"I told Sporty Spice your legend," Jow said casually.
In my head, all I could think about is how I've spent the majority of the last month of my life - chained up in a windowless copy room, putting together tax organizers which is every bit as riveting and back breaking as it sounds. I mean, I'm not being fair to my meditation cave/copy room experience, exactly. Oh lords, what is higher than those early days in a "cave" mostly by yourself? What problem couldn't you solve? What crazy idea couldn't you come up with? When you had three seconds before you passed out asleep, glowing from your austerity, what crazy idea couldn't you talk everyone else into?
(I'll give you a tiny spoil: I'm doing a pop up Goblin Market in Brooklyn right after tax season because I'm a crazy person)
But it also wears you down. The endless stuffy hours, worrying how this will possibly get done, the exhaustion of being on your feet almost all day, the kind of coworker melodrama that can only come from working in an old house with a family sized staff. By the time the last organizer went out, I felt drained dry. I felt like I had no more will to resist. I felt like I would never read anything or write anything again. I felt like I stared into the abyss and Gilead stared back at me and the weight of a million tiny indignities had rendered me without hope, without glamour, without the will to fight. I just wanted to survive. I just wanted everyone to shut up. I just wanted to sleep.
This job has taught me a few things, I've realized in the copy room. It's taught me to take a punch in the face and not cry. It's taught me what really hard, really exacting work looks like. It's taught me what it's like to not be the best at something and with (frankly) very little hope of ever being considered the best at this because my predecessor died and I will always be Dorothy, young, hopeless and stupid, teetering in her shoes that I have no business wearing. It's taught me what real systematic oppression looks like and what it does to you.
This is what real exile does to you. It takes your will. It takes your magic. It takes your curiosity. It takes your pride. It takes your ambition. It takes your fight. It takes everything you ever had to give and receive and smashes it down to survival.
"What legend?" I said absently, my eyes on the road. Because at this point, I had honestly forgotten I've accomplished anything worth talking about besides finishing tax organizers, the great and lasting achievement that is.
"What . . .girl. You opened letters that possibly had anthrax in them for NOW, you marched for women's rights and had your face plastered all over the news for your family to see, you are part of, nay! A high priestess of a coven that is decades old, you started the first Steampunk convention when you were like not even thirty because you had a whim, you're a published author and you have literally presided over tea on a throne made of (consensually) bound people. What legend!"
"Oh yeah," I said softly.