30 Before 30

by Marina Shifrin

  It’s 4:30 a.m. and I’m at work. I work for an awesome company that produces news videos. For almost two years I’ve sacrificed my relationships, time, and energy for this job. And my boss only cares … about quantity and how many views each video gets. So I figured, I’d make ONE video of my own. To focus on the content instead of worry about the views. Oh, and to let my boss know … (dance break). I quit! I QUIT. I’m gone.

  If my life were like a movie, I would’ve posted my video to the company website, flipped everyone the bird, and boarded the first flight back to the U.S. But I couldn’t do that, not to Jerry. Even though our lovely friendship had turned into something vile, I didn’t want to hurt him or cause him to lose his job—which he probably should’ve considering I wasn’t the last woman he manipulated with his power.

  I titled the video “An Interpretive Dance for My Boss Set to Kanye West’s ‘Gone,’” and uploaded it to my YouTube channel under the unlisted setting. I sent a private link to my parents, a couple of friends, and two equally discouraged coworkers. Fewer than ten people. Within a day it had almost one hundred views.

  Back at work, Jerry still wouldn’t meet with me. Short of not showing up anymore, I was running out of options for quitting. I began to wonder if he was planning to fire me.…

  My last graveyard shift marked exactly one month without alcohol for me. (It also happened to be the last day I’d ever work for Jerry, but I didn’t know that at the time.) I decided to break my drinking fast in order to celebrate surviving the shift. I brought a bottle of Jack Daniels to work, waited until my last stories were uploading, and poured it into three red cups. One I left on my desk. One I gave to Michael.

  “Shit,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I know.”

  One I took over to Jerry. It didn’t feel right, drinking whiskey without him. I couldn’t separate the smell from the way his one eyebrow would raise when he was about to say something mischievous. Or how he made me feel smart and interesting. Or how crowded bars melted into the background when he and I were talking. I missed our friendship regardless of how twisted it was.

  “Whiskey?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said. And he smiled at me. A slow, warm, genuine smile. The way he’d smile at me when I told him all my kooky ideas or made fun of his cynical worldview. He probably thought it was a peace offering. We clicked plastic cups and each took a sip without breaking eye contact.

  Michael and I got off our shift a little early and decided to see off Peter and Charlotte, who were leaving Taiwan for good. Their cab was coming in the early hours of the morning and we were all going to stay up until it did. Charlotte ran from room to room, packing last minute items while Peter, Michael, and I drank and smoked—complaining about work the entire time.

  At about four or five a.m., the cab came, and we helped them drag their suitcases to the curb. Michael and I gave them big hugs and watched as they pulled away. A small pit formed in my stomach. “Go with them,” it whispered. It felt as if Peter and Charlotte were driving out of the hurricane, while I was facing toward it.

  “Food?” Michael asked.

  “Food,” I answered.

  We got in a cab, or maybe we walked, the night begins to get hazy at this point. I remember we ate at one of those places where you order at the window and sit on the street. You get a plastic bag of noodles that you dump into a container of soup, and then you mix the two together to create the most satisfying drunk breakfast you’ll ever eat. All for a dollar. At some point during drunk breakfast, Michael and I decided it’d be good to watch the sunrise from his roof. He was one of those “one more” people when it came to drinking, and unfortunately, so am I. When you get two “one more” people together, the drinking only ends when one of you blacks out, makes out, or passes out.

  Maybe it’s because my endorphins spiked, or the overwhelming beauty of the quiet city, but this next part of the night is vividly scorched into my brain. We sat in two plastic chairs on his roof and watched the sun sneak over the horizon. Michael began to talk about how abhorrent the graveyard shift was, and then, unexpectedly, he burst into tears. Loud, heaving sobs.

  “It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair,” he repeated, crying into his chest. All these men and their tears! I grabbed the bottle of whiskey and took a giant swig. The kind of swig you see in the movies, when you think, They must’ve replaced the alcohol with juice because no one can drink that much without puking. It did taste like juice. Apple. I rubbed Michael’s back, trying to get him to calm down.

