Rejection

   Jean grabbed her purse and the bag where she kept her laptop. She walked very fast but tried not to look angry, disappointed or anything else. She just wanted to leave that place as fast as she could. It was very uncomfortable to stay there after she had been so insulted. As she arrived to the elevator, the door closed as someone was going down just before her. She whispered a course word, frustrated that she had to wait like an idiot in order to leave a please she definitely didn’t wanted to stay in or return ever again. She felt too humiliated.

 Out of nowhere, one of the guys that had been there during her interview walked up to her. He told her that they had been looking for her. A tiny shimmer of light appeared in her heart only to be crushed moments later when she realized the man had come to find her because she had left her pen in the table. What was even more annoying, was that he started talking about the results of the interview and telling her, once again, about all the flaws she had as a writer and so on. She wanted the Earth to swallow her, as his voice was very loud and everyone around seemed to be listening.

 She had to close her eyes and just try to relax by breathing slowly, feeling the air through her body. Ignoring the man was not easy but she could at least think of something else as he talked and talked and talked. The lady that managed the reception on that floor looked at them with surprise and obvious disgust. When Jean opened her eyes, the lady looked at her straight in the eye and shook her head, then looking at the guy. Jean only smiled, thankful that at least one person realized in what an uncomfortable situation she was.

 Finally, the elevator opened up and she stepped in without even acknowledging the man. For a moment, it seemed as though he was going to follow her into the elevator but fortunately he didn’t. He was even able to say anything else to Jean as she pressed hard the button that made the elevator close faster. She then pressed the number for the ground floor and started breathing normally again. She felt seriously awful and couldn’t believe she had to go home now in a bus that would take at least forty-five minutes. She didn’t felt good at all.

 Luckily, the bus didn’t take long to pass and she was able to find a free seat next to the window. She really wasn’t feeling ok and even though she was going to fall asleep, her brain wouldn’t let her. Not only because it may not be the best idea to fall asleep on a bus, but also because she had their words in her head. She could hear them once and again, trashing every single part of the work that she had done for them. Saying that they destroyed her isn’t enough to describe what went on in that conference room. A few tears rolled down her face.

 She had to clean herself with her hand because she had no tissues or anything like that. But it was clear to her that she had no intention to be the crazy woman in the bus that cries “for no reason”. So she tried to clean her tears off and attempted to think about something else. For example, the fact that she had left her family cat by herself. It wasn’t something that she did for the first time but it was something to think about. The cat was obviously ok but she had to create a problem in her mind in order to be able to resist the urge to cry.

 The bus took less time to her stop than it usually did. She hadn’t realized but she had left that office so early that there wasn’t even the normal traffic jam of peak time out in the streets. When she came down of the bus, she checked she had everything with her, including the pen she had forgotten in her pocket. Walking home took only five minutes. Her house had a cute garden that was brimming with light and color as she entered. It was as if nature was trying to cheer her up.

 And it did make her smile at least. When she entered the house, she called for her parents. Fortunately, no one answered back. They were normally there but she didn’t care where and why they had left, she only wanted to go to her run and be able to fall asleep and nap for while, all afternoon was possible. She dropped her purse and laptop bag on the ground and took off her shoes before lying down in bed. She faced upwards, towards the ceiling and, again, she could her all the criticism and the things all those men had said.

 She began to cry again but, this time, Jean didn’t clean her face or attempted to appear tougher than she looked. She didn’t need to do that, as that was her bedroom, her place in the world. There, she could do whatever she wanted and in that moment she wanted feel miserable for her. The words those men had said had been like daggers and they had stabbed her with them once and again and again. It was almost as if they had enjoyed themselves by doing so. To her, it was a very sick thing to do but she only reflected on that many days later.

 It had been really unnecessary to tell her all those things. They didn’t have to sink every single fiber of her soul by saying a lot of things that, even if part of the truth, weren’t as important in real life as they might have portrayed them. They essentially told her she had no idea how to write, that she couldn’t put three words together and that she made no sense whatsoever in what she had written for them. It was an essay about internal practices in very big companies.

