Dispatches

Grounded

I’m unreasonably happy about my coffeehouse job. I say unreasonably because there’s no way it can support my needs long-term; and the job isn’t anything to brag about. I’m not even a barista yet, just a general-purpose employee who takes orders at the register, prepares pastries and sandwiches for customers, assists the chef with kitchen prep, maintains inventory, and keeps the dishes, tables, and floors clean. It’ll take several months of proving myself in those areas to reach barista-level—a requirement that makes me smile every time I think about it. In our house, the ceiling is low: with nowhere to climb, you have to dig into the role you have now.

The quotation, "Plants are stuck. The best they can do is grow toward something", by Courtney Hollender, overlaid on an illustration of orchids blooming in the jungle by Martin Johnson Heade from 1872.

The Work

The work is grounding and meditative. It’s slow and repetitive enough for contemplation but too quick and demanding for rumination. Tasks arrive in batches and waves, with one leading to the next. Interactions with customers and co-workers are swift, light, and pleasant; and any that aren’t can be turned around or passed over easily. When the day is done, my work is done: it doesn’t follow me home, haunt my dreams, or pollute my other relationships; and its social and economic value is clear, tangible, and mutually-beneficial.

The House

The coffeehouse is hyper-local, with one owner, one manager, one chef, one supplier, one shift, and a steady stream of regulars. Every employee gets the same, end-to-end understanding of the business, moving from register to food prep to barista to (maybe) management—no exceptions. The owner is always on-site; and our beans are roasted in-house.

There are no shareholders, uniforms, dress codes, performance reviews, or productivity trackers. When I called about a job, there was no application. The manager asked me to come in for an interview, shared expectations and logistics, and then collected information for payment and taxes. No one asked for a resume, a website, or a LinkedIn profile. The hiring and training were frictionless and humane, in ways inhumane, frictionless software can never deliver.

I would call the coffeehouse an anti-corporate miracle, except the owners are indifferent about corporations. They run the business as if corporations don’t exist. And it seems to be working: business has been flowing for over ten years.

I love it.

The work, environment, and location are everything I’ve needed to bring six years of reading, writing, and healing to a clean finish. The experience has been the exact opposite of my experience in the healthcare system after cancer surgery and treatment—and provided the ideal tempo, environment, and depth of social interaction for recovering from it.

The quotation, "The factory is a good place for writing poems. The work is monotonous, you can think about other things, and the machines have a regular rhythm that accentuates the lines of verse", from Agota Kristof's memoir "The Illiterate", overlaid on an abstract spirograph created by Edward J. Woolsey in 1869.

The Yard

This wasn’t my story a year ago.

A year ago, I had a similar job in a similar environment, fifteen minutes away in the opposite direction. It was my first paid job in five years; and my first non-remote job in eight. I was exiting the parallel world of chronic illness, where time moves in strange ways and life milestones remain perpetually out-of-reach, with over 700,000 words of writing to sculpt into something worth sharing and the deeply uncomfortable sense that things would turn out fine.

Then I made the mistake of sharing the job on LinkedIn, along with the circumstances that led to it, which led to quiet ridicule from someone I considered to be a mentor during a virtual meeting, in front of potential connections who subsequently withdrew interest. Shortly afterward, I quit my job out of shame; and everything just spiraled from there.

Recovery took 10 months.

The Door

Why did that single, catty interaction—“Natasha has a job to share”—have such a devastating impact?

“Do you even want to work?” said my gynecologic oncologist after his flippant decision on medication cost me a job.

“So you’re not working or in school," said a nurse during a breast biopsy a few months later.

“We need to find you a rich man; you’re an expensive gal,” said a primary in response to my lab results.

It was bad enough losing five years after cancer surgery because of doctors’ disinterest in surgical menopause and enduring their snarky comments when it became longterm unemployment. It was worse coming from someone whose job is to fix broken systems, including in healthcare, after being invited to their workshop.

For five years before that meeting, I’d turned my experiences into a portfolio of service design projects, despite only having a few hours of energy per day, based on the belief I could make things better and gain greater agency in a profession that understood the stakes upon recovery.

That meeting made it clear I’d been wasting my time. The expert I’d modeled my work on didn’t think I belonged in the room; and the other designers in the room seemed to agree. So much for civic tech. So much for agency. So long, problem-solving.

Once I saw the parallels in values and behavior between tech and medicine—the smug pledge to “do good” yet open disdain for people who need help—I couldn’t go back. Since then, I’ve kept both at an aggressive distance and focused on actualizing their opposites.

The Garden

Which brings us back to coffee work, and more broadly, undervalued work.

In Craig Mod’s walking memoir Things Become Other Things, he describes a friend who “raised the station of all he spoke with in the way he spoke”. I want to be like that in every interaction, especially through work. So, I decided before starting the job to root myself in it, to view it less as a transfer station than a destination, where hidden value could be uncovered and developed.

So far, it seems to be working.

The Road

There’s a part of me that worries I’ve lost my ambition—and another that thinks that’s a good thing. When you lose ambition, you can finally develop drive, the ability to work on an idea or problem regardless of incentives and often without them, which makes you immune to manipulation and criticism.

I’ve written for 90-180 minutes per day for five years straight, without stable health, income, feedback, or direction—and with no loss of enthusiasm upon rejection. My work keeps getting better; and the work is the reward. The coffee work that’s supporting me in the meantime feels like it’s part of the process, not an obstacle to overcome. It’s brought together all of my thinking on time, resilience, change, and infrastructure, in ways that are unexpected and inviting.

I’m curious to see how it influences what comes next.

The quotation, "The more you know who are you, and what you want, the less you let things upset you," by the character "Bob Harris" in Sofia Coppola's film "Lost In Translation", overlaid on an illustration of plants growing outside a window by Anton Dieffenbach in 1856.