Life After College - Part 2

                 Now on the surface, it might not be extremely apparent why getting laid off would be a good thing.  It has left me with little money saved for rent.  I got severance, which added a month or two to the fuse before “making it on my own” blows up in my face.  I got unemployment, which could add a few months on top of that.  There was the fact that I was miserable at work, so the good in being free of that is clear.  But, that doesn’t change the fact that being laid off left me with a small window with which to find out what comes next.  Saving money for the adventure I’d dreamed of after college?  Back at square one, and the clock is ticking.  It took me 9 months to find a job I hated, and I had no better prospects of a job I’d like better.  So, you could say that I was back to the middle of senior year, in need of a job, this time with the pressure of impending financial implosion on top of it.

                Yet as a left the China Basin for the last time, I smiled.

                Somewhere in the darkness of those final weeks I was working there, a small light was born in my soul, even as it was being crushed by my situation.  One night I was lying in bed, trying to avoid thinking about work.  And honestly, if you were to ask me to pin point the thought that started it all, I couldn’t.  I was half asleep, and all sorts of random thoughts were floating through my head.  One of those thoughts, my brain latched onto.  And in that daydreaming way we have when near sleep, I started building, semi-consciously.  I thought I was just building a dream.  A dream of how to keep other undergraduates from experiencing what I had just gone through.  A dream of a resource I wish I could have had, and wished I had right now.

                My sleepy mind took a step back to look at what it had built, and laughed at itself.  I wasn’t an entrepreneur or a social activist: I wasn’t the type to make a website.  Where had any of this come from?  And then I looked closer, and I was like, “Yo...yoo...YOOOO!”  This shit could actually work!

                Then I shook my head, and went back to sleep.  I resisted the urge to get up and write the idea down.  I told myself, if it is as great of an idea as you think, it will still be great in the morning.  But when I woke up, my mind began running on the idea immediately.  I started to flesh it out.  “Okay, it’s going to be a website, and it’s going to function like this…and in order for it to function like this it is going to need this”. 

I got to work, and instead of taking notes on my sales conversations, I was scribbling ideas down in my notepad.  I did this for almost 3 days before I told my mom about it.  I think part of me understood what this idea meant to me, whether it had potential or not.  I was like someone who had been abused, and found a kitten.  And in that kitten I saw a chance for the redemption of my soul.  I saw a way to rebuild myself from the ashes of my battered psyche just from the act of nurturing something pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to ruin my certainty that what I was nurturing was pure and good.  I didn’t want anybody to tell me my kitten was really just a stuffed animal, transforming what had been pure into a sad parody of nurturing, further evidence of how hopeless my case really was. 

                I wanted to hold onto that feeling of purity so badly, but eventually I had tell my mom, show her this spark that had been born in me.  And to my immense relief, she told me that it was real.  But she told me that the true beginning of making this idea real was to share it, to create a community around it.  And I curled up around my spark protectively, instinctively.  I couldn’t bring it outside.  Not yet.  I still wasn’t convinced, and I couldn’t take the chance.  This spark was what I lived for.  It was how I got through the days.  I could stomach a day of work if it meant I could come home and scribble more ideas down in my afternoons.  “What were the key questions the survey would ask?  You could search by these categories, but what would be the potential options within those categories?”  No, I couldn’t risk that joy, small as it was.

                Then, a week after the spark was born, I was laid off.

                It was like the monster that had held me captive, the real monster I was hiding this spark from, just let me go.  I’d been hobbled, and suddenly I was free.  Free to stand, to stretch my mental muscles.  Free to roll the shoulders of my swagger.  Free to trust myself again.  And all my instincts were telling me one thing: go for it.

                And that’s what I decided to do.  I wasn’t going to try to find another job that paid me well enough to say I was young and successful.   I wasn’t drinking anybody’s Kool-Aid but my own.  Maybe I wouldn’t be able to save enough money to live abroad for a year like I had hoped to do.  Maybe I’d be foregoing some adventures.  But, at least I’d be foregoing them for another adventure.  At least I wouldn’t be sacrificing any more of my present for dreams of the future.  

                It was time to share this spark with the world.  It was time to make it real.

                But, how the hell was I supposed to do that?     

Life After College - Part 1

              It has been a long journey these past eight months since graduation, so I feel like it is finally time to sit down and document it in some way.  If you read any of the essays that I wrote leading up to graduation, and into that summer, you will know how I was feeling.  I felt a tremendous amount of pressure to find a job.  This pressure was unique in that I think I gathered the weight from different sources than others, but I think that the general pressure is one that all undergraduates share upon graduation.  

 

Personally, mine came in part from my prospects.  Either I found a job and started providing for myself immediately, or I would have to ask for someone to pay for a plane ticket to get me across country to the only family I had available that I thought could handle taking me in.  The pressure also came in part from a perceived lack of time.  There were things I wanted to get done by a certain time before life got too serious, my duties too heavy, and I didn’t have time to screw around.  The longer it took me to find a job, the longer it took me to save the money I needed to do the things I wanted to do before I had I jumped back on my career arc of academia. 

