Self-Love: A Magical & Cosmic Reckoning
Creative Nonfiction by Jay Aja
You start your workday just like any other: roll out of bed, maybe brush your teeth, skip changing out of your pjs (that’s now a thing of the past), and log in to your at-home office computer ten minutes before your shift. As a call center agent you spend your days mired in corporate banking. Even though you work from home and can slack of a bit you attempt to meet the demands of the job. Even if you’ve become a bit lazy in other areas. Even if the job itself lends a certain measure of distress to the day.
As your computer undergoes its initial start-up processing, you perk up when the welcome screen of the desktop beams “Hi Jay!” in tranquil, blue font. It’s a small joy, but one that still brings you happiness every time you see it. You decided to change your name to Jay once you began identifying as non-binary a couple years back. When you were born, you were sexed as female. However, you spent much of your childhood not understanding why your family would shout out “cum here gyal!” when summoning you. Sometimes you felt like you were a “gyal.” Other times, when your boy cousins were called for using the word “bhai,” you were often confused when you realized your family wasn’t referring to you.
They still address you by the name you were given at birth, but in all other areas of your life, you are Jay. You thought you would encounter some form of resistance with the Hillsborough County Circuit Court in Tampa, Florida, when you filed the official paperwork for a legal name change, but they simply mailed you your court date one month later. The judge approved your name change request in less time than it took for them to listen to your required explanation for the alteration, and you were Jay Aja by the end of the business day. The same celerity followed with the Social Security Administration, the DMV, and your financial and educational institutions. Even the Office of Vital Statistics mailed you your revised birth certificate all the way from Jacksonville, Florida, without solicitation.
You have experienced a surprising amount of privilege, dealing with little discrimination along the way from strangers. You almost weren’t surprised when your job so easily adapted to the new name, efficiently assisting you to update all of your employee credentials on file once they received your court certified name change documentation. Experiencing this level of acceptance in a corporate environment has made the job easier to perform.
Still, you know the days at the bank can be pretty varied. At times, there are those clients who can turn even the shortest calls into the longest moments. You are often held hostage by your job’s non-disconnect policy as they shriek obscenities or scrupulously detail their intolerances and prejudices against different demographics. These people make you wonder if call centers actually exist as social experiments designed to expose the true, vulgar underbelly of society. (You secretly start to believe this.)
Yet, your managers expect you to bear these burdens. As a call center agent, you are both therapist and confidante. You are required to yield to the influence of even the most crass, transmitting only virtual nods and smiles through the phone. Thankfully, your shifts usually consist of long stretches servicing pleasant customers. Those who like to offer you recipes for cookies, tips on where to shop and vacation, or simply pleasant courtesy. They offer a reprieve from the duress.
As you move through accounts today, you answer the call of a client whom you believe fits the latter model. It is a pleasant, older female who makes light conversation and chatters amiably. You think nothing of the six minute interaction until the woman begins to mock your name towards the end of a certainly devolving conversation. The interchange is so brief, you’re not aware that in this scenario you have just battled through microaggression #1:
Client: Thanks for your help! What’s your name?
Me: No problem! My name is Jay, spelled J-A-Y.
Client: (pauses for a few seconds) Well. That’s an interesting name for a woman.
Me: (pauses, then sputters)...Actually, it’s a very normal name for a woman.
Client: (laughs sarcastically) Really?
Me: (firmly) Yes. It’s a very normal name for a human being.
Client: (continues to laugh for several seconds)
Uncertain, you don’t know how to respond. Your short temper, easily triggered by anyone’s ignorance and bigotry, is throwing up firecrackers of red flags. Whenever you encounter situations like these, you deliver some form of heated comeback, but right now you’re at work. You don’t see a way forward in which you don’t get fired for reacting to the customer. So instead, your voice turns cold and sharply polite as you simply ask the client if you can assist them with anything else. They pause, mid-laugh, to cough out a “no.” You overrun the rest of their response with your end-of-call salutation and quick disconnect.
Afterwards, you just sit at your desk and stare at the screen. You don’t click to connect to the next call; your hand is unable to move the mouse. You take three deep, calming breaths as disbelief and shock infuse your mind, expelling exhaustion into your body. The onslaught is so visceral, it feels like an out-of-body experience, and for a moment, you wonder if you’re overreacting (It’s not that big of a deal.. It’s not that bad, right? Surely, they didn’t mean that?...I don’t care what they said...) But your fingers are shaking, the blood coursing hot like thick magma through the active volcano that is your rapidly pumping heart.
