As I have posted previously, I walked out (justifiably) on my job last week. I had turned my back on it and I started to think of the future with an optimism that I had never felt before. I was free and I was certain that I was taking a step in the right direction. I would focus on my writing, on school, on my family, all of those things I felt I had abandoned when I took this job.

Yesterday I was in the laundry room of my apartment building, reading The Communist Manifesto for school when I got a phone call from my old job asking me to come back. They would fire my old supervisor and things would be different. Things would be better. I was stunned into silence because I had gotten this call 5 months ago and I had gone back only to be repeatedly stomped on. I have to say I am not made of stone. I need money just like everyone else in this world. I am an American so you know I have tons of debt. But I was wary. I don't want to be caught in that corporate trap of demoralization. That is not who I am. That is not who I want to become.

So I told them I wanted more money. MORE MONEY. A financial incentive, I called it. I haven't heard back from them. I guess that is a no thanks.

I feel I am in this moment in my life that will seperate me from everyone else. I know who I am, hell, it took me 27 years to get here. I know what I want from my life and it is when we get these tests, these challenges to our resolve and our character that we confirm it, is it not? I am sure that many people would think there are worse challenges to a person's character than being offered a job, but when it is a job that does not allow you to be who you are but instead tells you, "this is who I think you are so therefore that is who you must be" then I believe it is a challenge and walking away is the only decision.

If I give someone else my voice than I have no right to sit here at my computer telling you my thoughts in the safety of my home, in an anonymous fashion. I have to walk the walk too.

It reminds me of this chapter of a book by Lisa Lowe called Immigrant Acts in which she writes the Asian Americans have been written out of history and in being colonized they have shared a violent history of oppression by the United States. It is this violent history that they are forced to forget when they become naturalized because when they become an American, the U.S. is always right, and there are parts of our history-the oppressive, empirialistic parts- that we choose not to remember.

That is what happens when an individual goes to work for a corporation. Some people can easily check there independence and their free will at the door between 9am and 5pm but for some others like myself it is too much to ask. I can not seperate my thoughts and my emotions from my body. I am not a machine that can go through the motions every day while doing my job. My intelligence and compassion, however righteous and quirky it may be is who I am. You get the whole package when you hire me and heaven help you if you try to change me or suppress a part of me that you feel is not appropriate for the workplace.

If I don't think those parts of me are work remembering or fighting for, who else will?

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