifference toward me.  Not today.  Today was the first day of our contracts, each six months long.  At the end, there would be a prize for one of us—a coveted full-time policy analyst position that came with expense accounts, trips around the world, authority to make decisions that mattered, and heart-warming fringe benefits, such as health insurance.

“All right, guys, let’s start,” said Meg as she turned on the overhead projector. 

Jerry grinned at me and turned toward her.  For the next several hours, he wouldn’t shut up.

The day turned out to be intense.  By the end of it, my stomach was on fire from conference room food, my back ached, and my voice was coarse from clearing my throat a hundred times or so before I would make numerous, mostly futile attempts to interject.  As I was leaving the meeting room, Meg did not lift her gaze to acknowledge my departure.  Jerry was still in the room continuing to brainstorm with her.  He was sweating; his shirt was now wrinkled and his face red.  He was still going like a steamroller. 

I almost hated him.

My former boyfriend was now a threat to my success at WWO.  What was worse, he was likely to win because he was quick and focused, crunched numbers on the fly, and frequently came up with genius policy solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems where resource constraints were at the first glance too insurmountable to do anything meaningful with.  The future ahead of him shone so brightly that even the most level-headed senior staff were blind to his flaws.  Of those, he didn’t seem to have many, except the fact that his genius was artificial:  he regularly took Radopin, a stimulant that made ordinary people miracle workers. 

At my current place of work is where I had the misfortune of meeting Jerry.  Somehow, when there were twenty of us, unfazed interns, competing for two contract spots and a chance to change the world, going out with him did not feel threatening at all.  He must have felt the same way because he freely shared his secrets, popping pills in my presence as if he had nothing to hide. 

“Don’t you think you could become addicted to these?”  I asked him once as I dropped one of his pills into the palm of my hand.  I then touched the pill with my tongue, where my curiosity was met with a bitter taste of uncoated promises.

“Define addiction,” he answered.  “If this stuff helps me do better, I’m all for it.  How many people do you know who aren’t addicted to the idea that they can make it?  All the way to the top, you know?” 

That was a legitimate question, I thought, but I worried about him:  if his morning rage and forgetfulness when he ran out of pills were any indication, long-term withdrawal was going to simply be hell.  Pure, unmedicated hell.

“They say it’s the gateway drug.”

Jerry rolled his eyes in response. 

“A gateway to what, getting things done?” 

“More like cocaine addiction and early Alzheimer’s,” I answered, irritated.

“Whatever.  That thinking is for losers who don’t take risks.  At least I’m doing something to succeed.”

I looked at him in disbelief.

“What exactly are you doing?”  I asked slowly.  “Come on, man, your parents are the ones who have pushed it onto you.” 

“And rightfully so.  After all, our family has a tradition of excellence.”  He was always that formal when mad.

Unlike Jerry, I had been raised to rely on myself and recognized my accomplishments only if they were preceded by hard work, so outsourcing the brain’s thinking power to a bottle of pills seemed wrong and unnatural, questionable at best.  In contrast, Jerry was almost proud of the condition that gave him the attention span of a monkey.  Out was the new in, he liked to say.  A clumsy outsider in adolescence, he liked to feel valued and special in the world of grown-ups.  He did not think that there was any harm in asking for a little help on the road to greatness, and his doctor agreed, prescribing corrective medications to my ex continuously since age twelve. 

I wasn’t sure if the doctor had ever stopped handing out prescriptions as Jerry reached the age of maturity where he would supposedly be able to exercise greater control over his impulses—for some reason, Jerry would always carry his stash in a discrete, unlabeled pill box.  The fact was, Jerry was still a regular Radopin user, and he wouldn’t let things be any other way.

~

After the meeting was finally over, I grabbed some handouts and dashed to the copy room to prepare for the following day.  There, I ran into Lexie.  She was my good pal who had just landed an account executive position at a public relations firm with whom we shared tenancy and a copy room.  This gloomy facility bore the proud name of a business center despite the fact that its only visitors were lowly junior staff who grudgingly made endless printouts and copies to support real, serious business.

