Heidi Goehmann

My very first job was at Taco Bell.

While it wasn’t my first choice as a 16 year old, there are few things that match the affection with which I look back on my time at Taco Bell.

A non-comprehensive list of the joys of teen employment at Taco Bell:

My boss, Mary, scheduled around my busy and last-minute teenage timetable and managed to show up at many, if not all, of my play performances with a hug and a sense of familial pride.
My coworkers were weird and terrible and wonderful. One of them drove me to Chicago to register for my college classes, introduced me to Wrigley Field, and reminded me not to let Chicago nightlife pass me by in all my studies.
I learned the art of dating and dumping and being able to work an 8-hour shift alongside that person through all of it.
I learned how to plan for bills first and fun second by watching others succeed and fail at it. I saved money to travel Europe, and learned how to budget for everything from toiletries to tuition.
I learned the valuable lesson that whoever does dishes gets to control the music. This is a prime power play in every area of life.
I learned that humanity can forge bonds in the strangest and simplest things - including a smile and non-judgment through the drive thru window at 2am and the steady grounding of someone’s daily trek to procure their burrito supreme for lunch.

Nostalgia is the rose colored lens of time gone by. It is both a dessert course and a ninja. Nostalgia both supports our younger selves and stealthily hides the truth in search of a moment of solid ground. It helps us honor the past, and avoid the future.

Nostalgia

/nəˈstaljə/

an affectionate, often incomplete, remembering of a time or place experienced in our past which brought to us a sense of belonging, safety, security, or grounding

The emotion of nostalgia contains both pleasure and grief, a strange mixture of happiness and sadness arising in our nostalgic moments that can be surprising. When we enter into the emotion of nostalgia, we can be swept away – the wave of yesterday begging for our attention. We have to consciously decide, like with most emotions, what we’d like to do with it, or else we might find ourselves led by it. Nostalgia says, “I miss something that was, and I want to honor that.” It also can be a half-picture, our remembrance in nostalgia rosy or tinted with only the pleasure of it, forgetting the painful bits.

Here are some crappy parts to working at Taco Bell in the late ‘90s at the age of 16.

The drains smelled horrific every 30 days or so, and someone had to clean them out…a unique horror my employers seemed to reserve for me.
For a brief period during the summer of 1996, the nerves in my fingertips lost all feeling due to switching and changing out the steam table.
The mockers! The drive-thru pranksters who thought they were endlessly clever! The incessant smoke breaks!
And let’s be honest, a person should only eat so much not-actually-Mexican-food. It’s not good for you.

Nostalgia serves us well and it can muddy the waters of our present. Psychologically, nostalgia does promote a sense of self – where we have come from, supporting where we are going. It can, for a moment, ground us in remembering something good about ourselves and our histories that might have been forgotten or set aside by the oppressive negative thoughts and experiences that come along with being human.

Nostalgia also can keep us in that incomplete place of the past, grieving what was inaccurately, with a vague sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) that can never be answered. I want to be in a place that is no longer, and likely isn’t meant to be any longer. Focusing too much on these thoughts aids my human penchant toward avoidance of what is happening in front of me now, or the hard work that needs to be put into what I might become.

Nostalgia is most dangerous within organizations. Nostalgia keeps us feeling a strong sense of stability, but it is a false bottom of stability, based on a half-reality that has passed. We use the community within the organization, the collaboration and teamwork to pass back and forth the rosy-hued half-truths of the past. The organization benefits from a sense of stability we find inside this picture. Nostalgia in organizations is a mental pat-on-the-back for a job well done. Then, in ten years the organization ends up wondering what happened, where was the growth, why are we stuck? The work of the present was traded for a picture of the past.

The dangerous side of nostalgia is harder to maintain on our own. Our reason often rushes in and defends the truth of the past too vibrantly to live there. But, we can overdevelop and live in almost any emotion too much for our own good. And so, here is a skill:

When you find yourself remembering the past, seep up that joy, friends! Remember the pieces of what has made you who you are. Remember the support and the gifts and the goodness. Then, turn to the other side of the coin, not in the negativity our strong reason-side can bring, but allow the emotion of nostalgia and the reality of what was to be held together. Note what has been, its good parts as well as its discomfort and sorrow. Note the growth, and note the growth you didn’t really want because trauma and its smaller siblings aren’t something we were intended for.

My son works at Taco Bell now, creating a family tradition we didn’t know we needed. My fridge is once again overflowing with too many hot sauce packets and his own coworkers have included him in Michigan life in their own ways. I will enjoy this turn of events and the regularity with which it brings up the wonderful moments of serving tacos to the greater Union, Missouri area with a late ‘90s sense of industry. And I will listen to his complaints of long hours, workplace shenanigans, and crabby customers, because the full picture is better, the two sides of the coin a completeness we need each day.