Generation Meh

Last month, I threw in the towel on a writing gig I’d had since 2011. I calculated that I’d filed over 400 pieces and written at least 240,000 words. I was tapped. The subject matter had ceased to be interesting to me. The pay had once been lucrative, but numerous structural changes to the compensation plan over the years meant that I was, in the final months, earning less than a fifth of what I had been pulling in during my salad days. While the time I devoted to this work was never so great that prevented me from loading myself down with day jobs and client assignments at the same time, it was enough to keep me from doing other writing that better aligned with what I truly wanted to say and from art and baking and a host of creative pursuits requiring more focus than I could spare. I justified this because there was a certain cachet to this byline and it was a dependable pay check.

The phrase “Irish goodbye” describes when you just slip out of an event without letting people know. I am a pro at disappearing like this in a social context, but I struggle when it comes to work and personal relationships. I’ve toughed out jobs long after the bulk of other team members have moved on. I’ve let friendships spool out long past the time when the other person and I have grown in different directions. I would die before allowing myself to overstay my welcome as a party guest, but I’ll lurk around until they turn on the house lights at ill-fitting workplaces or in bad dynamics. I convince myself that things aren’t that bad or that they’re bad all over or I just get so caught up in grinding along that I just push all of the red flags out of mind. Then, inevitably, seemingly out of the blue to anyone from whom I have been careful to hide my unhappiness, I snap and bolt for the exit. Rarely, if ever, do I look back.

All this to say, I should probably have thrown in the towel a couple of years ago, but the fact that I threw in the towel at all and did so gracefully is progress of a sort.

This time last year, give or take a couple of days, I was hand-washing underwear in the bathroom sink of a Motel 6 next to the Dallas – Fort Worth airport after a canceled flight left me stranded. I was on edge because not only was I separated from my luggage (and the rest of my underwear), but I was also two days late to start a new job. The next morning, I bought a chai latte and an overpriced Lady Speed Stick from an airport kiosk and finally flew home.

The job turned out to be a mistake. A well-paid mistake that lasted almost nine months. I took it because I had convinced myself I needed that salary and that I missed working around other people. Maybe I was right about the former, but I was off-base about the latter. When I look back, I feel hot shame at how hard I bit my tongue during those months and how hard I was on myself for not fitting in — the same kind of shame that’s attached to poor romantic choices. I did meet good people there, but I was never going to be able to fully decode them. I knew that at the first interview. I forged ahead, because that’s what I’ve always done.

That job, however, helped me get this job. The one I gave up my prohibitively-priced west coast studio apartment and all my IKEA furniture and moved 2000 miles for. There were other reasons, too, of course. There are always other reasons.

Life is much cheaper, much quieter, much colder here. Drama is not a Midwestern value. I’ve gone apple picking, turning the literal fruits of my labor into multiple baked goods. A coworker gave me free college football tickets and I stood for hours in frigid temperatures until I couldn’t feel my feet to watch our team go 11-0 on the way to undefeated season. I’m making a spreadsheet to track my holiday spending, logging each intended gift and its status, trying to intercept the mail as it arrives. I have someone to watch $5 movies with on Tuesdays. Most days, I feel like I’ve put a string of three or four good life choices together in the last 12 months, which is quite a winning streak for someone who has moved 11 times in the last five years, someone who hasn’t owned a bed since 2010.

There’s still work to be done, of course. There is always work to be done.

At my old job, newly-hired employees would have to participate in a game that involved asking colleagues weird questions in exchange for company-branded swag. The last two times I was cornered, it was with the same question, “When you were a little kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

I wanted to be a writer back then and I am a writer today. I suppose my kindergarten self probably lacked a nuanced understanding of the labor market and forgot to specify that she wanted to be a paid writer, but, nonetheless, that’s what I am. Writing has always been a skill set I’ve leveraged to land jobs, but since the beginning of 2013, I’ve made my living exclusively via the written word, whether that’s through my own business or working in-house. Living the five year-old’s dream currently involves me taking a break from penning a piece about post-season baseball in order to rummage in my closet for socks because I can’t write another paragraph with cold feet.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I Google former colleagues and classmates from middle through to grad school. I don’t care who got married or had kids, but I do like to check out their LinkedIn profiles to see if they ended up where they (and I) thought they would way back when. Why LinkedIn and not Facebook? While I don’t belong to either platform, LinkedIn is harder to game. You can curate a seemingly picture-perfect life on Facebook or Instagram, but inventing a fanciful career from whole cloth is a much more dangerous proposition. Google tells me I came up with some successful people – lawyers, consultants, a mid-sized city mayor, lots and lots of bureaucrats, a couple of writers. I wonder if they’re happy with where they ended up, if they made strategic moves to shape their careers or just let them evolve organically? These are the kind of questions that stoke my curiosity and that LinkedIn isn’t powerful enough to answer.

