The Price of Milk, Eggs, and Wellbeing

The summer I worked at the grocery store was sticky and sunburnt and hot. Actually, it was the hottest ever recorded, according to a depressing report I read from NASA. I spent my days stocking shelves in an air-conditioned building. After clocking out, I’d do anything I wished. Getting lost in a book by the lake after tending to my garden before cooking dinner felt like total freedom.

That May was also when the world-shattering novel All Fours by Miranda July was released. As any dedicated July fangirl would, I went to a local reading to get my copy signed, told her I loved her outfit, and promptly got lost in in the book's pages. The plot feels impossible to summarize, but if you haven’t read it: It’s about a middle-aged woman who sets out on a cross-country road trip, leaving her husband, child, and home behind, only to make it to a motel thirty minutes away. The journey that ensues is transformative, fantastical, and tender in a way only July could dream up.

All Fours takes place in the same city where the grocery store I worked at is headquartered—this felt like a wink from the universe. Now, I feel an echo of myself in the protagonist of July’s story. I took a risk I thought I understood and ended up somewhere else entirely.

Instead of escaping domestic responsibilities and societal expectations, I was escaping my career—one I had spent so much time and energy nurturing and growing. It was a relief to be someone else for a little while, to slowly slip out of the choking grasp work had on me for so long.

Before that summer, I was on the marketing team for a healthcare start-up. I barely lasted a year. Yes, the job was definitely burnout-inducing, but there was something deeper underneath that made me leave. I cannot remember a time when I did not use work to feel validated, accepted, and worthy, and that coping mechanism only became worse after losing my mom in 2019. The ever-present grief mixed with intense insecurity and the pressures of the job became a toxic sludge in my brain, and I went way beyond taking professional issues personally. The fear of doing something wrong, creating something that was not good enough, or upsetting my boss immobilized me.

I could have, in theory, just found another similar job. But I likely would have only repeated the cycle again. Life is rarely as simple as you hate your husband and should get a divorce—as is what happened in All Fours—or your job sucks and you should get a new one. Sometimes the only way to figure out what’s going on is to muddy things up. Sometimes a risk is necessary.

As July writes, “Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over.”

I originally took the job at the store for objectively self-centered reasons. Some of the closest people in my life logically questioned what I was doing, but I pushed through with my decision. I was so focused on making my escape from the corporate world at any cost that I never considered it could bring about more existential and collective realizations.

It began with lunch. Working in media and marketing roles since graduating college, I would never think to stop what I was doing to have a real meal break. At the store, it’s mandatory to take multiple breaks throughout a shift. What should be guaranteed for all workers regardless of industry or occupation felt luxurious. I never even considered this to be a problem before because I truly believed having a “creative” job was a privilege only granted to a lucky few, and if I was one of those few then I’d better hold on tight no matter what.

Work through lunch, ignore your body’s signals, and give everything you possibly can.

What I imagined might be a three or four month stint stretched into nearly a year. Over time, it was not all swimming in the lake after a shift, making new friends, and flexing the muscles I developed from the physically laborious work. I saw coworkers sustain injuries that put them out of work for weeks or even months. Customers were too often rude and cruel. Management’s distrust in and disrespect for employees was part of the routine. Waking up before sunrise loses its charm when the Chicago weather drops into the negatives. But through the days I felt resentful or tired or angry, I stayed.

One day, a coworker told me a customer was surprised to learn that many of the people who work at the store graduated college, including the person bagging her items. I wanted to run after the shopper to tell her more about the people that she had clearly just made so many assumptions about. They are professors, artists, musicians, chefs, bakers, dancers, playwrights, activists, photographers, journalists, designers, and teachers. With or without college degrees, they have talents, goals, and dreams for the future. They are parents, caregivers, lovers, partners, and friends. They are kind, hard-working, intelligent people who are simply trying to live. They work every day to provide an essential function in our current societal organization but are still worried about money, housing, healthcare, and what tomorrow may bring.

They deserve so much better.

I know I am not alone in my expanding beliefs around personal and collective labor. According to new Gallup polling, support for unions is at its highest level since 1965. Every kind of labor deserves to be respected and honored. Part of that means coming to terms with the fact that infinite capitalistic growth is not possible and should not be the goal. It is as unnatural as a ripe strawberry or fresh tomato in a midwest winter to expect that human beings can continually produce at exponential levels regardless of the literal or metaphorical seasons. We are finite beings living on a finite planet for a finite time.

Our labor should be used to take care of each other and ourselves.

Some friends told me they felt inspired by my career shift. I would say at least thirty-five percent of the time, I find what I did to be completely illogical, and I do not evangelize the choice. Their comments make me think of the many people I know who can muscle through jobs that cause them pain. Why couldn’t I?

A sign is only a sign if you choose to believe it. One morning, I was talking about my mom with a coworker who also lost a parent, and I looked down to realize the expiration date on the carton of soy milk I was stocking was my mom’s birthday. Whether grieving a relationship, a job, a person, or a place, grief can be a portal. Grief is confronting what was previously unconfrontable. That process can look like taking actions that do not make sense under typical circumstances. What felt so far away before was now literally in my hand. A carton of soy milk somehow felt like a sign that my mom’s unconditional love is always with me if I can be present to feel it.

I was never going to find it in a job or achievement.

As it was for the protagonist in All Fours, it is not possible for me to go back to the way my life was before. My world was cracked open, and through that I discovered new dreams about the work I want to do and the way I want to be in the world with my wife, my family, and my community. Especially in this uncertain and brutal moment in time, I will hold the seeds of those dreams close to my heart.

A few weeks ago, July shared a video about her creative process in which she says, “Remember you are absolutely free. What do you want to do today? Wake up, you’re actually here.”

Of course, I am not absolutely free. I have to pay my bills and do my laundry and clean the cat litter. But quitting my idealized marketing job to work at the grocery store jolted me awake to the fact that I am actually here.