Odd One out

In my world, I have always had trouble fitting in. Whether it’s because I’m vastly different from the person I’m surrounded with or unwilling to conform to their version of normal, I’ve just never fit. This has been never more clear than the first initial months of my former job.

While security jobs are often difficult because of what you will have to deal with, people-wise, working in a small airport was for me a new kind of hell. Not because the work itself was hard, or even the customers that I was working with were difficult. The repeated tasks that I had to deal with in the job and the people I worked with who barely acknowledged me as a person. I’m sure the people I worked with, meant well. Possibly. But with how the work was dealt with on a daily basis I always seemed to get the raw end of the deal no matter what I did, only because I was new. New and apparently not worth the task of getting to know, not while I was untrained at least.

The security team in this particular airport had clear groups that gathered during the workday and it was clear I didn’t belong with any of them. My workdays were spent in silence, watching the surrounding people talk about topics or people I had little to no idea about. My lunch hours were spent in an even more cold silence counting down the minutes until I could leave.

The security team was a family, bonded over the harsh training they took to do the job. Even though I wore the same uniform as them, I did not wear the bars that marked my training as complete. I was just some girl doing menial tasks, not worth the breath it took to acknowledge my presence. While things did change once I got my training completed I will never forget the first four months when I felt like I wasn’t even a person worthy of talking or acknowledging because of training I hadn’t completed.

Those long hard days of endless repetition, with little acknowledgment from the other people I worked with. Even after I got the training, even after I started making friends, I still felt like the odd one out. Always the one edged out of the workspace. The last one to be invited to things. Barely remembered that I was even there unless it suited their needs. Only valued for what I could do for them. Never really seen as a person or at least not a person worth seeing.

That kind of feeling is something that causes stress in a person's psyche and developing different attitudes from what is considered usual for a person. Even at times causing uncontrollable panic attacks and endless crying episodes. Sometimes the world gives us pathways where we can both grow and learn from and gives us difficulties for us to grow as a person. While I may have despised my time initially in the airport, there were many more moments where I absolutely loved working there, maybe not for the people but the travelers and of course the beauty of the Island airport where I used to work. I wasn't friendless, eventually. Even the people who left me mostly alone in the beginning eventually gravitated towards me.

I'm not entirely sure why I was such a pariah in those first early days of working there, if it was something I did, or just part of the circumstance. All I know is that those moments of cold bitter silence, where I felt more alone than I've ever felt in any of my other jobs, will continue to haunt me in those quiet moments everyone has in their lives. Now I am easily adaptable to whatever situation seems to come my way, and it is rare for me to be in that kind of cold silence anymore, but I will always fear becoming that shell of a person. The person unable to speak, trapped in a body with nothing about me for anyone to see as worthy. A frozen specimen that not even a scientist would want to study.