The One About the Life of A Working Student

I've spent the majority of my weekends throughout my college career working as a cashier at a grocery store (and at a restaurant before that). It is through working during the weekends and holidays that I get to save some money to pay for my textbooks and other necessities (i.e., food and shopping money) that I don't want my parents and older brother to shoulder. They've done enough by financially supporting everything else that I need in order to go to school without having to worry on how I will get by so I make it a point to not rely on them on things that I can provide for myself by acquiring a job just as any other mid/lower middle class university students in North America.

The reality of it though is that sometimes it gets too much. It can be really tiring and stressful especially if you are full time in school and have classes throughout the five days of the week and then having to spend the entire weekend working. There is no such thing as days off or rest days. You just savour the six or seven hours of sleep you get at night and the occasional nap in the transit en route to either work or school. It feels as though you're in the constant act of balancing and juggling balls in your hand and one wrong move would make you drop the ball and that would be the end of you. But at the same time, it teaches you a lot of things that you would have not learned otherwise.

I learn how to have a better time-management especially when exams and papers are concerned. I also learn to value how I spent my money and make sure that I am not wasting not just what I earn but the time I spent earning them into some meaningless material things. More than anything though, I learn to appreciate my parents and my older brother even more because I know that even if I bust my ass off studying and working on the weekends, what they're been doing and sacrificing is much more significant than what I could possibly do. They pick up the slack that I should be carrying at this age and they make sure that I - and we - live a comfortable life.

Introspectively, it takes a lot of patience and will power to work at the customer service industry. Not only you'll witness how disgusting people can be but it will also make you realize how something as trivial as a uniform and a counter can easily blur common courtesy. Being treated like you're less than everybody else and a complete moron is something that you have to deal with on a daily basis. At first it will offend you but most of the time, you learn to let it go and remind yourself that these people dont know a single shit about you and if anything, their treatment of you is a reflection of their character more than it says about your own. Other times, you learn how to fight for your self, to look them in the eyes and strike back. You learn how to pick your battles.

Working is also a form of motivation. 'Cause it encourages you to strive and work harder in school so you don't have to do the same thing for the rest of life. Not that there is something wrong with being a cashier but really, if you're given the chance to dream and aim for something, you gotta aim and dream higher.

You see, I was 18 when I started working. I worked at a fast-food restaurant (before I transitioned into a fine-dining restaurant) and it was when I was scrubbing toilets that I had a some-sort of epiphany where I told myself that I don't want to scrub toilets for the rest of my life and I gotta do well in school in order to keep myself and my family to have that kind of future. That realization is the beginning of it all. Had I not have that first job, I wouldn't find myself to where I am now and I would be a completely different person.

Funny how things work out sometimes.

I don't really know where this is going. It might be the sleep deprivation or my avoiding of the things I should be doing (prepping for an exam) but for what it's worth, sometimes it's nice to sit down and contemplate on the things that are running in my mind. It is through this that I get to remind myself how far I am from where I started and how life constantly changes.

Indeed, this whole thing is an endless, continuous process of becoming.