Panic At The Dish Pit-Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the Service Industry

Preface:  I work in a restaurant and I am diagnosed as having generalized anxiety disorder with panic attacks.  This is just my story.  I am not an authority on anything psychiatric.  I wrote this because I know I'm not alone in dealing with this frustrating and complicating problem. I also wanted to write something because the instinct anxiety and panic breeds in to a person's brain is to be ashamed enough of their disorder as to internalize it.  That strategy not only ignores the problem, it exacerbates it.  Anyways, here it is.
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It happened again last night.  I felt my stomach twist and noticed my nausea.  I say "noticed" because at that point I'm not sure if I just became nauseous or if I have been for hours, or maybe all day. Either way, that shitty feeling I'm just now noticing has now instantly become an obsession.  The checklist process in my brain kicks in.

"Could this just be the coffee I drank earlier?  Am I maybe a touch hungover? Oh wait, did I even drink last night... oh my god people often experience nausea right before a heart attack."

Cue full on panic.

"Shit, people always get really panicky right before they have a heart attack too. Is my arm going numb?  Why are my hands shaking so hard?!"

It should also be mentioned that at that exact moment I was driving on a freeway that was limited to one lane thanks to construction.  As always, my anxious mind fixated on possibility, not probability. It seemed, at that moment, completely reasonable that my tire was going to blow out at the exact moment I was going to have a stroke.

I had just delivered a pizza and was rushing back to the restaurant I work at when this all kicked in.  Making matters that much more urgent seeming was my bright orange "low fuel" sign blaring in my face.  Usually this half inch by three quarter inch light isn't a big deal, but with panic tearing through my brain it felt oppressive.  I stopped for gas and pumped something like $6.34 in to the tank because standing in one place for any longer felt literally impossible. Then I sped back to work.

The series of obstacles rearranges itself now that I'm back at my place of work.  The benefits live symbiotically with the negatives.  Yes, I like my coworkers and understand they know who I am and what I deal with and are supportive; which in turn makes me paranoid about alienating people who I care about.  Yes, it's a pizza restaurant and not heart surgery so it's not categorically urgent; but it is implicitly rapid paced and requires a rhythm and degree of proficiency in order to be performed with even a marginal level of competence.  That rhythm, that coordination, can't exist when thanks to some evolutionary misstep, your adrenal gland is misfiring like a goddamn uzi and your heart is palpitating and your eyes are dilated so all of the halogen lights suddenly morph in to white dwarfs and blind your eyes.

Eventually, panic subsides.  My heartbeat returns to relative normality and my hands regain control. A short time after that, after I've regained my breath and stopped hyperventilating, my muscles loosen and I can return to standard operating mode.  Panic seems to strike everyone on different levels and for different amounts of time.  Generally my worst episodes last anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours. Nine times out of ten I can detect it approaching and calmly motivate myself out of it by reminding myself that it's happened tens of times before and nothing truly awful ever happens.  When that doesn't work, all bets are off.  I've had to step outside mid-rush just to prevent myself from blacking out.  Anyone who's ever worked in a restaurant knows that a move like that is borderline sacrilege, something that should only be reserved for someone who thinks they are about to die. Believe me, that's about where I was.

I want this entry to be more than a self-pitying narcissistic rant about how difficult my life is, so I thought I'd write some advice to the young anxious individual who's in love with the idea of the restaurant life.  Truthfully the solution to all things anxiety, be it yours or someone else's, can be found in honesty. As a concept, honesty is something everyone is familiar with.  What people aren't familiar with is the raw, uncomfortable feelings that often accompany it.  Let's take an honest account of what a person with an anxiety disorder has to deal with if they want to work in the service industry.

First, the service industry is intensely competitive.  Whether your back of house, front of house, serving, cooking or whatever, you're always trying to maintain your rank or move up.  Yes, the camaraderie is real and you can find satisfaction like nothing else an ice cold shift beer with your co-workers after a brutal shift, but the operative word in that sentence is still "brutal".  Make sure you step in to life in the kitchen knowing somewhere along the line you will be stepped on.  It's difficult for the catastrophically-minded individual to operate in an industry where the traditional modus operandi for shaping young men and women in to respectable cooks is aggressive and repetitive negative reinforcement. This isn't to say that everyone who serves as a mentor in a kitchen is a heartless bully, but it is to say that you learn quickly that you have to totally bust your ass to be a good cook.