There was an air of desperation about my job search, so when I broke through before the other shoe dropped, so to speak, at the end of summer right before my free housing was about to run out, I couldn’t have been happier.  I thought to myself, “I did it.  I pulled a fast one on the corporate world”.  They didn’t know that I had no plans to stay, and that I was only joining to squeeze some money out of them so that I could do something cool before going back to school.  Somehow I had finally talked my way into a position that I had never planned or prepared to do in college.  I was going to be white collar, middle class on my own by 22.  Young and successful.  I let out a breath that I had been holding for an entire school year.

I get into the company, and I’m excited.  I’m ready to soak up everything, be great at my job, and bring creativity to it that they had never seen: I was going to Shake-Things-Up!  It’s an inside sales job, so they start talking about the art of the sale, controlling the conversation, overcoming objections…I’m like, it’s a game, and I’m going to be great at it!  All through training, there was nobody better.  Every game, every role play, every test of product knowledge, I was killing it.  And so management start to leave little bread crumbs in my mind.  “Hey, with your pedigree, if you kill it here you’re the type we like to promote.”  “You got all the skills to be as good as the best guy here.  Listening to him, and listening to you, there’s no reason.”  I was the chosen one, and it felt good.  Felt right.  I got my first paycheck, and I go get some clothes, a watch, some earrings…Life was pretty damn good!

And then the game ended.

I get into on the phones, go live, and I realize…these are real people that I’m talking to.  I’m having trouble asking them for money because I believe their objections.  I’m perceptive, I understand people, and I can’t say that all of them are going to get good use out of the product.  I realize that nobody around me is telling the truth.  I remember talking with a co-worker about how much we hated the phones, and I said I didn’t like lying about discounts, and she said, “Those lies are ok, I mean you have to”.  And I was like, damn even you?  This was business?  This was what the incentive structure required us to do?  Red flags started jumping up.

But management was good, they stayed in my ear.  The whole environment played on my pride, and I didn’t like doing worse than my peers.  I was the chosen one at first, and now I was dead last.  When it was a game, I played it better than everyone.  When it became real, I felt too much and couldn’t treat it as a game.  I didn’t want to fail, so I spent months struggling to make myself see the situation as a game again, to get back to winning, like I was supposed to.

And then I started to look bigger picture.  I started to think, I have had this same conversation now for the past few months.  I’ve made a 100 calls a day, talked for over 2 hours a day, having the same 10 minute conversation over, and over, and over again.  People did this for how long?  They worked within one company, made a career, made a life out of perfecting this one, stupid, inane conversation?  And of these, a lucky few were given the chance to become management, where they could convince other people to find it within themselves to perfect this one, stupid conversation.  There would be the glory of getting your team to drink the company Kool-Aid, after being there long enough to know full well what terrible chemicals were really in it.  Once there, someone would feed you the Kool-Aid that if you toughed it out for long enough, and a spot happened to open up, you could finally climb out of the drudgery of middle-management to the rarefied air of upper management.  There, at least, the decisions were abstract enough that you could get back to using your brain to solve abstract problems.  There, maybe, your intelligence would be required once again.

I started looking at the bigger picture of corporate life in general.  Two weeks of vacation each year for the rest of your life.  40 to 50 hours a week, if not more, spent doing something that was either mildly engaging or downright soul-sickening.  And finally by this past December I realized, yo, I don’t want to do this anymore.

But I can’t leave the pay check, I need it for my rent, or I’m right back to flying across the country hoping for extended family to take me in while I lick my wounds.  I didn’t want to have to say, “Life in the big city, couldn’t make it.”  So I dragged myself to work each day, and frantically searched for another job.  IAtfirst all I could seem to come across where sales positions.  I interviewed half-heartedly for a few, hoping that once I got inside I would see something different, something better.  All of the people seemed cool, the companies on the rise, said their sales culture was actually enjoyable, and the opportunities for money were through the roof!  And all I could seem to hear was, “Do you drink Kool-Aid?  Do you?” 

I looked into other corporate jobs, and it was more of the same.  Entry level PR, “Kool-Aid?”  Entry-level marketing, “Kool-Aid?”  I was getting desperate.  I would sit in front of my computer fighting the urge to just quit and go home so I didn’t have to spew out the nonsense that was required of me to one more customer who didn’t want to hear it.  It had taken me almost a year to find my first job, but I needed this one by tomorrow.  By yesterday. 

It was probably one of the lowest times of my life.  I wanted to curl up inside my head, pull the curtains on my awareness, and sleep-walk through this phase of my life until I could find a way to be free.  I felt like my plastic personality at work was bleeding over into the rest of my life…my mind was caught in muck, and I couldn’t remember how to relate to people, how to have the energy to care.  Things that came naturally were drifting away…And I thought to myself, “Is this what becoming an adult is?  Is this all that is left in life?” 

And then an amazing, wondrous thing happened. 

I got laid off.