There Is Always Something To Be Done

How I became someone who's always doing something.

My first job, at 16 years old, was working as a barista at a coffee shop in Clinton, Mississippi. (Clinton: Hometown of N’Sync icon, Lance Bass, and Clinton High School’s award-winning show choir, Attaché.)

The original Gravity Coffeehouse was a special kind of unicorn that, in my mind, existed only in places like Mississippi. It was a coffee shop, sure, just off campus from Mississippi College, a small liberal arts Christian university; it also served soups, salads, and sandwiches in an eclectic atmosphere. This confluence of cultures meant that it attracted a variety of customers, including wholesome theology students, moody literature majors, buttoned-up professors, and throngs of ladies who lunch.

Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash | This is a stock photo; Gravity was not nearly this sleek or brightly lit.

Too many people know Mississippi for being at the top or bottom of many unappealing lists: Lowest in education, highest in obesity. But if you were to ask me, I’d say it’s the capital of Ladies Who Lunch. Swear to God, Mississippi women love a chichi lunch place serving chicken salad and sweet tea. Sometimes the LsWL would linger, laid-back in their chairs intently listening to one another, re-upping their coffees or casually grazing on dessert for hours. Other times it was like a wild pack of hyenas expressively competing for talking time. My boss, Suzanne, made sure that I always kept their water glasses full as long as they were there.

As a reclaimed Auto Parts space, Gravity was artsy in both vibe and ethos. It was what you’d imagine a late-90s Seattle coffeeshop to be if you’d never been to Seattle, and then made it Southern. Paintings by local artists hung on the partially exposed brick walls. Juxtaposing the chipped concrete floor were mismatching tables and chairs with equally as eclectic table settings: each cloth napkin a different color or print, wrapped in a variety of colorful napkin rings. Ladies Who Lunch love a quirky DIY vibe.

Because this was my first job, I knew nothing about anything. It was the first and last time I haphazardly threw a cloth napkin on top of a tea light, setting it on fire. Everyone did everything: Work the register; make the coffee, the sandwiches, and the tea; bus the tables; stock the bags of coffee beans; clean the toilets. I still remember being in disbelief when Suzanne told me we were all to greet every person who walked through the door within seconds. Every person? In seconds? Seemed like a lot of work.

Suzanne was unlike any woman I’d ever met. She was both a business woman and a free spirit. She wore her bleach blonde hair in a messy lop atop her head that was always flopping around on the verge of unraveling. She wore the same shade of bright red lipstick daily. She had a mouthy and rebellious teenage girl a couple years older than me. Suzanne was funny and animated but guarded. She tolerated no bullshit. She knew how to hustle. She also taught me something that not only influenced my work ethic, but also my approach to life.

“There is always something to be done,” she told me one day when I was probably doing nothing behind the counter after the lunch rush. If you’ve finished cleaning the sandwich area, then go clean the toilets, and after you clean the toilets then organize the coffees, and after you’ve organized the coffees, find something else to do! And for the Love of God, you better stop what you’re doing the second someone walks through that door, slap a smile on your face, and greet them like it’s your momma.

“You should never have any downtime,” she told me once. So I’m just, like, always working? While this took some effort for my teenage brain to comprehend, before long, it was habit. I was busy all the time. Occasionally one of the older employees—the deadbeat musician or the angry Sewanee grad—would warm up a couple of chocolate chip cookies in the microwave for us to split, or someone would experiment with making a new, 20,000-calorie latte. But mostly, we were getting shit done.

Suzanne understood the needs of the ladies who lunched—a respectable space with an inviting staff—but more than anything she knew how to make the most of time, and the time of her employees. She was savvy, and she just might have been one of my first, non-family female role models in this way. I have worked for some powerful and terrifying women in my career, and I have loved it. They know exactly what they want and they are not afraid to tell you.

Decades later, I’d say I’m efficient. My husband would say I’m bad at relaxing. He’s not wrong. I used to have a difficult time watching movies because, as a full-time working copywriter with a creative-writing side hustle, I always felt that if I had enough down time to watch a movie, then I should be writing. Parenthood has slowed me a bit, but I am always doing something. All the time. Because time is finite.

Truthfully, though, always doing something is my way of being useful, and being useful, I guess, is my way of saying I love you. Because there truly is always something to be done—work to finish or writing to start or a house to clean or a desk to organize; a friend to check in with, children to engage, a husband to connect with; always more slack to pick up, more attention to give, more energy to share. Admittedly, it’s exhausting, but I don’t know how to be any other way. Plus, it hushes the constant thrum of noise in my mind. I guess I’m a lot more like Suzanne than I thought.

I think of Suzanne from time to time when I catch myself finding things to do around my house or pondering new projects when I’ve got plenty of existing ones. Would my life have turned out differently if I hadn’t gone to work at Gravity all those years ago? If I hadn’t crossed paths with her, would I be better at relaxing? Would I be less of a hustler? I don’t ever want to slow my go-get-’em spirit, but it wouldn’t be so bad to some day learn how to be one of the Ladies Who Lunch.