Lately, I’ve been a bit down on myself because I’m not doing more of the writing that I want to be doing, that I would do even without a paycheck. I need to revisit my book proposal, I need to refine those pieces on startup culture from an outsider’s perspective, what about that essay on feminism and 90s New Country? When that fretful feeling strikes, I try to remind myself that I’m actually in a remarkably privileged place. I’m exactly — cold feet notwithstanding— where I wanted to be when I was five, 15, 25. The little girl who was annoyed with herself for starting two consecutive paragraphs with the word “suddenly” in a Halloween-themed short story she wrote in first grade grew up to be a woman who gets paid handsomely not to make that same mistake today. That’s something worth hanging onto. As to whether it’s a surprising outcome, I’ll leave it to anyone from my bygone days who looks me up late at night to draw their own conclusions.

This morning, I texted my baby sister to congratulate her on her new job.

“So excited!! About time I finally got a career. lol,” she replied.

Like a lot of young people her age, my sister has cycled through a few educational choices and service industry jobs. Last fall, she hit on something that stuck, powered through the program and was offered full-time roles by both organizations she interned with.  And while she might wonder why she couldn’t have clicked into what works for her sooner, I know she’s happy to be there now.

I heard a similar story from a Forbes reader who reached out to tell me how a piece I wrote about (not) following your passion resonated with him. After a decade trying to make it in the entertainment world and having his quality of life suffer for it, he was making a change to go back into IT and to enjoy his acting efforts without having to rely on them to pay the bills. He was happy with his decision, if a bit rueful about how long it took him to arrive at it.

The time you spend figuring out where you need to be isn’t wasted time. It might feel that way because the older, wiser you of today is judging your more youthful self, a self who had less information, fewer life experiences and different priorities.  He or she wasn’t slowing you down, but trying to find a path to today without much of a map. The further you get from that person, the more difficult it becomes to understand his or her motivations, but that younger you was doing the best he or she could under the circumstances. Believe that. In another few years, today’s you will seem equally quaint by your future self’s more evolved standards.

You weren’t ready to be who you are today five years ago. Those years were an investment, not a write-off. Enjoy the ROI. Skip the guilt.

“Today is the worst day of the year. Blue Monday, the third Monday in January,” a man announced on the bus yesterday morning. He was wearing a safety vest. He went on to tell us that Blue Monday was a marketing angle cooked up by the British travel industry to sell more vacation packages to the Caribbean.

“Today is blue for me because the liquor store I like doesn’t open for another two hours,” he chuckled. “I never really get drunk. I just like a little something to make the day go faster,” he explained, maybe anticipating the silent judgment around him.

There was no reason for me to be having a Blue Monday, but I was. Someone told me recently that I always seem dissatisfied and I can’t really argue. It’s not a dissatisfaction born of having my sky-high expectations dashed by subpar restaurant meals or rude customer service people. It’s not even a dissatisfaction with myself. I’m not fretting about dry skin or vanity pounds. It’s an elemental sort of uneasiness with how I’m traveling through the world.

If you don’t know what you truly want, nothing will satisfy you.

Right now, I’m getting paid a lot of money to do what it is I do best (aside from making pizza). I’m living in a great city. I have a stable personal life and I can walk out my door and, in seven minutes, be eating gluten-free waffles. It’s not that I take these good things for granted, it’s that my mind seems hellbent on not giving itself a break and instead drifts to the non-good or less-good thing (my biological clock, my-soon-to-expire passport) and stalls out there. And I don’t know how to stop it from doing that or stop the guilt that comes from scanning for danger instead of basking in appreciation.

I do know that I suffer from a nagging feeling that there is always something left undone. I can write a piece I’m proud of that gets lauded and then go to the gym and then eat a lemon tart, but as I fall asleep, I’ll remind myself that I forgot to do laundry or pluck my eyebrows. There is always the anxious hostess part of my brain who won’t sit down at the table with everyone else and just keeps flitting around checking on how people are doing and asking them if they need a refill or another napkin. That part never relaxes or puts her feet up.

“When I find out what I want, I’m gonna let you know.”

– Breakfast at Tiffany’s

This is a tiring way to be. This is a feeling that dogs you when you wake up and when you fall asleep, as you’re working, or eating an aforementioned lemon tart. It makes a lot of days feel like Blue Mondays. Even when you know the concept has no substance behind it, you still let it bring you down and you get frustrated at yourself for falling into that marketing trap.