Lexie looked at me shyly, then clumsily turned away and started paying unduly great attention to the words proclaiming that the brand of printer paper she was using was decidedly the best.  I figured that I should respect her silence and unease, remembering the conversation we had a couple of days earlier when I came home and, too exhausted to do anything else, jumped online.  I loved the virtual world because it was easy, effortless; I could fragment my self and project any image I wanted, skirting around inconsistencies and thus not having to explain them.  I think that Lexie must have felt the same way.

“What’s up?”  I asked her that night as a newly opened chat window established a connection between us.  “How’s work?”

“Employee Health wanted to see me today.”  She seemed hesitant to share at first, but I could tell that something was bubbling inside her, forcing her to open up.  There was something in the way she was typing—hesitantly, deliberately, using the backspace key more than one would in meaningless online chatter.  Her keystrokes spelled uncertainty.

“Employee Health?  What about?”  I probed her gently.

“That test I took two weeks ago, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.  Those weird questions you told me about.  So, what are your results?”

“A mild case of attention deficit disorder, not severe enough to be clinically diagnosable.”  There must have been something about me that attracted people who couldn’t keep their thoughts in order.  Perhaps they sensed that I could be their rock.  In reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth, but I still gave it an honest effort.

“So, if it’s not severe, you are okay, right?  Just a little deviation from the norm.  Aren’t we all a little different?  What’s the problem?”

“They are recommending that I take medication to correct this deficiency, as they call it.” 

This was interesting.

“Why would they want you to do that?”

“They say I would be more productive that way.  There was a study where they found that they’d get something like five-hundred percent ROI if they gave people Radopin.  Now they screen everyone.”

Chills ran down my spine.  Smarties, anyone?

“But they can’t do that to you if you aren’t sick, can they?”

“Yes, they can.  The company that makes Smarties has a new drug formulation out, and it’s been approved for supplementation purposes.  For cognitive enhancement supplementation, that is.  It’s prescription-free.  The drug is only available through employers, though—they do it that way to prevent abuse.”

Didn’t supplementation mean no need to account for side effects?  What a lovely marvel of a pill it must have been—benefits all around without any public relations headaches.  All costs were not only externalized, but deferred to the future, ideally distant enough for Lexie and millions of people like her to vanish from corporate landscapes, too old to realize what had been stolen from them and too powerless to fight back.  These people would probably come to be known as the discarded generation. 

“What if you say no?”

“Then I say no, I guess…”  She accented her words with a virtual shoulder shrug—a colon followed by a question mark.  “Employee Health nurse, a very sweet lady, said that would be fine.  It’s up to me to decide.”

“Then screw it, right?”

“Well, it’s not that simple.  My boss hinted that he wants me to take it.  He said it would greatly enhance my visibility within the team.”

“Is that code for take it or leave?  Sounds weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Giving up control kinda sucks.  I know they say it’s cognitive enhancement, positive stuff and all, but I don’t know.  It doesn’t feel right, you know?”

I knew.  It didn’t feel right to me, either.  What was in it for Lexie?

“You aren’t going to do it, are you?”  I asked the Lexie who was standing in front of me in the copy room.

She turned around, and I realized that her eyes were filled with tears.

“My boss asked me to make extra handouts for another team’s meeting today, and his boss forgot my name.  My coworkers ask me how I’m doing twice as often as they used to.  My LinkedIn invite acceptance rate is miserable.”

Poor Lexie was being mobbed. 

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said.  “Maybe this is not the job for me.”

I felt sad for Lexie because I didn’t know what I would do if I were to find myself in her shoes.  On the one hand, I would want to succeed.  On the other, I wasn’t sure if I would be able to stomach the price:  the loss of control.  Knowledge had become a commodity—it could be produced, sold and purchased—and, as a result, new interests emerged, those who wanted to find ways to control such commodities, perhaps even own them.  This, in turn, necessitated the decoupling of cognition, an essential human function, from its owners, making people surrender control little by little, pill by pill. 

