I learned that after an intern has organized the office supplies, mailed the letters, made the pot of tea, and procured the sandwiches for lunch for both herself and the boss, there is a lot of workday left. Not capable of simply doing nothing for the afternoon, I applied myself very industriously to looking industrious. I stacked the Post-its by size, by color, and by shape. I walked to the post office and checked the mail twice a day. I often felt nervous, my work-engine idling uncomfortably.
Things got better after I found another, smaller storage closet in the theater attic and commandeered it as my office. I took yellow legal pads in there with me and came out periodically to announce that I had made a list of all the supplies that were running low (down one legal pad since yesterday!).
“Would it be helpful for me to make a trip to Office Depot?” I’d ask.
“No, we’re fine,” my boss would say, and I’d go back to sorting pens.
Had I not received a check at the end of the summer, I’m not sure I could prove the internship really even happened.
The biggest thing I learned from wandering out into the workforce, flipping on my “available” light, and letting myself be grabbed by the first open hand that came along was this: It feels good to be chosen for something, but making a life requires making some choices yourself, too. At the very least, one ought to know what one is applying to be chosen for. I’d been so paralyzed by the prospect of deciding what to do for a summer—because what if this one job was the beginning of what I’d do for the rest of my whole life?—that I couldn’t even pick a direction. As a result, I ended up sitting in a closet for two months.
* * *
A few months after that internship and a decade and a half after I crushed my fellow first graders at spelling, I turned that childhood victory into my law school application essay. I wrote five hundred words on how exceeding expectations helps you (that is, me) win at life. Did I get into law school? Yes, I did. Did I go to law school? No, I did not. But I applied because that was what liberal arts majors without any clear career path did, and I desperately wanted a path. I needed to know that once school ended, I’d still have goals to reach for—if not grades to earn, then professional accomplishments to rack up. I wanted a ladder with rungs, a hierarchy with titles, some structure to place around my need to achieve. I was afraid to exist without succeeding; I just had to figure out what to succeed at.
It was only when the acceptance letters started rolling in that I realized what I had done. One Saturday afternoon in February of my senior year, I sat on my little plank of a dorm room bed and looked at the letters spread out on my lap, my dog-eared LSAT prep book lying on the floor under a pile of spiral notebooks and binders. I pictured three years in law school—taking tests, writing papers. That, I could imagine. I loved school. But when I envisioned my life after those three years were over—late nights scouring tiny print for loopholes, long days yelling about things in court like on Law & Order—I felt nothing. What an idiot. I’d been so shortsighted that I’d chased the nearest A+ all the way into a corner.
Shit, I thought.
Graduation was coming, and if I wasn’t going to law school, I had no plan at all.
One company was still holding recruiting meetings with students on campus. I signed up at the careers office, pulled off a great act of bullshitting magic in the interview, and convinced the recruiter from Accenture that despite my abject lack of tech experience, I was totally suited to a job as a software consultant. When I got the job offer, I told myself it was the same as grad school admittance, because it meant I had succeeded, I was chosen. I wrote letters back to the law schools: With gratitude and apologies, I must decline. . . .
* * *
As a fresh college graduate and new analyst in a consulting firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, I had to follow a prescribed set of steps: (1) Go off to training camp and learn how to code software (ha HAAAA haaaaaa, WHAT?), and (2) be dispatched with a team of more experienced consultants to a company that needs some kind of software system to improve their business. My first assignment after training was at a major bank. Let’s call it SuperBank.
Here’s what I loved about my first year on the job: the outfits. The navy suit that also looked good if you put the navy jacket over gray pants, and the tweed shift that worked with either a black cardigan or the gray jacket that came with the gray pants, and the chocolate-brown skirt that went great with everything. I owned three pairs of low-heeled pumps: navy, black, and brown faux crocodile (“mock croc,” if you will, and I did). The fact that all of these things coordinated, making them practically mistake-proof when it came to mixing-and-matching, did not prevent me from wearing one black shoe and one navy shoe to work more than once. I painted my nails neutral colors to go with my professional ensembles: clear, slightly less clear, or pale pink. One time I got crazy and did metallic beige, but I felt self-conscious about it after six hours and took it off.
