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I went into my little town yesterday, first of the month, Social Security disability check in my bank account, to run errands and pick up essentials.  I only leave home about twice a month now considering my very limited resources  financially, mentally and emotionally.

I was gone from home 6 hours and came home absolutely overloaded, overwhelmed and exhausted both by the moving around ‘out there’ itself and by the patterns of interaction with ‘the public’.  I want to explain (with some humiliation and ‘shame’) how the tail-end of my day’s interaction went at our new ACE Hardware store.

I carried with me the store brand box of 50-count latex work gloves.  I needed more because I use them all day when I am working outside inside my very dirty heavy gloves.  $6.99 per box.  Were there any to be seen on the store shelf?  Nope.  Not a box, not a tag on the edge of the shelf that would let me know there was hope of ever finding them there again.

So what did I do?  Uh-Oh!  A big NO NO!  I actually asked of the 6 or 7 corporate garbed smiling employees standing around in the ‘lobby’ of the store (and yes, this new store is built to look just like a person might find on entering a grand hotel!), “I need some help here.”

Maybe it was because I forgot to say “Please” at the beginning of the encounter.  Maybe it was because I made the mistake of thinking that if I put these gloves from this store on my errand list, drove into town and down their street, parked my car, walked into the store, across the floor and down the long isle where I expected to find the object of my intentions that I could find them.

I didn’t enter the store to socialize.

I didn’t enter the store to eventually receive a very detailed and defensive explanation of the entire computerized ordering and receiving process this corporation uses to ensure that the simple things we customers actually wish to buy will ONLY be on the shelf first thing on Thursday mornings after the once-a-week truck brings new copies of what actually SOLD the week before.

I didn’t enter the store not to be listened to.  I didn’t come to have six people out-shout one another as they explained to me that I had no reason to be upset.  All of these minimum-wage employees, all evidently charmed by the Great American Corporate Logic did not seem to understand that I wanted to buy a simple basic item when they told me, “The store doesn’t want to have inventory just sitting around on the shelf.”

Give me a break!  I’m not upset because I came in to buy a $600 dollar chain saw.  How is this different than a grocery store using this logic and replacing a single loaf of bread on the shelf once a week, being content in the meantime to belittle an upset customer who actually wonders why THEY can’t buy a loaf of bread from an empty shelf?

So, let me get this straight (as I tried to be heard and explain MY logic at this juncture in time and place):  Your store only stocks one box of a very useful and well-priced item.  Someone who wants this box and lives in town shows up when the store door opens the morning after you have restocked this one item and buys it.  Then every other much more ‘polite’ customer than I who enters the store for the next 6 days will NOT buy the invisible box of gloves – and you will hear no complaint.

There sits the shelf spot empty.  There are all these employees stalking customers who can’t buy what they want.  There they go out the door having wasted their time with their money still in their pocket.  And nobody thinks this through?

What if the store changed their inventory replenishment system so that, say, five boxes came in on Wednesday night’s truck.  Then all five boxes could sell, four more customers would be happy, you make money, five more boxes come in the next week — etc!

Nope!

One male employee actually said to me, “I’ve been shot at in my life.  I’ve been shot, and you are upset because you can’t buy a box of gloves?”

Me?  In my increasingly overloaded state of, yes, emotional dysregulation by this time turned and responded back to him, “All right!  Go ahead and shoot me if it would make you feel better.  But that wouldn”t change the fact that I came here to buy an item I actually need and it’s not on the shelf!  I need to know if this space is going to remain empty or if more of these boxes are coming in.  Can you tell me if they have been permanently deleted from your inventory?”

(By the way, no doubt the man who offered this inappropriate response is also a severe infant-child abuse survivor himself.)

I was not displaying anger yesterday.  I was displaying irritation and dissatisfaction with a focused intensity of determination to be listened to.  All I asked for was that one person hear what I was saying and consider my suggestion that someone look into adding another few boxes of gloves into the inventory system so that more boxes could show up on the shelf so more people could buy them over the span of any given week’s time (by the way, this is NOT the first time I’ve faced this same empty shelf).  Did my heretical wishes tip over THEIR boat?  Evidently so.

