One of mine was when Momma made me pick out a pair of sneakers for school out of the bin at a local grocery store. And they weren’t even connected by a plastic dooey. You had to dig for the same color, size, and “style.” Mortifying then, fodder now.
I’ve got plenty. The earliest one I remember was my first day of middle school. One of the 8th graders on the bus made fun of my leg hair. I went home crying and forced my mom to teach me how to shave.
In college I was really broke and managed to tear a hole in the inner thigh of a pair of jeans. Since I was so broke going out and buying a sewing kit was off the table I patched up the hole with the smallest possible amount of duct tape and just hope no one noticed.
I think almost all my lows have been times when I did something really stupid or hurtful to someone else. I can’t think of any right now as these are generally things I remember at 3 a.m. when I can’t sleep.
Between the ages of 25 and 29, I got onto the corporate fast track after getting my MBA. I was promoted four times, was constantly winning awards, was suddenly making $150k (this was back when this was serious money). I was putting in 80-100 hours at week, not counting travel. I also gained 40 pounds, my blood pressure and cholesterol rose, and I was constantly seething at people who were not pushing it as hard as I was at work. I was not happy at all. People liked me less and less, and I refused to accept that this was my problem, not theirs.
Thanks to the concern of several people (my future wife, doctor, my parents, a colleague) I realized rather suddenly that I wasn’t in a good place. I changed jobs, took up tennis, cooking and reading again. For ten years my my career went sideways, but I got married, had a kid, bought a house, made friends, generally enjoyed my work and got along with my co-workers. Then I started pushing my career forward a little more, but I feel like I’m keeping a close eye on maintaining a balance.
The absolute low point was when my team at work presented me with a statuette of a man holding the globe on his shoulders. They meant it as a dig at my increasing self-aggrandizement. I misunderstood it as a gesture of appreciation.
There have been some lows but I think the worst was when my first marriage broke up, I lost my place to live, and I lost my job (and, eventually, that career path) within a two-week period. By comparison being hospitalized after a suicide attempt was a bump in the road for me–a large one, mind you, but I did recover from it faster.
In retrospect no matter how good I was technically, I was a terrible boss. I had impossibly high standards, no regard for my staff’s desire to have a personal life, and was sarcastic and bombastic. I got the message. No matter if their intentions were benevolent or not, they did me a favor.
The overall corporate environment was very hard driving. The “slackers” were putting in 60 hours a week. The hard-core ones like me pulled all nighters on a regular basis. I’d be doing management/financial stuff by day and fixing the programmers’ code at night.
What I didn’t understand was that everyone couldn’t or didn’t want to do that.
I was going to say “So, Atlas did shrug, but for a different reason,” thinking I was being clever, but then I saw your user name and now I’m just confused.
For myself, the lowest ebb I can think of is when I quit a potentially good job to work with a friend, and then the friend had to fire me because I wasn’t doing a good job (there were mitigating circumstances, but still). Then I found another job and got fired two weeks later - I never did find out the real reason, they told me some story about conditions changing or something. At the time I owed about $70 on my Chevron card and was having to field angry phone calls from their collections agency. I ended up parking cars for a living for a while, but at least I was able to pay my bills.
Obviously you have never been a pre-teen girl, Inna Minnit or you wouldn’t be so snide about it. Lots of things seem simple to an adult that are tremendously intimidating to a child, and I for one had never seen anyone shaving, not even my dad, when I got old enough to shave my legs. My parents were very private people. And (gasp) we didn’t have a television so I couldn’t watch commercials! Even if you’ve seen shaving done, that blade is sharp and it looks scary to a young girl (or boy too, probably).
I had just graduated from college and returned home to consider 'what next?" What next turned out to be a routine examination to see if I needed a new prescription for my glasses, which turned into retinal surgery 2 days later. As I was lying in bed convalescing, my father, who was the sole breadwinner but marginally attached to the family, told me he was moving out of state so as to be nearby when his aging parents needed him (in reality, to be as close as possible to his inheritance). Two days later he was gone, we were broke, and I knew I’d need another surgery after recovering from the first one.
That was pretty bad.
But I’m feeling better.
I think I’ll go for a walk!