  Then I remember walking down his stairs, giving him a hug goodbye. “We made it out alive,” I whispered in his ear. There was a cab and that’s it. That’s all I remember.

  I woke up at six p.m. the next day—not in my apartment. Without a clue of where I was or how I got there. There were Band-Aids on the insides of my arms, and my first thought was that I’d tried to kill myself. Then I realized they were covering up IV holes. There were tattered men lying around me, also hooked up to IVs. There were nurses checking stats, a desk, and not much else. I slowly got up and floated to the small front desk. I had no idea how to say, “I fucked up, huh?” in Mandarin, so I just swayed wordlessly. It was clear that they didn’t speak English because they silently handed me a plastic bag with all of my belongings and a bill. The bill, by the way, was $20. I still don’t know what that place was. Hospital, maybe?

  I went outside and grabbed a cab home. The sun was setting and the air felt unchanged. An entire day had disappeared from under me, and everything felt the same. Instead of feeling shame, as is customary when I’ve put myself in a potentially life-threatening situation, I felt nothing. Death had sniffed around my body and all I could think was: nothing.

  I got home, plugged my dead burner phone into the wall, and noticed there were about eight missed texts, most from my landlord, Sue, and a couple from some coworkers I was supposed to meet for dinner. Guess they didn’t think to call the local hospitals. I promptly threw up, showered, and then headed out to meet up with my coworkers, who, by the way, would make awful detectives in a missing persons case.

  “This job is killing me,” I told them in between sips of ice water. Michael was there to corroborate.

  We gossiped about work and what we wanted to do with our lives. I made fun of myself for drinking too much and told them we should all leave to start our own company—a conversation every single downtrodden employee has with her coworkers at one point or another.

  At about 4:30 a.m. we all went our separate ways. I decided to kill some time by walking home because my body hadn’t adjusted from the nightshift yet. I put on “Gone” and popped my ear buds in.

  I walked down Ren’ai Road, arguably the prettiest road in Taipei, and marveled at its stillness. There’s something tender about an enormous and busy road lying dormant. It’s similar to seeing a dog shaved like a lion; ironically poetic and slightly sad. As I walked through the empty lanes, I felt like the only living girl in Taiwan. A twenty-five-year-old girl: negligent with my body, thoughtless with my mind, careless with my career.

  I turned onto Xinsheng South Road, nearing my apartment. The neon lights of the long-closed stores danced off the palm trees. The security guard on the corner slept, like he did every single morning. The peaceful night brought everything into focus. I had to destroy our relationship in order to preserve myself. I pulled out my phone and texted Michael:

  Marina: I’m going to post it.

  Michael: Burn that motherfucking bridge down.

  I posted “An Interpretive Dance for My Boss Set to Kanye West’s ‘Gone’” that day. It hit 19,783,020 views before it was pulled off YouTube.

  14

  BECOME FAMOUS

  Before posting the video, I washed my hair, made my bed, and invited fame into my life. Just like that, like an honored guest I was eagerly anticipating.

  Quitting on YouTube started out as a joke idea, created out of ludicrous fantasies, but it became a reality the night I woke up
in the hospital. Something inside of me broke. It was clear that I wouldn’t be able to work in the same, blindly trusting way ever again. I had to be smarter, tougher, and more calculated with my career. I vowed to never again allow a poisonous work environment to seep into my bloodstream. A career rebirth was on the horizon. Cue: fame.

  My craving for fame began after I saw what it could do for small-time writers. My life in digital media was entangled with the need for views, clicks, and likes. The more views my animations received, the more it meant I was doing a good job. The more visitors my blog attracted, the more it meant I was succeeding as a writer. The internet was building a vapid infrastructure of faves and likes; my salary and emotional stability became dependent on it. I went from a generic attention whore to a full-blown attention addict.