 Jean had no idea of that. She had not been to business school or anything like it. She was just a normal girl trying to make her way into the world. She had thought that her English level was good enough for them but apparently it wasn’t. And of course it wasn’t because they had told her that she didn’t need to correct her essay for them and she didn’t. They lied to her because she would always do corrections but they had assured her they weren’t necessary. Besides, she had no idea of any business practices. She had a degree in creative writing, for God’s sakes!

 They had also told her that her way of portraying the business world was not very professional. And when she attempted to explain that she had no experience in the actual business world, as she had told the woman she had applied for the job too, they wouldn’t let her speak. They would only raise her voice and just keep talking. The guy that gave back her pen had been particularly nasty when saying that she shouldn’t have told them that she was actually good in English. At that moment she felt so enraged, she stood up and decided to leave.

After all, three men in one small conference room were attacking her. And it was all because of one miserable test they had set up in order to chose the perfect person for the freelance job they were looking for. They weren’t even going to take her into the company; they only wanted to see if she was available to do some texts for them once in a while. And, later that week, Jean realized the pay for one piece of writing was extremely mediocre compared to what people with no big company attached to them could pay her.

 It wasn’t the fact that they hadn’t hired her but the fact that they had been deceitful in a way and that they had been so rude in explaining to her why she hadn’t been selected. After all, it made no sense that they had invited her to their offices only to insult her. It would have been better to receive an email with two phrases: one thanking her for applying and the other rejecting her application. It would be more direct and less surrounded with bullshit. She realized those guys only wanted to feel superior somehow and they had found their guinea pig in her.

 Jean fell asleep as she was thinking all of this. She woke up to the voice of her mom telling her it was dinnertime. When her parents asked how it had all went down, she told her everything that had happened and that she was planning to move along. It was hard for her to be her age, living with her parents and she did wanted to earn some money for herself but she wasn’t going to stop looking for a perfect fit to her talents. That company wasn’t the only one in the world and she was certain that, sooner or later, someone would be interested in what she could do.

Your so-called "freedom"

   I don’t get it. I simply don’t get why people transform into humans with traces of swine characteristics once they move out of their homes, far away from the eyes and supervision of their family. It’s beyond me why people, many times, simply choose not to learn anything and decide to do things as they please, as if that had ever worked. Maybe I am obsessed with order and with everything being spotless and clean but I’d rather be obsessed that way than not caring about anything, not even your own hygiene. If these people don’t even know how to clean their own room, how are they taking care of their own bodies every day, if they are that is? It disgusts me a bit to even think about it because to me being clean is not a trace of character but a basic human instinct that you should know to survive.

 Apparently, it is not as I thought. I have lived with my parents for a long time and that has formed a certain image in my head of how people usually live. I have gone to other houses, of course, but always of people I’m related to or friends who also live with their parents, so it’s not really a clear picture. I have even dated people that live alone but I have to be honest and say I never pay attention to details in those moments so, maybe they were clean and maybe they were not. That certainly something to think about because if I decided to date someone permanently, I would certainly decide such a thing based on the amount of order and cleanliness he has with himself and everything he owns.

Is that an exaggeration? I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not the worst thing to prefer dating someone that is clean and knows how to behave like a human being. I have to confess I hate people that eat and live all their plates in the sink. And they pile up and the smell keeps getting worse and its like they’re waiting for someone else do clean them for them and it’s simply pathetic. I just don’t like that because I think it shows what kind of person you are and that’s certainly not the kind of person I would like to be involved with. Is it insane that I’m the opposite kind of person? The kind of person that cleans his mess just seconds after creating it and the kind of person that gets sick if they happen to find lots of hairs from strangers when cleaning the floors? Is that so bad?

 I don’t think so, of course, but people will always exist that happen to love living in a certain degree of anarchy because it makes them feels free. I have no idea why freedom is always related to a mess, to chaos, because freedom is not chaos but respect. Or that’s what I think. When you are free, you can do what you want, that’s true. But the only way to properly use freedom is if you combine it with respect and use it wisely instead of taking advantage of it as if you were a child, as if everything that has the capacity to worry you doesn’t exist any more. Freedom is not dirt. I refuse to even think about it like that.