Your anger accelerating into rage, you want some type of retribution so, believing you’ll be heard, you send your manager an irate email informing them of the events that just occurred and your reactions:
...this is no one’s business unless I choose to talk about it, but full disclosure, I identify as non-binary and I always have. My name is not the über-white-American-woman name my parents gave me at birth in an effort to white-wash me into being acceptable in this country. My name, by my own choice and to fit my own identity, is Jay. This is who I am in the core of my being until I leave this lifetime–and it is my identity, no one else’s. So, I do not understand why situations like these have to be a problem: When I get a call like this, I don’t know what to do–I want to stand up for myself, but I feel like being on the job takes away my rights to do so because Quality Assurance will simply listen to the call and side with the customer, saying that I am harassing them. But I am just trying to defend myself against their ignorance. I’m trying to withstand discrimination, and in advocating for myself, I am affirming difficult decisions I have had to make in my life that were hard to act on at the time but which have only allowed me to become more authentically myself. I don’t want to have to endure any customer making me feel this tired as a person.
Your manager replies:
Jay, I totally understand how you feel, and I am so sorry that they made you feel that way. I will listen to the call and ponder. Please take some time for yourself. Again, you are who you choose to be, not who I or anyone wants you to be. You have my total support.
and later:
Jay, I listened to the call. One good thing, her comment came at the end of the call. My only advice to you is to ignore comments like this cardholder said. Just respond “thank you” and move on. Do not give her cause to think she is getting under your skin or is making you question who you are. But I am sorry you had to deal with that.
You don’t respond to the last email.
Your manager, an older man around the same age as your father, is West Indian (like you) and was born in St. Lucia in the 1950s, later migrating to Britain, then obtaining residency in the U.S. Theoretically, this should be a good thing to have someone from your culture, an elder, as your leader. Yet, you’ve wondered in the past if this shared background has tainted how he treats you; you’ve always sensed something amiss in your interactions. This doesn’t really shock you. In the past, you’ve observed West Indian superiors treating West Indian colleagues unfairly, whether due to power roles, jealousy, favoritism, or discrimination between different Caribbean countries. And then there’s that rampant homophobia in the Caribbean community. So, cue microaggression #2.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise then that your manager seems to be simply brushing off your concerns. His apology and empathy feel perfunctory and performative. Your job has a company-wide policy of inclusion regarding diversity in all areas, reinforced by HR requirements of conduct. It doesn’t feel as if your manager cares about what you just experienced. It feels like he’s simply trying to behave in a way that seems in compliance with these mandates, not because he actually believes in or understands them, so as to ensure upper-management does not get held accountable here. Leading to microaggression #3.
You’re not really quite sure what you expected.
You know you wanted vengeance. You wanted the client to be held accountable. When you first emailed your manager, you recalled that upper-management sometimes closed the accounts of abusive callers upon observing agents enduring harassment. But the older, female client who mocked your name opened their account with this bank back in the 1990s and their credit line is over $30,000. The client will not be made to answer for what they did to you. You realize, Of course. They’ll prioritize the big-spender who adds to their bottom-line over the “hurt feelings” of a call center agent. I’m just another cog in the proverbial machine of the corporate office. One more number, as cookie-cutter as any other, on an ever-growing roster to a host of evermore distant managers.
And frustratingly, part of you still doubts yourself. You’re still not certain if you were overreacting. You’re still not quite sure if the problem does not actually lie within the manager or within the client but inside of you.
You wish you had just stood up for yourself on the call, made your voice matter. You know you can’t control others’ reactions, but you can control your own even if it would have resulted in you being reprimanded by your job. Hell, you knew you were quitting the damn place anyways in a few months to go to grad school, if they fired you would it really have made that much of a difference? You wish you had never reached out to your manager. So many people have an opinion on gender fluidity, but they never stop to consider what the person in front of them is experiencing–they’re not willing to extend that empathy. You let yourself down. That’s really from where this pain is stemming.
