I went in for yogurt this morning.

School is out, it is summer, the city is half empty as either they are on vacation or have gone home, and the store had a girl in it stacking shelves who could not have been more than seventeen. The first thing I felt, before any thought arrived, was pride. Look at her, seventeen and already doing the work. Good for her. It came warm and immediate, for a girl I had never seen before and probably will never see again.

Then, maybe a second later, I noticed how she was standing.

Posture of someone who would rather not be seen doing the thing she was doing, doing everything so carefully so she makes the least sound possible, so she wouldn’t draw attention. I read it instantly as embarrassment. Shame, even. And the moment I decided it, I was no longer looking at her. I was looking at me.

The shame was not coming off her. It was coming off a sixteen-year-old version of myself, and I had just reached back twenty years and stuck it on her.

My first job was a car wash at sixteen. After high school, I went on to building sites, plumbing first, digging trenches, and dragging pipe around in the summer heat. Then tiling, which was worse, because the tiles sat on the ground floor and the job was on the fourth, and so was the glue, and so was the water, and all of it went up on my back and in my hands, all day, every day. After that I waited tables in a bar.

The whole time, across all of it, I was ashamed.

I had decided somewhere that this was low work, beneath whatever it was I was supposed to be becoming. I would be hauling a sack of glue up four flights with my shirt stuck to me, and some part of me would quietly log it as proof I had failed, though if you had asked me failed at what, I could not have told you.

It took twenty years and a teenager I will never meet to realize the work was never wrong. It was honest and decent. Most of it was hard in a way a lot of people genuinely cannot do, including the version of me that resented it while doing it perfectly well.

Holding a yogurt like an idiot, I noticed the pride came first, free and unfiltered. Then my own history surfaced and painted shame across a girl who, when I finally looked at her properly, was still angled into the boxes. Still uncomfortable, but I had no way of knowing why. She could have been bored, tired, pissed off about being inside on a sunny day, or any of a hundred ordinary reasons a sixteen-year-old looks as if she would rather be elsewhere.

I could feel proud of her in half a second. I have never once managed to feel it for the boy carrying tiles up the stairs, who I actually knew, who was me. Instead, I reached back, took his shame, and tried to paint it on her.

I think a fair amount of what I called humility over the years was really contempt turned inward, replayed so long I stopped noticing it. I could give grace to her without effort. It has taken me half a lifetime to start offering the same kindness backward to the kid hauling buckets of glue up four flights of stairs, and I’d be lying if I said I was done.