Chemical enhancers fit into the picture well because, the more control people gave up, the more they received of the things that they supposedly wanted—more comfort, more automation of everything, more mindlessness, a reduced need to take any sort of responsibility for personal decisions.  It was easy to say yes to Smarties.  In a avalanche-like fashion, more and more people were voluntarily outsourcing their decision-making powers to others, who, in turn, supplied them with comfortable lives.  This symbiosis was hard to break, making Smarties proliferation strategy brilliant. 

I had a hunch that, the more people gave up their cognitive freedom, the harder it would be for those who refused to do so to hold their ground.  The sad thing was that, in the long run, Lexie just couldn’t win.  She would have to give in—and, for the sake of her career, she’d be wise to do so sooner than later.

~

It was seven-thirty in the evening, and, exhausted, I boarded a train full of suits.  I was one of them.  My one-hundred percent wool pant suit was complete with thoughtfully selected business accessories.  Maxed-out credit cards that had been used to acquire this look of accomplishment were well hidden in the depths of my five-hundred dollar business tote, one of the kind that screamed success.  I could not afford one of those bags that understatedly, matter-of-factly alluded to their owners’ accomplishments without being in anyone’s face; not even my banks’ generous credit line commitments secured by nothing but blind faith in my successful future could help me with that.  My life was already mortgaged too heavily. 

The toes of my shoes were cleverly pointed, molding my feet into a shape that was just right for the world of tamed corporate sexuality.  A few years prior, when I had graduated from college and was shopping for a new, professional identity, a shoe store girl with heavy eyeliner on and a strategically messy, forty-five minute hairdo asked me what style I was looking for.

“Enticing enough to underscore my femininity but something I could kick ass with,” I replied half-jokingly.

She understood.  Apparently, my desires had mass appeal, so it wasn’t difficult to find a pair of shoes that I’d be pleased with.

These shoes would always remind me to fully reap the benefits of my not so secret weapon, gender.  I had no reservations about doing so. After all, women were finally true equals to men, which meant that we no longer needed to disguise our defining characteristics.  It was finally okay to be a woman.  What was not okay was to be a weak, deficient one.  Like me. 

The sad truth about me is that I am a fully recovered victim of a mini-stroke, which I had suffered while playing softball in twelfth grade to make my list of extracurricular activities more appealing to upscale colleges.  My wholesome, all-American eggs-and-bacon diet must have done me wrong. 

Incapacitation became my first prison, one to which I had surrendered my body.  The stroke at such a young age was probably my punishment for wanting more out of life.  I had recovered, but, subsequently, would always have to pace myself as the ghost of what had happened consistently pushed me to do more with my life but never gave me a chance to fully let go.  Always aware of my limitations and terrified of a possibility for a repeat incident of horrendous pain and surreal, debilitating weakness, I had a tough time competing with people like my ex. 

I went through a lot to get as far as I did in life, but I was still not good enough.  Not qualifying for the disability status and the associated protections within the workplace, I was just defective enough to be unable to take advantage of most performance enhancement wonders developed for the healthy by modern neuropharmacology.  Within the corporate advancement system, I was rapidly falling through the cracks.  However, I still tried to do my best, as pathetic as I felt at times.

After my stroke scare, aware of the restrictions imposed on my body, I started paying more attention to the relationships that other people had with theirs.  I often noticed neglect.  On the train, for instance, I could almost hear my neighbors’ bodies scream, craving freedom from constraining clothing, begging for their fixes, which, depending on the individual, probably ranged from legal chemical substances to quick holidays in the woods, where cell phone companies and ISPs were still unable to violate what was left of these people‘s privacy.  In the world of virtualization and complexity, nature with its fresh air, elusive and coveted, was the white-collar drug of choice—absent, of course, handy chemical substances for tricking and taming the nervous system. 