 However, people still think that living alone, the “big liberation”, is al about doing whatever you want to do without any excuses. So waking up late, showering becomes optional, eating whatever you want whenever you want it, having no responsibilities or respect for anything beyond your own body and not even thinking about any consequence because that is just not cool. All of that is implanted in our minds when education at home has been all but good or even remotely decent. People whose parents have explained things to them have a tendency to be better socially simply because they know why doing certain things is socially unacceptable or should simply be avoided.

 But let’s say all of that is ok, all of that is perfect if you leave by yourself. You can be a pig if you want, when you leave alone. But the truth is that when most people leave their homes, they leave it to live with others. No one has the money to live really alone until they have a proper job and so on. And seeing many students depend on their parents to live away from home, the obvious answer is to live with roommates. And that’s when everything we have been talking about comes back and acquires importance. Because when you share a space with others, it’s not all about you. You share a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and maybe other common areas. True, your room is your own but that’s it.

 So most people have filthy rooms and live like pigs when being students but they try to behave like decent human beings outside of it. Right? Well, wrong. Because many people, all of those we have been talking about, they simply think that the world and the people in it that are their same age are just as filthy as them. So the plates and pans start to pile up, and so does the laundry and everything begins to become as filthy as if they were living alone. Why? Because freedom means chaos for them and not respect. They have no respect for themselves or for others, so they do thinks as they think everyone in their situation does.

 Of course, in order to have a nice life living with roommates, people simply do not say a word. Maybe they like living like that or maybe they simply do not want to quarrel with anyone about anything. I personally do not know which one of those solutions is the worst. Not saying anything and submitting yourself to the lives of others is beyond me, it’s something I simply cannot understand. Especially when you have a stake your own health because, at the end of the day, that’s what we are talking about. It’s about our life and having a nice space to share with other people and not simply about living and going forward like a mule. If we do that, we might reach a point when there are no more roads to keep walking on.

 All of this, some might think, is an exaggeration. And maybe it is, maybe we won’t die if we clean our bodies in a filthy shower or if we use the greasy pans that who knows how many others have used in the past. Maybe those are not lethal things and we can survive a small mess. But what that would entail would be a world where everything is a mess because people have stopped caring about the fact that we always live in community, we rarely live truly alone and there is no correct way to ignore that. What if bus drivers stopped doing their routes as they are supposed to? Would that be tolerable? What if airlines only had flights whenever they wanted or felt like it? I bet many people wouldn’t be exactly happy about it or the world would be a lazy ball of filthy and disgusting people.

 To my knowledge, we haven’t reached that stage and I personally hope we never do. Because this world is ours, for every single one of us and we cannot live thinking it’s all about us because it isn’t. Each person in this world is not important and that a truth we are never told or reminded enough. Each one of us, in our own, is simply not important enough. But as a group, as communities and as a species, we are important because of the simplicity of numbers and the importance those numbers have when affecting other numbers like the amount of trees, of drinkable water, of animals in the world and so on. When we live together, we share and respect others as we consider them equals; we gain more than we lose. And that’s the best for our growth as human beings.

 It is because we learn that by helping others we are actually helping ourselves. Those dishes that are left in the kitchen for hours or days, if we clean them just after we’re finished, we are letting someone else use them and that person would likely do the same so at dinner there will be clean plates to eat properly. If you clean the bathroom after you use it, people will eventually notice and, no matter if it is because of guilt or because they have learned, they will begin to clean everything too and the chances to have an infection or something nasty get into you will be as low as they can be. Of course, that’s the optimal way of living.

 So why not living like we care about others and ourselves? Why not living alone as if we were still living with our families? The world doesn’t just get different because our personal situation changes. The world does not care about a single organism but about the group, the communities. So let’s live, let’s enjoy ourselves and let’s do that by respecting others and letting them know how much we care about them and about the world as such. You will forgive my rant, my incessant way of pushing these truths down everyone’s throat but I do believe in the importance of respect, because it brings and order to our lives than lives for far longer that any of us would ever live. Because respect is freedom.