Generation Meh

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  • The Art Of The Irish Goodbye

    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.

  • My Dirty Laundry

    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.

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    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.

  • How To Be A Writer When You Grow Up

    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.

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    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.

  • The Gift And Curse Of Hindsight

    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.

     

  • The Day After Blue Monday

    “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.

     

     

     

     

  • The Paradoxes Of Time Travel

    My freshman year dorm room was papered in inspirational quotes. I trawled databases of them, cut and pasted relevant ones into a Word doc, changed the font to something scripty, printed out pages and pages and then cut out each saying. I taped most of them to my closet doors. By October, at least a handful would regularly get unstuck and flutter to the floor and I’d have to smooth out the scraps of paper and reaffix them with another loop of tape. No matter how hard I try, I can only recall one of the quotes and none of the specific motivation that led me to decorating my room with them.

    Recently, I did an interview for someone’s coaching program. This happens sometimes. What made this one stand out was that the interviewer read me a couple of snippets of old GenMeh blog posts. I found myself surprised to hear words I’d written five years ago, because I don’t remember writing them five years ago and I doubt I’d write them in quite the same way today. I’m sure in the moment they felt genuine and urgent and right, just like it felt genuine, urgent and right to fill my walls with famous quotes meant to enlighten my college years. I was struck by the surety of my point of view. Age and experience, it seems, have brought equivocation or at least a little temperance.

    To think about my younger selves is to be filled with a swell of protectiveness and wonder at their vulnerability. Look at this blind newborn kitten, this foal trying to walk for the first time! In some cases, there is still a sense of shame, irrational though it may be. I feel embarrassed for these earnest iterations of myself, for her sense of style, for her black and white thinking, for naiveté that she wore like a cardboard “Kick me” sign.  Whether she was 12 or 22, she knew exactly what she wanted because she had no idea how much choice there really is in the world. They’re all me, but also not.  They’re stuck in their times and circumstances and I can’t rescue them from their bad hair and misdirected idealism and I can’t figure out how I shucked one self off to become the next. Somehow, the me who got hit by a car in seventh grade became the me who saw the inside of the Sistine Chapel who became the me who moved back in with her parents while unemployed who became the me who gets invited to a White House event. Maybe you need to be ignorant of the process for it to work.

    And while I can only remember one quote from the walls of my old dorm room, it sprang to mind this week when I was trying to sound insightful about sentences I’d written half a decade ago:

    “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

    Seems as good an explanation as any as to the relationship of the mes of yesteryear to the one of today who wishes she could take them under her wing.

     

  • On Shipping And Simplicity

    I’ve been packing. Rather, I’ve been thinking about packing. I bought boxes. I put one of them together. I put my printer in it and then promptly forgot about it for a week. I’m in the process of moving (gonna give the west coast a try) and while I don’t have much stuff, I have too much to fit in a suitcase and a carry on. I’ve pared back as much as I can, but I still have enough (extra towels and sheets, my air mattress, a sock monkey) to fill approximately three of the aforementioned boxes. These three boxes have been driving me crazy. I’m leaving my current address two weeks before moving to my new one, so where is my stuff going to live in the interim? Should I send them to my SO’s parents’ house and he’d fetch them over Thanksgiving break? Should I mail the stuff back to my own parents and live without a printer for the interim? Should I find a way to pack a yoga mat and my drying rack in a suitcase? Should I leave money with a friend to ship them to me once I’ve landed? I’ve cycled through multiple complicated options and devoted more thought than any sane person should to what to do with some discount linens from Marshalls.

    The only option I hadn’t considered was the simplest. I could ask the person I was renting from if I could send the boxes now and have her put them in a corner of the living room for me. Instead, I was losing sleep and acting like I was trying to import $2M worth of cocaine from Bogota with the DEA watching my every move.

    In layman’s terms, Occam’s Razor states that, in the absence of certainty, the simplest explanation should rule.  It’s a pretty good approach to solving life problems, too. What’s the easiest solution to your current woes that meets your needs? Start with that option before working your way up to more elaborate fixes.  Get headaches when you drink red wine? Instead of testing every varietal on the shelf to see how headache-y each makes you, opt for white instead. Problem solved. Want to lose a few lbs? Instead of joining a $100/month gym or going raw vegan right off the bat, spend a week logging your calories to gauge where you might be able to cut back. In my case, in lieu of stewing over what to do with my stuff, I should simply have sent a four-sentence email to try to solve my problem the easiest way possible.  When I finally sacked up and did it, the tenant replied ten minutes later to tell me to go ahead and mail as many boxes as I wanted.

     

    Save time and energy. Start with simple first.

     

  • Independence Days

    Last week, I had a preliminary interview with a media conglomerate for a role that sounded great on paper. I was a little surprised to get tapped because I don’t have a journalism degree, haven’t interned in a newsroom or paid my dues at The Ortonville Independent or a place like that. I worked my way up through the student journalism ranks in college. I took a little time off from writing to work in international development and have balanced freelancing and corporate work (and now entrepreneurship) for the last five years.

    The hiring manager (a senior editor) called back because the HR rep I had spoken to had forgotten to ask me about salary. He said I had a lot of experience and he didn’t want me to get deeper into the hiring process without hearing what the job paid. It wasn’t enough and we both knew it. I thanked him for his transparency and he thanked me for my frankness. I told him I was flattered to have made the shortlist out of the hundreds of applications he received.

