Cogitating on the New Year, New Decade, New Work, and Working Class Artists
In 2010, I was 30 years old and heading into my 8th year working as a retail manager at a small frame shop in Huntersville. This was a company that I was forced to report to the Department of Labor because they were refusing to pay managers like me overtime, paying us instead "half time", or half our hourly wage, which amounted to less than minimum wage for some (at Christmas, to boot). The DoL found in our favor and we won our case. This was the same company who, in 2008, in response to a worsening economy, cut the entire staff's pay by $2.00 per hour, taking me down to where I had started when I began working there, and then one of the owners showed up not even a month later in his brand new Mercedes SUV. This was the same company who, when I told the owners that I wanted to go back to UNCCharlotte to finish my degree, refused to allow me to change my schedule, saying that I had to work with their hours and keep my availability open every day that the shop was open, and that if I had a problem with that and wanted to go back to school, my job would be in jeopardy and my hours would go to someone else. I would leave that job the following year to work administrative jobs, something I considered “moving up” at the time, because now I had weekends off---two whole days in a row, like a real person.
My husband and I had just bought our first home a year prior in 2009, a small, affordable house in north Charlotte in an unassuming neighborhood of other working-class people. To no one’s surprise, we soon found out that 485 was being built practically in our backyard, and we would climb down the embankment and take walks there on the many many days when no one was working on it. It was kind of an ironic, blistering hot greenway for us. Later when it was finished, we would be woken up almost nightly by the insanely loud sounds of jackasses racing each other down the interstate.
In June of 2010, I finally had a hysterectomy after years of pain and illness. No longer having a period was life-changing; it had always been horribly painful for me and being freed from that is something I will always be grateful for. I still say that of all the surgeries I've had, that was my favorite. I felt better for a few months and then gradually began to feel sick again, with similar symptoms. I continued to go to work every day despite constant nausea and pain, adapting and persisting since the pain wouldn’t go away, and hiding how miserable I was by burying myself in my work.
I always made art when I worked full-time at these jobs, but like so many other working-class people who keep a consistent practice, no one noticed or cared. I was just as prolific back then as I was now, doing a ton of documentary photo work, churning out dozens of illustrations and sculptural items, evolving my practice, constantly teaching myself new techniques and programs, learning to edit video, learning special effects makeup and costume creation, selling my work online and in craft shows, where I would often pay more to rent a booth than I ended up selling. I scrambled to fit these things into the little time I had while not at work, despite being exhausted from the health problems I dealt with on a daily basis.
When my employer let me go out of the blue for no reason, I recorded him admitting that he was paying me under the table to avoid paying payroll taxes, turned him into the IRS, submitted to a hearing