I’m either not good enough or dead…or both.

I remember decades ago I had a “friend” from high school named Edward. When he was depressed because he liked this girl Ann but she didn’t like him back, I was on the phone with him counselling him and helping him stay calm. When he was in love with his BCIT classmate later on—and I happened to, by pure luck, work with her at Superstore—once again I was always on the phone to calm him down.

But when I got a different job after finishing university, working as an office assistant in a small company as I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do for a career, Edward disowned me. I happily told him about my new job, and he scoffed and said, “Pffft. You mean you’re a secretary.” I said I wasn’t—not that there was anything wrong with the secretary profession—but Edward kept insisting that I was merely a secretary. That was rude.

I don’t think he reached out anymore. He essentially disowned me and thought that I wasn’t good enough anymore or that I was dead to him. 

There was another classmate named Victor. I guess he was raised in his culture to look down on those who are in lower standing in society and in life. I still remember in the final years of high school when the counsellor or someone coming to our class to give us information about the universities we could apply to. When the information about colleges was being given, Victor scoffed in a way that seemed to suggest colleges were beneath him. 

Victor was another one who disowned me. I ran into him and his girlfriend while I was taking a Saturday class to get my teaching license. He looked up and saw the small school building where I was a student and scoffed and said something negative about the school. He promised he’d call me. He never did. 

Years later, I was in another company. There was a semi-retired woman that I supervised named Valerie. She wanted to look for a new opportunity with BC Hydro and asked me for a reference. I gave her a glowing reference when the hiring department phoned me. She got the job and left our company. We kept in touch. When I eventually left the company because it had become toxic due to the management in place, I reached out to Valerie and said I’d left that company. Valerie never returned my messages even though she’d still exchanged messages while working at her BC Hydro job. It was only after I announced that I had left that company that Valerie stopped communicating. 

Likewise, there was a friend named Kori, an older immigrant lady that I had befriended. Kori had told me that she had another friend who said something like, “I only watch blah-blah show on TV.” Kori dumped that friend, thinking that if someone said something like that, it proved to Kori that the person was uneducated and very small-minded, someone not ambitious enough and not willing to improve. So, I should have realized that when I messaged Kori that I had left the job, she would stop contacting me. I didn’t know or realize beforehand. But when Kori stopped communicating, it became clear. 

Is this how our society operates? 

I’ll say the title again. I’m either not good enough in people’s eyes or dead. Or both.