Retail therapy: how a seasonal holiday job humbled me

Working at Bloomingdale’s gave me a fire to bring another level of my “A” game to my career and how I approached it. It was more than teaching. It was about learning. It was more than scholarship, it was about finding the humanity in the work.

It is an ebb-and-flow of becoming, of creating various communities, of being welcomed and welcoming others.

On a practical level, I made sure that I prepared for every engagement in my job search, presented well at campus visits and paid attention to every detail of the interview process.

In some karmic way, by working in retail, I told the universe that I could sacrifice and challenge myself to enter into another phase of who I am. Once I surrendered ego about where I was supposed to be in my life, and the amount of money I should garner; the world shifted and I saw career as phases of blossoming your gifts and talents in various spaces and tasks.

Last September, I started at NYU as a clinical professor in Liberal Studies teaching writing. In about a week, I will have completed my first semester at NYU.

In addition, I just completed a trailer for a multimedia digital humanities project that I am working on called, Orisa in the Ghetto. This showcases my entrepreneurial, media work and academic lens.

Along with learning the landscape at NYU, I am on the other side of an emotional presidential election where students had many questions that I simply could not answer. However, I smile at the long work days because when I am elbows deep in grading papers or exchanging theory with colleagues, I tap into the grace shown to me on the floor of a purse section of an upscale department store. This time my quota is happiness.