The Face I Held Together While the Repair Fell Apart
A customer once told me I was the calmest man she had ever met. I thanked her. I did not tell her the truth, which was that I had been up since four with a sick dog and a bad night, and the calm she was admiring was something I had put on that morning like a clean shirt. I want to talk about that today, because there is a kind of work that does not show up on any invoice, and almost nobody names it, and over forty-five years it has cost me more energy than any physical part of this job. In 1983, a sociologist named Arlie Hochschild wrote a book called The Managed Heart. She had been studying…
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