Helping and making sure everybody sees you being helpful
People will call you tall at 5'8 if you work in senior living. the important thing is to stay humble about it
I think people with narcissistic tendencies can do very well in the caregiving and customer-service professions, so long as theose tendencies are properly managed.
I have a number of narcissistic tendencies. In disclosing this, I hope the reader thinks to himself, “What a charming, candid disclosure of what can after all be only a little and eminently forgiveable fault.”
I also prefer to think primarily about myself in the context of my professional life, because I am very anxious not to write down a lot of whimsical anecdotes about the “fun” things residents say and do, to sketch personalities and share homespun wisdom and turn myself into Mitch Albom.
People like to congratulate you when you say you work with children or the elderly. But if you say you work with people your own age, no one has a very strong reaction one way or the other. I think it is better to take a square look at one’s own narcissism, one’s desire to appear special and young and strong by default, than to mistake working with a particular age group for a virtue.
I work in the Activities department of a large senior-living corporation. I drive, I put up and take down fliers, I issue reminders, maintain confidences, I set the evening movie schedule, twice a week I lead a seated exercise class, I am responsible for a number of keys, I help to manage the bistro; in this way and in several others I am very much like François Vatel:
The maître d’hôtel, superintendent of chefs and household staff, acted as the public face and temporary repository of his master’s honor, and was responsible for making all arrangements necessary for convenience, comfort, and prestige. He was master of all servants except himself and very nearly not a servant at all. His role was not to absorb barked instructions and turn them into repetitive acts of obedience, as was the lot of a lower-ranked servant, but to act as if he were his own master in absentia, to think as he might think, to act as he might act, to anticipate and contrive on someone else’s behalf. The task of the maître d’hôtel was therefore doubly difficult: first, he must successfully twin himself, and once that impossibility was achieved, he must teach one of those selves to think like a master of servants, and then teach the other to take orders from the first.
When my sense of dignity is well in order and I feel myself on a stage in the hallways I take great pride in being approachable. If I see a piece of trash on the ground, I sink down to retrieve it in grand humility. If nobody is there to see and admire me as I do it, I might wait until the moment becomes more opportune.
Once, when I was straining to replace the big wall calendar by the elevator bank: “Look at him, with his long arms!”
Once, carrying two grocery bags from the car into the lobby (each bag containing only a single grocery): “So strong!”