You wish you would have held both that client and that manager—and that company and the larger world beyond—hostage with your words: forced them to listen as you recounted your own journey towards recognizing you are non-binary. How it began when you listened to “How Do You Sleep?” by Sam Smith on Spotify and read his lyric commentary on consciously syncing into his own gender fluidity. How you began to piece together the puzzle of the shifting sense of masculinity and femininity oscillating within you with the word “non-binary.” That it was a triumph of identification, not an arbitrary labeling.
You would have told them about Dre, one of your close friends from that period of self-discovery. How they told you that being non-binary felt like it manifested as 40% male and 60% female for them. How for you, it felt like you were 20% male and 80% female. How those ratios have since then spun awry like the dials on quarter-slot casino machines as those numbers have erupted past the confines of those controlling boxes. How you think that maybe that is why there are people who are unable to comprehend gender fluidity: that you don’t understand it, unless you see that openness inside of you.
You would have told them how Dre, a makeup artist, spent hours in front of the mirror, feathering layers of subtle shades into the skin above their eyes, sculpting their brows with wands slick with dark pomade. How you posted pictures to Facebook of the two of you together after a New Year’s Eve party and your older sister’s husband, seeking to be respectful, singled Dre out in the picture and tentatively (albeit confusedly) asked if she had a good time. You had laughed with delight and told Dre about the pronoun reference the next time you saw them. Dre’s dark eyes lit up with a glowing pleasure, made all the more large and evocative by the ebony, wing-tip styled eyeliner encircling them, as you experienced firsthand their wonder and joy. You would have told your manager and that client how Dre had proclaimed, The wording is not a mistake. It is a magical and cosmic reckoning with who I am.
You would have told them about the next day, when Dre uploaded an Instagram post proclaiming their self-love: how they never identified as either woman or man but as both and as neither at the same time, as non-binary. You would have told them about the picture—Dre: wearing a vibrantly mustard yellow shirt and a black fitted cap, flat-brim turned to the back. Dre’s beard: the color of black roses, edged and trimmed to strongly curbed lines. Dre’s face: tilted to the side and slightly back; foundation, smoothed into a sheen across the remaining skin, accented by a touch of blush to the apples of the cheeks; tinted, glossed lips parted slightly, provocatively open; eyes a fête of mustard yellow color, expertly applied above a wing-tip eyeliner so sharp it could cut; eyebrows honed to equal precision, a small dash cutting into the edge of one, fanning Dre’s Puerto Rican pride...You would have told them.
As your computer undergoes its initial start-up processing, you perk up when the welcome screen of the desktop beams “Hi Jay!” in tranquil, blue font. It’s a small joy, but one that still brings you happiness every time you see it. You decided to change your name to Jay once you began identifying as non-binary a couple years back. When you were born, you were sexed as female. However, you spent much of your childhood not understanding why your family would shout out “cum here gyal!” when summoning you. Sometimes you felt like you were a “gyal.” Other times, when your boy cousins were called for using the word “bhai,” you were often confused when you realized your family wasn’t referring to you.
They still address you by the name you were given at birth, but in all other areas of your life, you are Jay. You thought you would encounter some form of resistance with the Hillsborough County Circuit Court in Tampa, Florida, when you filed the official paperwork for a legal name change, but they simply mailed you your court date one month later. The judge approved your name change request in less time than it took for them to listen to your required explanation for the alteration, and you were Jay Aja by the end of the business day. The same celerity followed with the Social Security Administration, the DMV, and your financial and educational institutions. Even the Office of Vital Statistics mailed you your revised birth certificate all the way from Jacksonville, Florida, without solicitation.
You have experienced a surprising amount of privilege, dealing with little discrimination along the way from strangers. You almost weren’t surprised when your job so easily adapted to the new name, efficiently assisting you to update all of your employee credentials on file once they received your court certified name change documentation. Experiencing this level of acceptance in a corporate environment has made the job easier to perform.
Still, you know the days at the bank can be pretty varied. At times, there are those clients who can turn even the shortest calls into the longest moments. You are often held hostage by your job’s non-disconnect policy as they shriek obscenities or scrupulously detail their intolerances and prejudices against different demographics. These people make you wonder if call centers actually exist as social experiments designed to expose the true, vulgar underbelly of society. (You secretly start to believe this.)
Yet, your managers expect you to bear these burdens. As a call center agent, you are both therapist and confidante. You are required to yield to the influence of even the most crass, transmitting only virtual nods and smiles through the phone. Thankfully, your shifts usually consist of long stretches servicing pleasant customers. Those who like to offer you recipes for cookies, tips on where to shop and vacation, or simply pleasant courtesy. They offer a reprieve from the duress.
