The first person to fit a pair of glasses to my face was named Colette.
It was 1988. I was eight years old, and I went to the Irongate Mall in Hibbing for an eye exam and, later, a fitting for my new glasses. My mother knew Colette’s last name. It did not stay with me. My worldview was first-name-centric then. Colette was the person who fitted glasses, and that was enough information to account for her.
I assumed every town had one. The person might be named Susan or Steve, but there would be a Colette somewhere, fitting and adjusting glasses, and that person would have been doing it for as long as the town had existed. Nobody had hired Hibbing’s Colette after a previous Colette quit. She had simply been there. Other towns had been issued their own. It seemed less like a labor market than like plumbing.
It did not occur to me that she might work noon until closing and that someone else might do the mornings. Or that this was rural northern Minnesota in the late 1980s and she might have made shit for an hourly wage. Or that she went home, where there were presumably people who knew her for reasons having nothing to do with glasses. I met her while she was doing something for me and took that to be the whole arrangement.
I do not remember the frames. I do not remember what she said. I remember her name and my certainty that every town had a person like her, permanently available, who knew what to do.
I was eight. The part that interests me now is how much of that understanding survived.
I have been hearing things about a company I used to work for. It was where I worked when I had the mental crash that put me in a locked psychiatric ward in rural southern Minnesota, and where I worked through much of what came after. I left in early April of 2024.
The company apparently went on a hiring binge, bringing in dozens of full-time people as well as contractors. Then I started hearing that a fair number of the people I had helped hire were leaving for other jobs. And the man who had been my boss, a director who quit to be with his family and bought a sailboat to sail around the Caribbean, was working again somewhere, in some capacity.
This was all secondhand. I know enough people who know people to get the news and not enough to know what any of it means. But each report required a small adjustment to a place I had apparently left intact in my head. These people worked here. Those people reported to him. I could still picture the company as it had been when I was there, which was becoming less useful as a description of an actual company.
I know people leave jobs. I have left several. I spent years hiring people who were, in order to come work with us, leaving somewhere else. Still, when it happened to people I had put in particular places in my memory, I was surprised. Even the director’s return to work required an adjustment. I had allowed him to quit, apparently, as long as he stayed on the boat.
I still know a fair number of recruiters and engineering managers around Minneapolis and St. Paul. I have stepped away from management, but I have stayed in touch with people from the years when hiring was a large part of my job. One of them, a friend, texted me out of the blue. I knew she had been in contact with my old director, so I asked about him.
Later that day, I texted him myself. I said I had spoken with our mutual acquaintance and had asked about him. That was more or less it. I did not ask a specific question or suggest getting together. I was making contact and leaving the rest open.
The status said Delivered.
I went off and did something else. When I looked again, it said Read.
No reply. Not even a hello.
And I knew why, immediately, with the confidence I sometimes bring to things I have no way of knowing.
He remembered what I had been like.
He had been my manager during much of my recovery from the break. I cried frequently. My medications kept changing, and there were side effects to contend with while we worked out what helped. I was a hot mess. I was still trying to figure out who the fuck I was and what having schizoaffective disorder meant for me, and I was doing this while employed, in front of people whose opinion of my ability to do a job mattered.
I still find the crying hard to write about. I was supposed to know things and make decisions, and I could not reliably keep myself together in front of the person I reported to. Whatever else I did at that company, I remember that.
The diagnosis gave me a name for things that had been happening for years. It did not tell me how much of my old confidence I could trust, or which ambitions were still mine, or what I was supposed to do with the discovery that some of what I had understood as my personality was illness. The medication could help with one thing and make another thing harder. Meanwhile there was work to do. I was trying to understand what had happened to me while continuing to be someone other people could depend on.
My old director saw some of this. I do not know how much, or what he made of it. I know what it felt like to be seen, which is different, though I was doing a good job of confusing the two while looking at my phone.
