get a life; or, another emotional labor question

Post date: 2018-04-21 18:12:14

I make my living in a job that necessitates my performing a lot of emotional labor. I am also a person who tends to take on a lot of emotional labor in my personal life. It getting exhausting and I'm responding to that exhaustion in maladaptive ways. Help me figure out how to recalibrate so that I don't lose my mind.

I am a business manager for a small business in a fairly small town in arts education field that attracts talented people who tend to have really bad boundaries. I report directly to the business owner and my role involves many things but a lot of it is customer facing. The customer facing stuff is fairly straightforward, but as of late we have a lot of regulars who have many opinions about how we should be running and growing the business. Most of this is well-intentioned and it is heartening that people find value in what we are providing and want to share their ideas for helping it thrive.

That being said, it is getting extremely tiresome to be the gatekeeper of this business when seemingly every other person who avails of our services wants to give us "advice" without having any real sense of what it means to keep a small business afloat financially - and by "us" I mean "me" because I am essentially the public face of this company and as such am a captive audience for everyone who walks into the building and sees me at my desk. I am also much younger than almost all of our regular customers and frequently these unsolicited opinions have a tinge of condescension about them - especially when they come from men. (I'm a woman. Of color. Which may or may not matter, I'm not sure.) In order to maintain good relations with our customers I have to at least give the appearance of making them feel heard, even when their opinions are objectively not good for the company. My boss is a good person and also for the most part a good boss; his main flaw is that he hates conflict and he delegates a lot of the work that has the potential for conflict to me. This is fine - it's one of the reasons why he hired me and I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this.

The combination of all of the above factors basically means all day every day I am performing gargantuan amounts of emotional labor just to keep things from going to shit. I'm rapidly getting to a point where it's getting difficult to get through the day without frustration. I would love to have just one day where I go to work, do what is assigned of me, chat in a banal way with our customers, and that's it. Instead, it feels like all I do all day every day is listen to people mansplain at me and expect me to change business policy as a result.

Today was especially bad; I was dealing with a notoriously difficult customer and he said something that really, really pissed me off. I got through the interaction without any issue, but internally I wanted to scream. I texted a friend who I always felt was a safe person to vent to and told him what happened. I have been the recipient of his work-related venting in the past and am happy to be an ear for him when he needs it. In response to my text, he told me that I was stressing out over stupid shit, I need to stop letting things bother me, and I need to get a life.

I don't even necessarily think he's wrong about that! Though I wish he had said it in a way that was less hurtful; I've been trying really hard not to succumb to the shame monster after he texted that to me, without much success. But I don't know how to not let things bother me when my job quite literally necessitates me having these stressful interactions with people during which all I am doing is performing emotional labor.

I love my job, aside from this nonsense. I really do. It's the best job I've ever had and we do really great work in fostering creative work and building community and I'm proud of what we do; in the aggregate this is the happiest I have ever been in any job I've ever had. But I've never had to be customer-facing in any of my prior jobs in this intense of a way and I don't have readily-accessible coping mechanisms. Is there a way for me to reframe these experiences in a way that keeps me from having these intense negative reactions day in and day out? Or do I just need a vacation?

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