  “You need to add more boobs to the thumbnail,” Jerry once said while looking over my shoulder. “It will get people to click.” I was working on a story about a Ukrainian woman who had demolished her body with plastic surgery in the hopes of looking more like Barbie. I added four more sets of breasts to the thumbnail, and our view count jumped to over 700,000, making me an official member of the Capitalizing Off Women’s Insecurities club. It made me feel powerful and masculine, like Jerry.

  The benefit of writing for a big company is that there is an established voice that’s going to make money. All you need to do is show up on time and write in the voice of the company. When you write for yourself, you have the opportunity to choose your own words, your own voice, but the getting paid thing gets a lot trickier. In short: you have to be known to get paid.

  The day my Modern Love story was published in The New York Times, I was certain I’d made it. It was something written on my own, for myself, and The New York Times published it. There’s a current of excitement that runs through your body when you stumble on something you know you can do for the rest of your life. Especially when that something requires little more than a laptop and a room.

  You begin to envision an existence where you work from your small apartment, occasionally stepping out for coffee at a charming café. The only schedule you watch closely is your menstrual one, and when people ask what you do, you can giggle and say, “Oh, I work for myself.” I wanted to giggle and say that.

  After The New York Times article agents and publishers reached out to ask about me. “What are you working on?” “Do you have a novel?” “Any samples?” I didn’t have any of those things so I utilized the fake it ’til you make it mentality. Maybe if they gave me a week, I could come up with some sort of writing to prove my worthiness. “Yes, it’s true,” I’d smugly tell future panel moderators, “I wrote my first film in a week. You have to rise up to the opportunities handed to you.” But that’s not how anything works. Good writing takes effort, time, dedication. It took me fifteen years to go from writing about Kevin in my diary to writing about him in The New York Times. The agents and publishers eventually grew disinterested due to my lack of samples and quickly moved on.

  Only one agent, Tamara, seemed serious about working with me. “What kind of books would you like to write?” she asked over the phone.

  “Essays,” I told her. It was the only writing I knew how to do. Well, that and credit card deals, or topical animations, but essays were my favorite.

  “You can’t do essays,” she told me, almost too quickly. As if she had known I was going to say “essays” and was prepared to intimidate the idea out of me. I was confused. I’d just published an essay in The New York Times. Ever heard of it, Tamara? What more could you want?

  “How many Twitter followers do you have?” she asked.

  I quickly pulled up my Twitter account and looked at the number. It was fairly high. “Almost two thousand,” I confidently told her.

  “Oh, so basically nothing,” she said. I winced.

  “It’s nearly impossible to sell a book of essays from an unknown writer. No one knows who you are so they’re not going to want to read about you,” she told me. Ah, she had me there.

  It makes sense, of course. Publishers want to buy a book that they can easily sell. One New York Times article does not a writer make.

  Tamara, like the other agents who were initially interested in me, disappeared shortly after she appeared. I was left with this deep pit in my stomach, like I’d missed a chance to succeed.

  According to comedy lore, Donald Glover got his first writing job (on 30 Rock) because he had two scripts and multiple sketches ready to go when someone important asked if he had any writing samples. I felt like this was my Donald Glover moment and I blew it.

  But there’s no such thing as a big break—just little pushes forward in the endless pursuit of success. If being published in Modern Love didn’t generate enough attention for me to leave my job and become a full-time comedy writer, then I was going to fight for more. Shortly after my conversation with Tamara, I invited fame to come into my life using a method handed down to me from my mother.

  Olga spent most of my childhood hopping from one addiction to the next. There was the year that she was obsessed with the Atkins diet; our dinners were just slabs of steak with cheese for dessert. Then she was addicted to Olympic swimming; I came home to pictures of Lenny Krayzelburg posted all over the walls. After that, of course, was the self-help book compulsion; the whole family developed an unusually sunny outlook on life. It felt like we were normal for a moment. That addiction only lasted a summer, but it was my favorite. I still fondly remember reading The Secret which teaches you to manifest things by making physical and mental room for them—I was desperate enough for fame to give The Secret a try.