I looked around, but no one would meet my gaze.  Squeezed between a young shark with platinum highlights and a glassy-eyed corporate kamikaze, both of them tangled up in the wires of their music players, closed off from the world and submerged in their own realities, I suddenly wondered if, in ten years, I was bound to become a disillusioned, yet delusional zombie like them.  I thought again of my competition, the one who looked so harmless and safe when he lounged on my old futon just months ago, pizza sauce dripping from his stubbled cheeks.  We had just started dating, and even such dull a background as political debates shown on C-SPAN couldn’t stop us from doing it like rabbits on speed.

The train suddenly came to an abrupt stop, shaking me a little and helping me return to my post-ex reality.  As the number of interns under consideration for permanent positions started to shrink, so had Jerry’s interest in intimacy.  He stopped calling for no apparent reason two months into our courtship, perhaps sensing that we would soon find ourselves in direct competition with each other—or perhaps the euphoria of a new relationship had worn off and he moved on, chasing a new fix and disposing of me as he would of a used bottle of Smarties. 

The train jolted again.  It felt as if the city was a complex production system, and its giant, shiny skyscrapers sourced the system’s intelligence.  At day’s end, large quantities of processed material were being carried by transportation arteries to be disposed of away from the thought centers, in the dark alleys of the world‘s conscience.  There were so many of our kind, of the discarded generation, that sometimes the system would clog up, and that’s when commuter trains would stop dead in their tracks like blood clots, unable to push any further. 

Most of the time, that’s what career progress felt like. 

~

Several weeks had passed.  Color started to fade on the leaves of carefully transplanted, yet still pitiful remnants of nature—city trees whose roots had been forced into concrete and imprisoned by steel enclosures.  Captives to the city lifestyle, they seemed to be losing hope for regeneration, and early frost was further curbing their expectations for a glorious comeback the following year.  As days passed, I started finding this natural process relatable because, to me, it represented fading hope.  Piles of wordy documents filled with ambiguous, nearly utopian mission statements were growing on my desk. 

I kept working hard, winning some battles, losing others.  With each completed report and delivered presentation, tension grew between Jerry and me—soon, there would be nothing left between us but this constant, all-encompassing feeling of unease.  We were nearing the home stretch of the race for the job. 

By objective measures, I had been doing well.  My work was getting nods from senior staff members.  One outside policy consultant, Mark, an older guy who came from money and had made some of his own, so he no longer had anything to prove, was so impressed with my work that he offered me his card, insisting that I contact him if things didn’t work out at WWO.  Everyone agreed that Mark was a good guy even though he wasn’t one of us—he worked for a private sector company, which, in our circle, was frowned upon.

This notwithstanding, something in the demeanor of those who had direct control over my professional fate made me worry.  For starters, Jerry’s ego appeared to take up more and more room in our endless meetings, making it difficult for me to break up his self-aggrandizing monologues to put in a word or two.  More importantly, electronic return receipts on the correspondence I had been sending to Meg had started to show that it would take longer and longer for her to open my emails.  More often than not, she would not bother responding, leaving me in lingering silence.  I considered this lack of feedback, whether positive or negative, to be the most sophisticated form of torture conceivable within the boundaries of a white-collar master-slave relationship.  Why would she ignore my work?  I wondered.  Were my notes getting lost in the sea of other unread correspondence?  Was my work worthless? 

This torture by silence was unbearable. 

Despite my disorientation, I continued to work hard, trading fun nights and weekends for dates with numbers, statistics, and a laptop.  And then I arrived to work one day to find my professional persona mutilated, my shaky junior analyst voice about to be silenced for a long time.

Deleted.  A message that contained a weighty outcome of nearly eighty hours worth of grueling work, which I had completed in a week, had been deleted by Meg, unread. 

At first, I wanted to cry, but instead I managed to put myself together and prepared to walk into Meg’s office.  I had not put myself in thirty-year indenture to student loan companies for nothing.  I had good ideas.  I was real, damn it. 

I was going to fight, and I was going to be heard. 

With that realization, I ran to the bathroom down the hall, hurriedly fixed my hair, applied an extra coat of Seduce ‘Em All Sweet Berry lipstick, washed my hands, used twice the amount of paper towels as I would normally do, and then forced myself to slow down as I approached Meg’s office, my heart beating loudly, like a thousand hammers pounding on an anvil.  I was finally going to confront her.