Secondly, the powers that be do not give a shit about you.  This is true in almost any profession, but the level of ambivalence doled out to kitchen workers is extreme.  Don't count on finding yourself in a position that awards you benefits, a 401K or anything else that might serve to protect you should the worst happen.  Think about basically every minor pitfall you could endure and realize that most of that shit won't get treated so long as you are working in kitchens.  Hernias, damaged teeth, broken feet, wildly infected burns, the list of things i've seen go untreated by kitchen workers who simply don't have the means to deal with them goes on and on and on.  This doesn't even begin to touch the gauntlet a young person seeking mental health must go through if they don't have benefits.  Our society basically damns mental illness right out of the gate.  Whether you're a normally functioning individual who happens to have panic attacks like me, or the paranoid schizophrenic who is a legitimate candidate to hurt themselves or someone else, you're essentially thrown in the same boat. Every free clinic i've ever stepped in to, every exhausted and overwhelmed doctor who's ever checked me out, have all concluded almost instantly that I'm seeking drugs and can't be trusted.  It should be noted that I receive that level of suspicion even though I'm a white male with zero prior convictions, far and away the most privileged sector of society. I can't even imagine what it's like for other people.

Thirdly, that stereotypical fun fast kitchen lifestyle is hard.  This seems like it goes without saying, but honestly so many of those youthful, self destructive things that make working in a restaurant romantic are the things that completely work to inflame anxiety.  Coffee? No good.  Cigarettes? Nope. Alcohol? Bad bad bad.  Basically anything that dehydrates you and/or speeds your heart up is more or less a recipe for disaster if you're prone to panic.  Maybe it sounds silly to consider these things at all, but look at the other two elements I wrote about up there.  Kitchens start to feel like families, of course you'll want to drink or have a smoke with your co-workers.  And if nicotine and alcohol (or other things) don't sound appealing based on that alone, then just wait for the harsh realities of life to catch up.  When I have a lousy paycheck or a hard day at work, I don't want blended wheatgrass to get me through the night.

Again, I'm just one person with one perspective.  Nothing I am saying should be taken as a general truth and nothing I am saying should be given any credit from a psychoanalytical perspective.  I am writing what I would like to have been told when I was 17 and got my first job washing dishes.

None of what I'm saying is meant to discourage anyone from getting involved in working in kitchens. Truth be told, if I could do it all over again, I'm not sure I'd change a whole lot about the trajectory of my life.  Kitchens have an amazing and empowering feel to them.  It's honest work done by honest people.  Furthermore, generally the people who stick around in kitchens do so because they are creative and interesting individuals who have fallen in to the margins of an otherwise uncreative society.  I spent several months wringing my hands and feeling embarrassed before I told my coworkers what I was dealing with, and the result? Assurance and support, through and through.  One fellow employee even empathized and confided a similar struggle with me. Yes, my panic can be frustrating at times, sometimes even crippling, but I can't say assuredly that my reality would be much different if I worked in retail or some sterile office setting.  Go in to everything you do with honest expectations, prepare for the worst but always, always hope for the best.

First Things First

I'd like to begin our journey together with a touch of elegance.

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Not too long ago I asked my friend Dan Jacobs, executive chef at Odd Duck here in the beautiful city of Milwaukee, if he knew anywhere that was hiring.  I was desperate. I was desperate enough to, to the complete horror of my own eyes, type the word "dishwasher" in to the text box that contained my maudlin inquiry.  For those of you who are lucky enough to have never worked as a dishwasher in a busy restaurant,  allow me to give you some perspective.  Dishwashing is the sole job that exists in the kitchen that you can't possibly source any inspiration from.  Unlike other cripplingly dull jobs, you can't use your imagination to get out of it because it requires a rigid, mechanical and relatively focused mind. Things happen when you are washing dishes that knock you out of your escapist stupor. A clog, a sudden rush, a broken glass, some clunky cumbersome object that breaks the flow you've developed over the course of your shift.  Trust me, a Hobart claw amidst the homogenized ocean of silverware and plates can fuck your whole day up.

