I had been unemployed for three years after college, trying to find work in the sort of positions young artists get to work their way into the art world: art handler, artist’s assistant, gallery receptionist, scenic painter. I rarely got so much as an acknowledgment that I’d been rejected, and gradually got the feeling that I just didn’t belong in the art world.

I had been trained as an art handler, as part of a work-study job at Pratt. I was taught how to pack and hang art properly: laid on a padded table, wrapped neatly in plastic or glassine, bubble wrap (bumpy side out), sheets of cardboard and cardboard corners, the edges of the tape folded under for easy removal. I learned to measure walls to hang each painting so the center is at the same height. I learned to never hammer a nail above a painting propped against the wall, even if fully wrapped, because drywall dust could fall on it.

There was a certain respect that we owed to art no matter what it was, or who made it, or how much it was worth, or whether we liked it. An artist who brought us her watercolors rolled up loose in a grocery bag would leave with them flattened and carefully wrapped between two sheets of cardboard. If an artist’s work included a residue that dripped onto the gallery floor they would likely receive a phone call about whether we needed to pack up and return the residue, and how that should be done. Once your work enters this space, every particle it may exude becomes a sacred thing.

I have wrapped every painting I have submitted to an exhibition in the way I was taught and rarely had it returned in the same shape. More often than not, my packaging has been thrown out. I have had paintings given back to me in a plastic bag, wrapped in paper towels. I know that these galleries treat everyone’s work like this, at least in group shows, but it makes me feel like my work is unworthy of the respect I would have given to anyone else’s.

The gallery taught me to pack and hang art, but I was being trained for a job I could never be hired for. An art handler is essentially a mover. Despite the recommendations of my former co-workers, the interviewers for those positions noticed two key things about me: I’m not very strong, and I can’t drive a box truck.

I began to apply at retail stores and fast food joints, and too was turned down from every single one. I put on the cheap suit I shared with my then-boyfriend, who was a foot taller than me; the straight pins hidden inside the ankles to shorten the pants scraping my legs. I walked around handing out resumes to places that refused to take them, directing me to fill out the form online. A woman at a Wendy’s struck up a conversation with me and I responded, thinking she might have been the hiring manager. She told me conspiracy theories for an hour while I waited for my interview to begin, wondering if I was being judged based on how I dealt with her.

I went to a temp agency, where the manager told me I was incapable of working with other people. She suggested a seasonal job where I’d be locked, alone, in a vault. I called a number on a telephone pole advertising work of some kind and wound up going door-to-door in Sheepshead Bay for three eight-hour days trying to scam sad, desperate people into signing up for an ESCO. Realizing that I’d rather run into traffic than ring another doorbell I went home and never picked up my $35 paycheck.

Then I got the copy shop job.

You know how in Office Space, Peter Gibbons has eight bosses? The misconception I had about that scenario was that when you have eight bosses, they would have a common goal. The reality is that each boss has an entirely different idea of what your job is, assigns you specific tasks, and expressly forbids you from performing the tasks that the other bosses have assigned. They’re more interested in preserving their role in the hierarchy than running the business in ways that make sense. This means that what you should be doing at any given time depends entirely upon who happens to be looking over your shoulder, and whether they feel the need to make irrational demands as a display of dominance.

My general manager once called me into a private meeting to tell me — a few days after the Parkland shooting — that if we were in the Army, he would have me shot for insubordination, because I asked my supervisor to take a message from someone who was asking for me on the phone while I was in the middle of a conversation with a customer. I sprung out of my chair to say “I quit,” but said nothing and sat down.

General managers were constantly being changed without warning: they didn’t even introduce themselves. The new GM would always change something about the operations of the shop that alienated major clients, lose thousands in business, and blame the loss of revenue on the entry-level staff. They would come up with new rules and not tell me about them until they caught me breaking them: for example, switching back and forth whether all of the copy paper set aside for use in production had already been coded out of inventory, which made it look like entire cases had been stolen.

The GM before I started working there, I had been told, was a combat veteran with PTSD, who was fired for having a breakdown during which he gave away everything in the store for free.

I’d had two new GMs since I had attempted CPR on my friend who had been dead for two days, whose last words to me were about whether her outfit made her look good enough for some potential employer. Two new GMs who never gave me a raise because I didn’t smile enough.

I spent most of 2016 preparing my portfolio to apply to grad schools. My reasons for wanting to go to grad school were largely to escape the life I was living: a minimum wage job where I wasn’t allowed to sit down. A cockroach-infested apartment where I was constantly being exploited for money by people who were more trapped than I was, by substance use disorders and constant promises of rent that led to more and more people living in my apartment and none of them paying. I had convinced myself that I couldn’t leave unless it was a move up. To just quit and be unemployed, to flee without moving somewhere better, would be another shameful failure.

But I had spent the past three years planting a garden in the backyard with currants and figs and blackberries and the thought of leaving it was heartbreaking, and it led me to stay in that house far longer than I should have. And I was in love with someone who I thought was worth staying for, someone I’d convinced myself only treated me the way he did because I was fundamentally incapable of being in a relationship or belonging to a community.

One of the requirements for a grad school portfolio is that all of the work presented has to have been done in the past few years. Yale was the strictest in this regard: at least eight of the sixteen required pieces had to have been made within the past year, to qualify. This meant I could not apply unless I had been consistently painting and making enough work to send in a portfolio. So under the stress of all those people coming into my house and screaming at each other in the middle of the night when I had to get up at four in the morning, I was painting. At the end of the year, I took a month off work, just to get one more painting done before the deadline.

One of the paintings I made that year was of the copy shop: