Can't you see that I'm a unique and special person!!

This janitor gig is driving me mad. One of the cleaning products I'm using burns my skin, through the gloves. The builiding is hot as hell, since they turn the air off when the 9to5ers leave. But most of all, my supervisor, the woman who trained me, is on my back all the time, constantly reminding me of how I messed something up.

At the last building, my manager was a white, transgender woman who was soft spoken and not very demanding. I have to think that part of the reason I don't like my new supervisor is because I don't like an older, black woman, whose spent her life as a janitor telling me what to do. I think I'm better than her! Shit, she's probably had plenty of white women telling her what to do her whole life.

Yesterday as I was reviewing the ways I could tell her off, I started thinking about toughening up. I'm so used to being in positions where I have power and agency. I need to toughen the fuck up. The other jobs I've held have been two different facilitator positions, where I had lots of power and no direct supervision. Also, in high school, I worked scooping ice cream at a store run by a white, Jewish woman whose kids I knew.

I'm so used to being treated like an individual with my own set of needs, that I don't even have the coping mechanisms to deal with being in an oppressive environment. This is an environment where expressing any difference can get you fired, where you get written up because you ran out of time, and where they show anti-union videos in training.

I need to:
1. Stop taking what she says personally.
2. Remember most people feel this level of powerlessness regularly.
3. Disconnect from negative feelings directed at her. Even if she is mean and does have it out for me, she isn't the problem.

Info about Cleanpower, the horrible anti-union company that I work for.
http://www.workerjustice.org/justice_for_janitors.htm