In the explanation I had already supplied, my name appeared on his screen and brought all of that back. The crying. The uncertainty. The employee who might need more than an ordinary conversation. He had moved on, and here I was, and he did not want to get into it again.
That account used things that really happened. It also supplied his entire part of the conversation without troubling him to participate.
He could have been busy. He could have meant to answer later. He could have looked at a message that contained no question and decided there was nothing to answer. He could also have chosen not to engage. I had no way to choose among these explanations, but only one arrived with years of embarrassing memories attached, so that was the one that felt like knowledge.
I do not need to make this a symptom. People without my diagnosis can do plenty with an unanswered text. But I had been ill in front of this particular person, and I was afraid that being ill was what he remembered about me. The lack of a reply gave that fear somewhere to go.
April 9, 2024, is the date I attach to the last time I cried at a job.
I know that is an unusually specific thing to keep track of. I have had sad days since then, and anxious ones, and days when work got to me. But I have not cried at a job since that date. After the years when it happened frequently, I notice the absence.
Part of the difference is a medication routine that works for me. I have written about the flatter affect that comes with the drugs I take, and I still have things to say about what that costs. But I can feel something now and have a little time to decide what to do with it. I can be upset without the upset becoming everything I am doing for the rest of the day. That matters at work. It matters everywhere else too.
I also sought out lower-stress work. I have a job where I do not have to be on for nine or ten hours a day, available for every question, tracking how everyone else is doing while trying to keep myself functional. I know more about how I work and what I can sustain. I have become more willing to arrange my life around that knowledge. The pills help, and so does no longer asking myself to get through the same day that was wearing me out.
None of this was in the text.
I did not tell him about the job or the medication or the date. I did not write, I am doing better now. I mentioned a mutual acquaintance. But I think I wanted him to answer so that, somewhere in the exchange that followed, he might get to know the person I had become since he last managed me. I wanted a chance to be someone other than the person crying at work, or at least to be that person with a few more years attached.
I wanted to know whether I was still the hot mess to him. I had sent a text about a mutual acquaintance.
This is where Colette comes back into it, though it took me a while to see why I was thinking about her.
I wanted my old director to have an updated picture of me. I had made considerable progress since the years he knew best, and the possibility that I still existed somewhere as that earlier person bothered me. Yet the picture I had of him had barely changed. He was still my director, the man who had witnessed those years, available in my mind for a conversation about them. He had left the company, spent time with his family, gone sailing, returned to work. I knew these things and still approached him through the one thing he had been to me.
I had given myself several years of a life and given him a job title and a boat.
Colette had a last name. My mother knew it. She had a shift, and a wage, and whatever happened when she left the mall. I do not know any of those things. I have kept her first name for nearly forty years because she was there when I first needed glasses. She may have forgotten me before the week was over. That would be a reasonable outcome for a person whose job involved fitting glasses to a succession of children. It would not change what I remember.
The director and I had known each other for much longer than a fitting. Still, I had been one of the people he managed. He had other employees, other responsibilities, an entire life I knew only pieces of. I remember the recovery from the middle of it, where every medication change and every bad day mattered enormously. I cannot assume it occupies the same amount of space in his memory, or that the parts he remembers are the parts I would choose for him.
I have been a manager. I know how little of a person’s life I got to see. There are people I helped hire who are now leaving that company, and I have no idea what most of their days are like. I was there for part of their lives. Some may remember me fondly. Some may hardly think of me. I do not expect to hear about every change in their circumstances. Yet I was looking at my own former manager’s silence as if it could tell me what he thought of the last several years of mine.
I still wanted a reply. Recognizing that he has a life does not make that embarrassing or unreasonable. We knew each other during a difficult period, and I would have liked to hear from him. What I cannot get from a reply, however friendly, is assurance that he remembers me the way I hope to be remembered. I cannot even be sure that the picture I want him to revise is one he has.
He may not be keeping the record I am trying to correct.
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