Ceylon

I stopped trying to edit. I stopped trying to cut out the anxiety, the bills, the rejection letter from my last interview, my mother listening to records alone and two months out of the mental hospital, my rent, the anxiety. Stop, breathe, drink tea.

My job isn't terrible. I don't have to wear a uniform. We have no manager and no real rules. Mostly, I price merchandise and place orders for cups with cats on them. But a tea house is still food service, which means I also heat up blueberry scones and place them on trays with Early Grey. I wash a lot teapots.

Sometimes these teapots chip, and that's when I claim them. I dress them pretty in a box, and I take that box on a bus ride. Forty-two minutes later, the chipped teapot's home, sitting on my kitchen table.

I'm a little chipped too, a bit beat up and over-steeped. I'm trying to roughen my edges as I age instead of sanding them down--give myself a few snarls, wait for the people who want to take me home despite the cracks.

A lot of my co-workers at the tea shop are under twenty, while I'm almost a quarter of a century. I'm probably too old to be working at a tea shop, but I like it. Especially when I meet new faces around Seattle, America's next Silicon Valley. I like saying to the busy bees of Amazon, tech start-ups, and and the elegantly aging Microsoft: "I work at a tea shop."

This isn't very profane. I don't need to be smart to do this job, nor do I need to be motivated, creative, or giving. Rainy mornings find me rinsing Ceylon leaves out of teapots. I sweep a lot of toilet paper bits off the floor of the women's bathroom. Mitra, a Buddhist monk, is always at the third table translating old Sanskrit texts into English--which really means that he has conversations with Cody and Indryani about meditation and ways of higher being. The walls are yellow like a wash of flowers, and instrumental music plays from the speakers.

Software developers are generally one of two types: soft, kind in the face, living alone in a townhouse. This type is generally identified by their beards. The second type of software developer is "bro," meaning he wears button-downs, is clean-shaven, and drinks too much beer. Those with mustaches are a second, worse, subcategory. I've yet to meet a female techie.

And so we'll often meet--me, the ignorant, lazy, uncreative, and selfish tea shop employee, and he, the bearded loner or chiseled white man in a button-down, and we'll have this conversation:

"What do you do?" [Me, already guessing.]

"I develop software for Amazon." [Him, almost abashedly.]

"And what do you do?" [Him, a little excited now.]

"I work at a tea shop." [Me, really saying, "I'm a little chipped and broken. I don't have a nice, high-paying job. Sometimes, I take home broken teapots because I can't afford to buy them. I'm carving out a strange life for myself on the opposite side of the country from where I grew up. I'm twenty-three, and I don't really know what I'm doing. I work at a tea shop, and I'm poor and broke and far from home, but I'm glad I don't develop software for Amazon."]

My body wasn't made to be strong. I have fat thighs that make biking up hills a shitty time. My knuckles crack too easily. The bags under my eyes are their own pillows.

In high school, I was the kid who couldn't remember her freshman year. Forget that I started at a new school, rode the bus for the first time, experienced being thirteen with a fresh set of teenagers--literally, forget it all. None of this made an impression on me. I don't even remember the anxiety of my first class. I think I might have been late.

Or perhaps, the changes confused me so much that I retreated into myself, erasing an entire year of my life.

My body wasn't made to be strong.

Now that I'm twenty-three, I try to summit a mountain once a week, or at least make it out to hike. When I bike to work--which is every day--the ride is always uphill. I rock climb so often that my climbing shoes have holes after a month.

I'm making myself stronger, and I do it by tearing myself down. Sometimes I prefer the bodily exhaustion, while other times I revel in my emotional misery. How intensely can I feel something? How much can I struggle?

I have a blog that consists entirely of pictures of my face. After five years, I can now spend hours going through my face in stages. They show world travels. They show nights at home in bed with tea. Some show various states of undress. A lot of them are me at my most miserable, crying, afraid that I'm pregnant, having just failed an exam, suffering from a breakup. They're beautiful portraits of myself, and I study them with unabashed vanity, trying to dissect if I've grown through these broken versions of myself, if I've made my body stronger.

And I think what I'm most afraid of, is that under all this, all these masks of misery and struggle, I'm just a weak person struggling through all of life's different complexities. That at the end of the day, I haven't gotten any stronger. I'm simply miserable and afraid.

But I keep tearing myself down, telling myself my muscles will build back harder, and that the struggle will make me stronger.