Well, another moment of these interactions and I’m quite certain I would have been permanently 86-ed from their store.

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Yes, my disability DID come into play.  A far more adequately emotionally regulated person (from infancy thru adequate infant-caregiver interactions – secure attachment – that build the emotional-social brain in the first place) would NOT have had this ridiculous interaction go this way!

Warning to self:  “Do not EVER actually go to that store expecting to find what you need!  Do not EVER go to that store as the last stop after a day of errands!  Do not EVER try to use logic in talking to those employees again!  Do not EVER expect to be listened to!  Do not EVER expect them to care one single bit that what you wanted to spend your money on is not in the store even though it COULD have been!”

There aren’t enough shopping options in this town to boycott stores on a regular basis.  I don’t have a reliable car or the gas money to make the 50 mile round trip in one direction or the 75 mile round trip in the other direction to get to a larger shopping area.

I have limited income and I’m sorry, folks!  But why should I spend 2 – 4 times as much money to buy smaller packages of gloves that are 1/5th the quality of the ones I have found before and wish to buy again?  Why should I waste gas money returning to the store when I only go to town twice a month?  And when would I need to show up, anyway?   Only when the store opens on a Thursday morning so I and some other customer who also needs that one box of gloves can argue for it?  Fight over it?  One person buy the box and both of us go out into the parking lot and exchange money between us so each purchases half of the one box’s contents?  (I guess we’d have to decide which one of us ended up with 24 gloves and the other with 26.)

POINT OF STORY:  For every person who experiences emotional dysregulation there is likely to be a process that leads up to these difficulties.  Increasing irritability is a sign that OVERLOAD is taking place that will lead to OVERWHELMING unless some way is found to ‘down-regulate’ this pattern.

The reason I am on disability now is that I CANNOT modulate incoming stimuli well, my senses and my ability to filter them out are shot.  I have spent most of my life ‘getting along’ in the world using up resources that I have never really had!  I am quite simply — burned out.

I have to be very very careful now of how often I leave the sanctuary of my own home and yard because I DO NOT carry the calm peacefulness of ‘sanctuary’ in my own body.  This is a condition that is often referred to as ‘complex posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’ but I don’t care what it’s called, it came from being completely overloaded and overwhelmed with violence and trauma from the time I was born until I was 18.

I have, essentially, NO TOLERANCE for irritation.  I have an allergic reaction to most people I encounter, I swear!  If I were rich I would string a Personal Assistant along with me everywhere I go — or send that person ‘out there’ instead of me so I could avoid what I very often experience now.

I only vaguely understand that the kind of overload and irritation I can often feel in the midst of ‘too much stimulation’ and ‘too much of the wrong kind of stimulation’ is related to right brain ‘limbic kindling’.  It’s like having a burn that hurts if ANYTHING including water touches that wounded and unhealed skin.  This is irritability!  And if I ever find that I want some more of it I know exactly where to go to find it!

And, yes, I admit that at almost 60 years old, being worn out to a large extent, it is my ‘fault’ that I can no longer gracefully and ‘appropriately’ handle BS like I used to.  I just don’t have it in me to be ‘nicey-nice’ anymore in the midst of what feels like insanity and chaos.  Yes, I am an ‘accident waiting to happen’ with my overloaded body-brain and my resulting extremely short fuse!  And I suspect that during the time frame I am in as I return to the earliest years of my life in the writing of my book I will have to be very, very, very careful of myself – and evidently of other people as well.

That was a high price to pay for a non-box of work gloves!

And never mind now that as I go to actually publish this post my cable internet is on the blitz again for the second time in a week.  I CAN handle this one – blissfully!  I think……

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I have to say that all of this contrasted most sharply with my next experience at Safeway (our only grocery store in town).  There I received a $10 coupon at checkout because I had just spent over $75 – and I was delighted to head to the vegetable isle for all the fixings for a wonderful spinach salad — cost?  Absolutely FREE!

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