After spending an exhausting summer working on a goat farm in rural Spain, I then decided to hop on over to Italy with my girlfriend as a treat. I scored a utopian, non-paying job with a Brummie and her lovely Italian husband in their quaint little country house, excited to see what the rest of the summer would have to offer working for them.
As it happens, she was the worst person I had ever met.
Even reflecting back on my time with her, my fight or flight instinct is triggered. I started writing down a list of the horrendous things that she did to bring down the people around her so that I could process my thoughts in the form of an article, but even looking at my notes now, I have over 900 words of bullet points that cannot be woven into complete sentences, and as such, shall forever remain living in my PTSD-filled head, rent free.
Not only did she spend her time with us belittling Wales, homosexuality, the working class, disabled people, foreign people, the work we did and all of the lovely Italians around her, but she didn't acknowledge for a single second how horrendous all of this made her.
I had never met anybody so triggering before, and I pray that I never do again.
Thankfully, my girlfriend and I have since left the house and are settled back in Wales, where we did some small Googling on her and realized that everyone else finds her awful, too. So, you win some, you lose some, I guess.
Personally, I learnt a lot about myself working for her. It happened to be as educational as it was traumatizing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
1. I don't need to try and prove my own worth to people who make it their full-time profession to belittle me and my culture.
2. I now know how to mask pure, seething hatred when anything I say could get me thrown out into the middle of nowhere.*
3. Patience!! (Especially when someone spends three hours demoting your sexuality and heritage)
4. I can take refuge in the fact that I will never be that type of person.
5. I can add anything at all to Welsh Cakes, and they will always taste good.
6. How to dig a banging trench and work under unbearable conditions
7. That actually I am SUCH a tolerant person
8. The importance of reflection in order to process traumatic events
9. How to stand up for myself in situations where before I would absolutely have wavered
10. That sometimes, people deserve to have rotting bananas stuffed behind their wardrobes.
And so, I guess it wasn't all bad, after all.
*Which happened, in the end.
