When I started my job, no one knew that my dad was ill, because we had just concluded all the treatment we could hope for and so it didn’t come up. I wanted to be professional and keep everything zipped up. But because my dad had a scare in my first few months there, I ended up bursting into tears at work and told like an entire floor my life story. Later that week, my boss came to my office and told me her dad passed away from cancer right before grad school and it was awful because she wanted to tell someone but she had just started. She blushed furiously for the entire story (not a slam, but she is one of those white ladies who gets flushed whenever the topic gets hot), so I know she was overclempt when she was telling me, she was opening up, but she decided she would deal with it by telling me this in case I felt that too. (She never explained it as such; I just understood her intention and her making herself available in case I needed to talk at work.) It was an extraordinarily kind gesture. She and I don’t really talk anymore, but on occasion, run into each other and every time, I have the feeling that she manages to impart with a sense that she genuinely cares about my well-being in a big sister/benevolent boss kind of way and that she is in my corner. People can be so generous, it really blows me away.
I suppose I should know this, since I get offered a subway seat like every day, sometimes twice in one ride. Hey macarena!(Gotta do abs.)