Washing dishes is not dirty, it's completely filthy.  It's not hard, it's agonizing.  It dulls the mind and crushes the body all at once.  This in no way meant to delegitimize dishwashing as good honest work.  If anything, a good dishwasher ranks high on the hard workers list. However, to the overprivileged, lily white, suburban bred porcelain doll that was 17 year old Tommy Ciaccio, it felt utterly Sisyphean.  In short, I think dishwashers shouldn't be employed; I think they should be drafted out of a pool of distracted high school students who are given six months stints in the dish pit, so as to give them some perspective on what life is like when you don't go to college.  But that's not the case.  They are employed, and the requisite years one spends in the dish pit before moving up in the kitchen make peeling potatoes and grinding meat seem like some kind of sweet heaven.

Despite all that, that's where I was.  If I didn't have a wife and mouths to feed (dog mouths, specifically), I probably would have chosen an easier route, like driving my car in one direction until it ran out of gas, and then just living in the woods forever.  But I have shackled myself to responsibility and thusly found myself in a pathetic plea for a dishwashing position.  I was sure somewhere had a vacancy that would allow me to fulfill my manic and admittedly baseless need for a change of scenery.

Dan knew better than to be deceived by my cunning wiles.  For a brief, humiliating period of my life, Dan had been my boss at Wolf Peach.  My arrival at Wolf Peach, appropriately enough, was too a product of desperation.  The restaurant I was working at had to suddenly shut down leaving both me and my then-fiancee-now-wife out of work.  Wolf Peach was close to opening and was hurriedly filling in it's last few opening positions. Determined not to be impoverished, I decided to snap one up. With an illegitimate amount of confidence, and opportunistic deceitfulness raging harmoniously together in my heart, I bluffed my way in to a cooking position at Wolf Peach. Bad move.

Twelve combined hours and five or six threats of physical violence later, Dan quickly and deservedly dispatched me to the dish pit.  It was only by virtue of his true benevolence that my frustrated boss didn't just straight up fire (or murder) me.  It didn't take long for me to break.  I just couldn't do it. Eight to ten hours of sweating through dirty, physically challenging work was just too much for me to handle. I was 26 years old and on the verge of getting married. I was fast approaching (and have since surpassed) one decade in the service industry and I wasn't even treading water, I was flailing and abjectly plummeting headlong back in to the goddamned dish pit.  Crestfallen, I quit, with a personal vow to never return to the service industry.

I decided to take a stab at normalcy, which manifested itself in working in retail at a major electronics chain in the wealthy suburb of Fox Point. After six months I felt it was time to move on.  And by "felt it was time to move on" I mean I could either quit working retail or experience what it's like when your soul bleeds out through your nose and ears and dies in a puddle on the floor in front of your eyes.  And there, as ever, was the service industry, ready to break my fall.  While I have returned to the kitchen, I do so with a forcibly ambition-less shroud cast over me.  Clumsiness and anxiety aside, I never want to be a chef, and while I love the place I work, a sense of permanence feels defeating when my face is already smashed against the ceiling of the potential it has as it pertains to me.

What makes the decision so heartbreaking for me was the fact that I passionately and truly love food.  Generally speaking I'm wildly intrigued by cuisine and spend hours poring over cookbooks and wistfully watching Anthony Bourdain live out every sane human being's fantasy.  I adore the vibe of a bustling restaurant kitchen, even to the point where I love the stereotypically sociopathic behaviors of the chefs I've worked for.  I've also had the privilege of being raised by two parents who cooked home cooked meals for us almost every single night of the week.  Food is as central as anything to my happiness. So what's the problem? Behind all the platitudinous gastronomic fantasizing that lives in my heart lies a clumsy and befuddled guy with comically imprecise motor skills and an anxiety disorder.  These traits are not conducive to a hot, fast and hostile environment that requires you to be fast on your toes and has zero room for error.

Which leads me to here, the birth of Rough Chop.  I felt the name appropriate as these are perspectives written by an unbridled epicurean who also happens to be an inept cook in a restaurant kitchen. Incidentally, this blog's existence should be at least partially credited to the same chef who verbally eviscerated me and sent me to the dish dungeon.  The reply I got in response to my counterintuitive plea for additional kitchen work was not a job, but a push in a more appropriate direction. Disparate from the unfortunate soul that is "Kitchen Tommy" is the (hopefully) more capable and confident "Blogging Tommy".  Frankly I have no idea where this little project will lead or how it will evolve.  At the very least I hope to illustrate to you, the reader, why the world of food and everything it entails is so absolutely important and powerful to me. I mean, if I can't cook food I might as well blather on incessantly about it.