She raised her head and looked at me with a little too much enthusiasm, smiling a little too widely.  Her eyes remained cold.

“Hi, Meg.  Did you get a chance to review the report I sent to you yesterday?  The one on—“

“The poverty report?”

“No, I submitted that one last week.  This one is on barriers to workforce entry associated with mental health problems in Southeast Asia.  I got some great stats for it and refined a couple of the models that Jerry presented last month.”

“Right, that.  Great work.”  Her smile got wider.

“Oh, you’ve read it,” I gasped.  Was technology wrong in representing Meg’s opinions of my work?  A glimmer of hope touched my heart.

“Great work, but Jerry submitted his proposal on this topic two days ago.  Given the urgency of the situation, we went with his work.  Ask him to show you the details—he really did an amazing job pulling his stats together.”

No such luck.  Technology may be impersonal, but in that foible lies its strength—it has no reason to lie.  Meg was the one who was lying—about having read my work and probably about other things as well.

“Meg, do you know how he was able to turn this around in a day?”

“Lots of caffeine and determination, I suppose,” she said casually.  Did she know he was using?  She was faking a look of disinterest so well that I thought she might have.

“He is on a brain stimulant drug,” I blurted out before I’d had a chance to think about where this conversation would lead.  “A possibly illegal one,”  I added.

“First, I doubt this is true,” Meg said slowly.  She looked like she was carefully weighing the implications of her words.  “Second, if this were true, his medical history and private life are none of our concern.”

Of course not.  These things only become of great interest when people start underperforming, I thought.  Then, suddenly, everyone starts acting shocked and surprised.

“But I don’t think he needs these drugs, you know what I mean?” 

“Are you a medical professional?” 

Meg appeared irritated now.  My impromptu audience with her was over, and I had not scored any points while I was there.  It was time for me to leave, humiliated.

I hated myself for telling on Jerry, but the unfairness of the situation had pushed me to speak up.  His presentation couldn’t have possibly been as thorough as mine—since he submitted his work two days before me, he most likely failed to include key numbers that were released a day later.  Meg, however, wouldn’t have known—she hadn’t bothered to read my work, just as she was not going to bother looking into dubious reasons behind Jerry’s spectacular performance.  After all, our organization did not bear the costs of Jerry’s decision, neither material nor emotional, so why would she care? 

I had almost turned around to leave, but did not do so, perhaps because my humiliating experiences had become me.  I gave up on trying to act cool.

“Meg, how can I improve my performance?”  I was desperate for some, any reassurance.

“Seems that Jerry’s got it.  Perhaps he could coach you.”  She seemed indifferent to my plea for help.  “Also, you are reading into people too much.  I would stop doing that if I were you.”

The problem was, she wasn’t me.  I was weak and principled and naïve—a bad combination.

I left, my eyes feeling like I had just minced a hundred onions and my cheeks wet.  I looked and felt like a helpless raccoon subjected to cosmetics testing:  tears were streaming down my face and leaving paths of mascara on my cheeks.  What a pity, I thought.  I couldn’t even cry as discreetly as Jerry or any other guy could.  Not that he would ever cry.  After all, he had nothing to cry about—his tactics were so good that even our do-gooder organization, one that was about to spend millions to help alleviate the disparities resulting from mental health discrimination in Third World countries, preferred to silently endorse them. 

Forget the mentally challenged, I thought angrily.  It seemed that the healthy and responsible were the new minority. 

I was being implicitly asked to step into a gray area within corporate conscience.  Meg was right:  I was not a medical professional, so what did I know about why those drugs were being manufactured?  What did I know about who had the right to benefit from them?  I was just a ballsy junior analyst whose work and thought processes were hardly being acknowledged, let alone respected. 

Should I do it, too?  I wondered.  Should I give in and play on their team, even if it means playing against my own body and conscience? 

Those two hadn’t done me much good lately.