As you move through accounts today, you answer the call of a client whom you believe fits the latter model. It is a pleasant, older female who makes light conversation and chatters amiably. You think nothing of the six minute interaction until the woman begins to mock your name towards the end of a certainly devolving conversation. The interchange is so brief, you’re not aware that in this scenario you have just battled through microaggression #1:
Client: Thanks for your help! What’s your name?
Me: No problem! My name is Jay, spelled J-A-Y.
Client: (pauses for a few seconds) Well. That’s an interesting name for a woman.
Me: (pauses, then sputters)...Actually, it’s a very normal name for a woman.
Client: (laughs sarcastically) Really?
Me: (firmly) Yes. It’s a very normal name for a human being.
Client: (continues to laugh for several seconds)
Uncertain, you don’t know how to respond. Your short temper, easily triggered by anyone’s ignorance and bigotry, is throwing up firecrackers of red flags. Whenever you encounter situations like these, you deliver some form of heated comeback, but right now you’re at work. You don’t see a way forward in which you don’t get fired for reacting to the customer. So instead, your voice turns cold and sharply polite as you simply ask the client if you can assist them with anything else. They pause, mid-laugh, to cough out a “no.” You overrun the rest of their response with your end-of-call salutation and quick disconnect.
Afterwards, you just sit at your desk and stare at the screen. You don’t click to connect to the next call; your hand is unable to move the mouse. You take three deep, calming breaths as disbelief and shock infuse your mind, expelling exhaustion into your body. The onslaught is so visceral, it feels like an out-of-body experience, and for a moment, you wonder if you’re overreacting (It’s not that big of a deal.. It’s not that bad, right? Surely, they didn’t mean that?...I don’t care what they said...) But your fingers are shaking, the blood coursing hot like thick magma through the active volcano that is your rapidly pumping heart.
Your anger accelerating into rage, you want some type of retribution so, believing you’ll be heard, you send your manager an irate email informing them of the events that just occurred and your reactions:
...this is no one’s business unless I choose to talk about it, but full disclosure, I identify as non-binary and I always have. My name is not the über-white-American-woman name my parents gave me at birth in an effort to white-wash me into being acceptable in this country. My name, by my own choice and to fit my own identity, is Jay. This is who I am in the core of my being until I leave this lifetime–and it is my identity, no one else’s. So, I do not understand why situations like these have to be a problem: When I get a call like this, I don’t know what to do–I want to stand up for myself, but I feel like being on the job takes away my rights to do so because Quality Assurance will simply listen to the call and side with the customer, saying that I am harassing them. But I am just trying to defend myself against their ignorance. I’m trying to withstand discrimination, and in advocating for myself, I am affirming difficult decisions I have had to make in my life that were hard to act on at the time but which have only allowed me to become more authentically myself. I don’t want to have to endure any customer making me feel this tired as a person.
Your manager replies:
Jay, I totally understand how you feel, and I am so sorry that they made you feel that way. I will listen to the call and ponder. Please take some time for yourself. Again, you are who you choose to be, not who I or anyone wants you to be. You have my total support.
and later:
Jay, I listened to the call. One good thing, her comment came at the end of the call. My only advice to you is to ignore comments like this cardholder said. Just respond “thank you” and move on. Do not give her cause to think she is getting under your skin or is making you question who you are. But I am sorry you had to deal with that.
You don’t respond to the last email.
Your manager, an older man around the same age as your father, is West Indian (like you) and was born in St. Lucia in the 1950s, later migrating to Britain, then obtaining residency in the U.S. Theoretically, this should be a good thing to have someone from your culture, an elder, as your leader. Yet, you’ve wondered in the past if this shared background has tainted how he treats you; you’ve always sensed something amiss in your interactions. This doesn’t really shock you. In the past, you’ve observed West Indian superiors treating West Indian colleagues unfairly, whether due to power roles, jealousy, favoritism, or discrimination between different Caribbean countries. And then there’s that rampant homophobia in the Caribbean community. So, cue microaggression #2.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise then that your manager seems to be simply brushing off your concerns. His apology and empathy feel perfunctory and performative. Your job has a company-wide policy of inclusion regarding diversity in all areas, reinforced by HR requirements of conduct. It doesn’t feel as if your manager cares about what you just experienced. It feels like he’s simply trying to behave in a way that seems in compliance with these mandates, not because he actually believes in or understands them, so as to ensure upper-management does not get held accountable here. Leading to microaggression #3.