  During the overnight shift, I spent my sleepless days cleaning up my internet footprint. Deleting old photos, college videos, and anything that didn’t make me look like the fun, laid-back professional that I’m not. I ripped my stand-up videos from YouTube and edited them down to forty-five-second digestible clips—my best jokes from my best shows. I created and designed my own website (the one I still use today) with links to everything I was proud of: marinavshifrin.com. (That’s marinavshifrin.com.)

  I began sharing more photography on Instagram. I tweeted one to two jokes a day, so that if anyone scrolled through my feed, they’d know that I was a good joke-writer. I wrote flowery Yelp reviews and even won Yelp’s “Review of the Day” right before my video went viral. (There is a very entertaining comment thread in which Yelpers try to figure out if I was a bot created by Big Advertising.)

  Every inch of my social media was meticulously curated with things I am most proud of. I was constructing a hologram of my life and damn did it have a nice sheen to it.

  Editing the video of my dancing around the office was an exercise in observation. I watched countless viral videos, trying to figure out what they had in common.

  Pooling all knowledge together, I put my mediocre-to-poor editing skills to work. I made sure my video was under two minutes long, knowing that most people wouldn’t watch anything longer. I began with a close up of my face, staring right into the camera and through the screen. It was the familiar locked eye-contact that most YouTubers use, but this was a little a different. Instead of the cheerful “Hi, guys,” I wordlessly stared, adjusting the camera as if something important was about to happen. I added scrolling text so that those who couldn’t watch with sound would still know what was happening. Exactly one third of the way through the video, when viewers’ attention would naturally wane, I added a little cliffhanger: “Oh, and to let my boss know … (dance break).” This kept people watching until the end, which ensured their views were counted. I don’t want to brag, but it’s nearly a perfectly constructed viral video.

  Want to hear a secret? I never told anyone this because I thought it made me sound maniacal, like a malicious media manipulator. But now I’m older, a little more confident, and I care less about what Jerry and other lecherous men in power think of me: the video I posted, the one that got over nineteen million views, was the second video I’d created. My
previous attempt had been made a week earlier. The two videos are nearly indistinguishable. I dance in the same way, in the same places, to the same music—the only difference is, in the first video I’m wearing a gray baby-doll dress cinched at the waist with a thin red belt. My hair is down and bouncing around my shoulders, and if you play the video slowly enough, you occasionally catch a glimpse of my Ninja Turtle underwear. “You look like a slutty nineteen-year-old intern,” Rebecca said after I sent her the video.

  “I do?”

  “I can see your underwear! People are going to put screenshots of your butt on Reddit.”

  “Who? My parents? No one is going to see this,” I told her.

  “Yeah, but what if they do?” She had a point.

  Before you release anything into the world—your résumé, a photo from a night out, a long Facebook post chronicling the demise of modern-day democracy—make sure that your underwear isn’t showing, literally and metaphorically. It is perfectly okay to recruit a Rebecca for these purposes.

  So I went home and looked through my closet. Everything I owned either had holes or stains, or it was too short. Everything except for a beautiful, forest-green corduroy blazer that my stylish pen pal Amy had gifted me a month earlier. Because Amy is a New York public defender with wild amounts of confidence, I trusted that the blazer would project a similar image of maturity and grace. It was the nicest piece of clothing in my closet, and when I wore it, I too felt like a badass NYC lawyer.

  I put on the blazer, reshot the video, re-edited it, and then … made a viral video pros and cons list, probably the first and only one of its kind.

  Ultimately, my decision to make the video public came down to this: Jerry stripped me of my voice, work responsibilities, and my trust in authority figures. The morning I woke up in a hospital with the crushing disappointment of being alive, it became clear to me that there was truly nothing to lose.