    Five years ago, I probably would have kept pursuing that job and tried to make the salary work. I would have considered it the break of a lifetime. Now, I’m okay with taking a pass. I’ve built kind of a thing for myself and have capitalized on opportunities that have come my way and I have a good sense of what my work is worth. In letting this one go, I realized that at some point I’ve stopped looking for someone to give me my big break. I’ve stopped believing that the only way I can have more is if someone gives it to me. I’ve stopped looking for a benefactor, a patron, a champion. I’ve accepted, without really realizing it,  that if I want more, I can go get it. I have the tools and the knowledge and the experience to figure out how to get more money, more time, more experience, more life  for myself and by myself. I don’t need to wait to be chosen and to hand over the power of that choice to others. Life is much more like a lemonade stand than the senior prom.

    Recently, someone told me I was a successful adult woman and I deserved to think of myself that way and structure my career accordingly. I was making my life more difficult by denying myself this reality and the things that go with it. “You don’t need to buy a $1500 St. John suit, but you do need to get the USB ports on your Macbook fixed.” was the precise quote. I reminded myself of this after I hung up with the hiring manager. As a resourceful adult, I can afford to pass on opportunities that aren’t right, because I have the ability to create better ones for myself. There is a sense of peace in this thought.

    Generation Meh turns five years old this month. I feel like the blog and its author are growing up.

     

  • You Don’t Need To Get Better At Self Promotion, You Need To Get Better At Life

    Recently, I tweeted:

    “Everyone wants to know how you got from A to B, but they hate it when the answer is “Worked hard and had talent.”

    “I COULD give you “five easy steps to get from A to B,” but you’re gonna pitch a fit when step 1 is “Learn how to excel at being a human.”

    A couple of months ago, I watched both seasons of The Pickup Artist. I joke about hunting down Mystery and teaming up to do a book on applying PUA wisdom to the corporate world*, but the show actually provided a huge amount of food for thought. You only need to watch a couple of episodes to understand how easily taught self-promotion truly is. Take a room of hapless, dateless schlubs and give them makeovers, a few canned lines and a little training in using and decoding body language. In short order, even the most gun-shy guy among them could stroll into a club and hold a woman’s attention for 3 – 5 minutes. The fly in the ointment was that most of these guys had issues that ran deeper than being nervous around the opposite sex, so while they learned how to promote themselves like pros, they never really worked on becoming the type of well-rounded men women would continue to be interested in or engaged by after their small talk material ran out. That’s the part that doesn’t fit neatly in a 22-minute episode.

    Most of us aren’t looking for advice that includes hard work and introspection. We want a list of steps and a guarantee that if we follow them, we’ll get what we want. If you just do these three things, you can lose 20 lbs this month or get a job at Google or attract more women. No one wants to accept that there might not be a shortcut and we might not be able to achieve X, because we lack the requisite skill set or dedication. It’s uncomfortable to look inward and accept that all the tips in the world aren’t going to land us a dream job if we don’t have the qualifications, attitude and work ethic demanded by employers. It’s much easier to focus on how to massage the language of our cover letter than it is to face the fact we have to work harder and get better at our chosen craft in order to make the cut. That’s not fun or sexy or easy like scoring a cell number from a drunk sorority girl.

    If you’re not getting the results you want in life, it might not be because you suck at self promotion or lack connections, it might be because you need to work on what it is you’re attempting to promote – yourself.

     

    *Only semi-joking. Mystery should call me.

     

  • On Book Proposals And Lessons A Long Time In The Learning

    I spent most of March revising a book proposal after an editor and a literary agent cold-emailed me to ask if I had anything in the works on that front. I dusted off the proposal I wrote in 2010 and never submitted and spent a couple of days wallowing over all the water that’s flowed under my personal bridge since then. That sounds kinda tampon commercial-y doesn’t it? I’ve moved multiple times, ended up in the hospital with mono, got into a relationship, got out of it, met someone else, quit my job, started a business, spoke at NYU, etc. I could see where I was coming from at the time I wrote that proposal, but it isn’t a place I could get back to. The book I wanted to write back then wasn’t something I could see myself writing today, although I’d never trade some of the experiences I sought out as fodder for it (road-tripping across the country, anyone?). I went back to the drawing board. I looked at what I’m known for (analysis related to Millennial culture), what was missing from the current literary landscape on the subject and how my voice (pithy but informed) could fill that gap. The proposal was 17 pages long and extensively footnoted. Pedantry is my hedge against criticism and always has been.

    The reception was mixed. One party was enthusiastic and one was ambivalent. The ambivalent one loved my voice, but wanted something bigger and grander and more marketable. What else did I have up my sleeve? she wanted to know. I talked over the feedback with a confidante who urged me to set logic aside and really think about the story or stories I was passionate about telling. If I could write any type of book, what would it be? I thought on this and fired back with my  pie-in-the-sky dream projects*. Market trends and pre-existing platforms be damned. It still wasn’t the right fit for this particular contact, but I felt good about putting all my cards on the table.

    The thing is, I thought I’d already learned this lesson last summer and learned it the hard way. I thought I’d gotten my head around the fact that you don’t get what you don’t ask for, at least as it related to my personal life. I thought I had well and truly accepted that pragmatism shouldn’t always supplant desire and that not every course of action lends itself to be evaluated with a list of pros and cons. And yet, here I was being schooled all over again.

    There is almost five years’ worth of advice on this blog. And despite the fact that a helluva lot has changed since I started writing here and since I drafted that first book proposal, what hasn’t changed is my need to heed my own counsel and the reality that unlike learning to drive or tie your shoes, some lessons don’t stick the first time around.

     

    *If you ask nicely, I might just tell you what they are. Maybe even in fewer than 17 pages.