Ask For What You Need

When I was 17 I’d just moved back to AL and I needed a job. I’d graduated the year before and spent the last six months in Michigan with family. After several months of looking I walked into Shoe Carnival. If you’ve never been in a Shoe Carnival (especially back in the early-90’s) let me describe. This place was not just a shoe store, it was a shoe warehouse. They called it Shoe Carnival because there was almost always someone on the microphone acting as the “Barker” like you’d have at a carnival. They’d be constantly announcing specials in a “Step right up” kind of way. They have this big wheel you could spend to see how much you’d save that day. Back then both the wheel and the Barker would be up on a podium type stage just as you walked in the door.

I walked up to the Barker and in my meek little (terrified) voice said “Could I get an application?”

“What do you want?”

“An application please….”

“Is that all you want?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “I’d really like a job.”

“Then you need to come in and ask for a job! Ask for what you want.”

That lesson has always stuck with me. I did walk out that day having filled out an application and later I did get a job offer from that store. Unfortunately, I was too young to be a cashier there and at the same time was offered a job at the newly opening competing Shoe Dept, where I could basically have my choice of positions. So, I took the latter. But, what I took away from that experience at Shoe Carnival has had more of an impact on me than that year or so that I worked at The Shoe Dept.

This is a lesson that is so fitting for those of us living with chronic pain. So often, we feel like crap and we need extra help. We barely have the energy to speak let alone ask for what we need. But, asking is the only way we’ll get what we need. As much as those around us may love us they can’t read our minds. They don’t know what we need. We may be thinking that they’ve seen this before, they should know by now, but they don’t. They aren’t us, and the truth is that our needs change, so even if we told them once before what we need today may be different. it’s difficult but we have to find a way to let those around us know what we need, specifically. Maybe you don’t have the energy to spell it out, so maybe you need to work out a code ahead of time, so you can just give a number and they know that number means you can’t do anything, or that they need to cook dinner, or whatever it might mean.

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