I am not as hard-working as my co-workers, who sometimes pull 20-hour shifts to make sure no customer has to miss out on a midnight hamburger. I am not as smart as our manager-turned-engineer, who learned how to fix all the machines, so we didn’t have to call a mechanic. I am not as organized as those who predict and order the ingredients for thousands of customers a week — customers who wait in the wings, ready to scream, throw drinks, and use racial slurs over a lack of ketchup.

These things are skills. There are different types of labor, and just because we treat the work done by marginalized people as worthless doesn’t mean that's true. And if you think you are better than those people because you work in retail or organize files, you are wrong.

For me, my time at McDonald's was invaluable. Yeah, I never want to scoop fries or make burgers again, but I learned something more important: I started to chip away at my arrogance. I challenged the ways I dehumanized people because of their jobs. I stopped equating my dislike of big, shitty companies with dislike of their foot soldiers. I developed more empathy.

And if that is supposed to be an embarrassing blip on my résumé, I really don’t get it.