You’re not really quite sure what you expected.
You know you wanted vengeance. You wanted the client to be held accountable. When you first emailed your manager, you recalled that upper-management sometimes closed the accounts of abusive callers upon observing agents enduring harassment. But the older, female client who mocked your name opened their account with this bank back in the 1990s and their credit line is over $30,000. The client will not be made to answer for what they did to you. You realize, Of course. They’ll prioritize the big-spender who adds to their bottom-line over the “hurt feelings” of a call center agent. I’m just another cog in the proverbial machine of the corporate office. One more number, as cookie-cutter as any other, on an ever-growing roster to a host of evermore distant managers.
And frustratingly, part of you still doubts yourself. You’re still not certain if you were overreacting. You’re still not quite sure if the problem does not actually lie within the manager or within the client but inside of you.
You wish you had just stood up for yourself on the call, made your voice matter. You know you can’t control others’ reactions, but you can control your own even if it would have resulted in you being reprimanded by your job. Hell, you knew you were quitting the damn place anyways in a few months to go to grad school, if they fired you would it really have made that much of a difference? You wish you had never reached out to your manager. So many people have an opinion on gender fluidity, but they never stop to consider what the person in front of them is experiencing–they’re not willing to extend that empathy. You let yourself down. That’s really from where this pain is stemming.
You wish you would have held both that client and that manager—and that company and the larger world beyond—hostage with your words: forced them to listen as you recounted your own journey towards recognizing you are non-binary. How it began when you listened to “How Do You Sleep?” by Sam Smith on Spotify and read his lyric commentary on consciously syncing into his own gender fluidity. How you began to piece together the puzzle of the shifting sense of masculinity and femininity oscillating within you with the word “non-binary.” That it was a triumph of identification, not an arbitrary labeling.
You would have told them about Dre, one of your close friends from that period of self-discovery. How they told you that being non-binary felt like it manifested as 40% male and 60% female for them. How for you, it felt like you were 20% male and 80% female. How those ratios have since then spun awry like the dials on quarter-slot casino machines as those numbers have erupted past the confines of those controlling boxes. How you think that maybe that is why there are people who are unable to comprehend gender fluidity: that you don’t understand it, unless you see that openness inside of you.
You would have told them how Dre, a makeup artist, spent hours in front of the mirror, feathering layers of subtle shades into the skin above their eyes, sculpting their brows with wands slick with dark pomade. How you posted pictures to Facebook of the two of you together after a New Year’s Eve party and your older sister’s husband, seeking to be respectful, singled Dre out in the picture and tentatively (albeit confusedly) asked if she had a good time. You had laughed with delight and told Dre about the pronoun reference the next time you saw them. Dre’s dark eyes lit up with a glowing pleasure, made all the more large and evocative by the ebony, wing-tip styled eyeliner encircling them, as you experienced firsthand their wonder and joy. You would have told your manager and that client how Dre had proclaimed, The wording is not a mistake. It is a magical and cosmic reckoning with who I am.
You would have told them about the next day, when Dre uploaded an Instagram post proclaiming their self-love: how they never identified as either woman or man but as both and as neither at the same time, as non-binary. You would have told them about the picture—Dre: wearing a vibrantly mustard yellow shirt and a black fitted cap, flat-brim turned to the back. Dre’s beard: the color of black roses, edged and trimmed to strongly curbed lines. Dre’s face: tilted to the side and slightly back; foundation, smoothed into a sheen across the remaining skin, accented by a touch of blush to the apples of the cheeks; tinted, glossed lips parted slightly, provocatively open; eyes a fête of mustard yellow color, expertly applied above a wing-tip eyeliner so sharp it could cut; eyebrows honed to equal precision, a small dash cutting into the edge of one, fanning Dre’s Puerto Rican pride...You would have told them.
About the Writer
Jay Aja (they / them) is currently an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of South Florida. They are second-generation-immigrant Guyanese-American. You can find them on Instagram @cooliegyaljayaja and Twitter @cooliegyaljaya.
Read more from Jay
Check out Jay's poem "6 feet apart," the opening piece to our open-access ebook, Tales from Six Feet Apart.
