Half Awake -- Love & Psychosis

Chapter 5: Blurry Year

After working at Jimmy John's for a while, I applied to be an assistant manager at a different location. I soon got the job and was really excited to start taking my job seriously. Unfortunately, Jimmy John's is a little too serious and it soon turned toxic. I had a great team that was frustrating, a manager who barely communicated, and multiple whirlwinds of emotions from time to time. Instead of treating my employees like garbage I treated them more like family. A balance between working hard and hardly working, but eventually the hardly working becomes more advanced.

This store was my pride and joy for over a year. I had responsibilities and I took them seriously. Eventually, I had too many responsibilities and it felt like the weight of everyone's expectations fell on me. I would work six days a week, and destroy my body physically. Overtime eventually became an issue and this company salaried me. I don't want to say that I was a glorified assistant, but I was. I could make sandwiches faster than 30 seconds, and I had great opening skills. Opening was my favorite part about being an assistant!

I would get to the store at around 5am-6am, and immediately start the open. I took pride in myself for being able to open quickly and do it well. The best part about being an opener was being alone. Those early hours in the morning were spent jamming out to my favorite songs, or listening to podcasts about famous serial killers with the volume all the way up. Slicing fresh veggies and baking delicious bread was simple and fun to me! At the end of the ten hour shift though, my body would crash nearly everyday. Taking naps almost every open day was not how I wanted my body to react, and my body never got used to the bipolar schedule.

I would close the store one day, and open the next. Sometimes I wouldn't get home until 11pm, and I had to tuck my restless body into bed. I wasn't on any medication nor diagnosed bipolar, but sometimes I would stay awake until it was time to go to work. I haven't recognized mania episodes yet, but I know I was in a very large depressive episode during my time at this Jimmy John's. It was exhausting to carry myself around in general, and getting out of bed was the most difficult part about myself.

Laundry piled up all the time, I forgot how to feed myself, and I crashed and burned the entire year of 2021. The blurry part of this year was how I grew as a person. I learned that I was heavily depressed and emotional, but I had nowhere to go but home and work. The time I took off was cherished but also with a hint of guilt because I knew I was being counted on to run a store, but I was freshly 21 and didn't even know how to take care of myself. I felt that living in an apartment and paying half of my rent was all I worked for. I sustained my life by exhausting myself with physically intensive work because I felt like I had to.

The way to "make it" isn't to pretend there's a dream inside there somewhere. The "Jimmy dream" is a feverish one, and competitive at that. My drive to work hard and sustain myself and Kyle grew stronger, but my patience only grew weaker.

I liked to call myself the "Jimmy Drifter," because I had been to so many different stores to help out. My main store back in the day was getting too difficult to even go to. Eventually, I chucked up my two week notice for a different franchise that I thought would get me further into my "career" I thought I had. It was getting too upsetting to deal with responsibility because I wasn't responsible enough. I didn't want the responsibility at all because I lost all passion for my store.

Skipping town to a store further away when gas prices were up to five whole dollars a gallon? Not my smartest decision. I took a pay cut too to go work for a friend I'll call Chuck. This guy was at my first Jimmy store on 44th and Eastern. He was the assistant there, but now the GM at the new store. Chuck was given a brand new store to run, which is amazing for this franchise. Lowell was a busy store, and sales sky rocketed the day they opened. Working in this store was very crowded, and Chuck kept his store well staffed and well rounded. The occasional idiot or call in sick-er would piss Chuck off a little, and this seemed to be the main issue of the store. Not that I want to expose any of them in any way! Shit talking was the specialty of the store, and boy there were no safe spaces.