I've had many jobs over the years.
My plunge into the workforce began at a young age, 11, when I stepped into the family hair salon to assist my mother. Little did I know, this was just the beginning of a long and diverse work experience that would shape my professional journey.
Under my mother's watchful eye, I learned the basics of running a small business. This included bookkeeping, customer service, inventory control, and money handling.
By the time I took my first job outside the hair salon as a roller skating waiter at a local fast food chain restaurant (at the age of sixteen), I'd already learned many of the hard skills required for management.
I was promoted to Assistant Manager within a year (at seventeen). This "promotion" came with lots more responsibility, but technically, it was a reduction in pay (because my tips as a waiter had been more than what they paid me hourly as an assistant manager).
To compensate for the lost wages, I was allowed unlimited overtime (paid as time and a half) and worked as many hours as they would allow me to.
Twenty years ago, I had the energy to work sixty to seventy-hour weeks, and whenever I wasn't at school, I was working. Looking back, imagining having the energy for work and school is hard.
Now days I can barely handle 40 hours a week. Then again, senior year, I had an easy load, especially 2nd semester when I was only doing subjects I was skilled in (computers, literature, teacher aide, and off period).
I slept in as a teacher aide (first period) IF I attended it and rarely attended the second period because I only needed a half hour to do the weekly project (which took the other students all week to do).
Despite being in high school, I had already taken on the responsibilities of an adult.
I moved out as soon as I turned eighteen, becoming my own guardian. This unique situation led to a shift in how I was treated by my teachers, who, without the fear of my 'guardians' coming down on them for not keeping track of me, now treated me with more autonomy (and didn't bother to count my absences).
Suddenly, all that mattered was my grades, and my "behavior" was no longer their business. This was a shift I had desperately needed in my life - to not be treated like I was "lesser" than (or an inconvenience to) the people around me.
The school wasn't so bad when teachers didn't threaten to "call home" about everything I did.
Teachers weren't always honest. Sometimes they would lie about you, and of course in a they said they said match, the teacher is always trusted over the students.
Being my own guardian was a liberating experience, a stark contrast to the years of being 'handled' with behaviorism punitively.
The campus became open to me, and I could come and go as I pleased.
I wrote notes to leave class whenever I was "done" for the day or didn't see the point of sticking around. They could no longer force me to stay within the classroom or even the school's walls.
I was finally free.
They couldn't take my cell phone and hold it until my guardians "came to get it."
Since I WAS my own guardian, I could just walk down and ask for my own phone OR simply refuse to give it to them in the first place (which I often did)
No punishment could be placed upon me. If they sent me to detention, I simply would not go.
The last few months of school (when I was living on my own), after a lifetime of being "handled" unfairly and punitively, were my revenge on the system that had held me for so many years.
As a legal adult, liable for myself, I simply refused to comply with anything the school tried to force upon me that I felt was unreasonable.
It was a high point in my life. However, eventually, I would find myself broken back down again, pushed back into a period of reconstruction.
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Lyric Rivera, holding up a purple book with a pink brain on the cover (Workplace NeuroDiversity Rising) smiling from behind it.
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– Lyric Lark Rivera
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