It was the dawn of Dilbert. The age of cubicle culture. There was a popular book out at the time called Who Moved My Cheese? I read it, because I read every how-to-be-a-businessperson book I could get my hands on, but I couldn’t tell you today what it was about. I think there was an analogy wherein business people were mice in a maze. And the cheese was whatever they were looking for . . . money? Opportunity? The feeling of achieving something that proved you were worth the oxygen you breathed? (Maybe that was just me.)
* * *
Our project group—a mix of consultants from my company and financial specialists from SuperBank—occupied the thirty-seventh floor of the SuperBank office tower. Nose-high cubicle walls divided the floor into modular quadrants. I had to memorize people’s cube decorations to find my way to and from the elevators. There was Stephanie’s red college pennant; there was Derek’s little bendy horse he’d gotten as a Happy Meal prize because we were all in our early twenties and still often ate like children; there was the clip-on fan Adam had rigged up over his desk; turn left; there was my cube. The size of your cube indicated your station in this professional society: tiny for an analyst; less tiny for a consultant; even less tiny for a manager, plus a small extra chair for cubicle guests.
Our team was charged with testing the software that would go into all the new SuperBank ATM machines. Kicking the technological tires, so to speak. The elder consultants explained to us newbies what software testing entailed: writing scripts for scenarios wherein you imagine how a person might use the software—in our case, scripts for how a person would use an ATM machine. Then another team would use those scripts to test the ATMs, making sure everything worked, and fixing what didn’t.
I couldn’t even think of more than maybe four scenarios for what could happen at an ATM. Get money. Don’t get money. Check your balance. Deposit a check? What else was there? I tried very hard to write good scripts—I asked my coworkers to sit down and show me, time and again, how to come up with different plots for this ATM story—but I flailed helplessly when I got back to my cube. I’d stare at the phone on my desk, willing it to light up with a call from someone a few cubes away wanting to take a break and get coffee. I loved coffee breaks, but even with enough breaks to sip more caffeine than it could possibly have been healthy to consume, every workday felt sixty hours long.
I loved my coworkers, but I hated my job. Putting together outfits wasn’t enough, and often, when I got back to my little apartment each night to boil my pasta and watch Ally McBeal, I wondered, How much longer can I fake this? I suspected not much longer, but I couldn’t imagine the next page in my own script either.
* * *
I stuck with the consulting company for a few years, transferring from Charlotte to the Atlanta office when John and I got married, but I never did feel like I fit in, which is why I developed a lunchtime habit of scrolling through online job postings. I was looking at jobs over a bowl of soup one day when I saw a listing for a copywriter. Copywriter? That’s a thing? Like, a writer, but not novels or journalism? Perfect! I looked it up, a
nd sure enough, this was a real job you could get paid for. A local hospital was looking for a writer to join their in-house communications team, to craft ads making their hospital sound better than other hospitals, write brochures about various diseases, and report heartstring-yanking stories about sick children to use in fundraising campaigns. I drafted a cover letter explaining why this job was my true calling (“Having grown up in a medical household but majoring in English . . .”) and attached copies of emails I’d written at Accenture as writing samples. They hired me. I took a big pay cut, and an even bigger leap of faith, when I accepted the job.
As soon as I finished filling out my new-employee paperwork and had a moment of quiet in my tiny new office at the hospital, I opened up my box of business cards. I marveled at the title under my name: Writer.
Had I done it? Was this my destiny? Could Cheerios boxes be far away? Other questions bubbled in the back of my mind. If I were taking a class called “Career,” would this change be considered a bad grade because my salary went backward? Or a good grade, because I was doing something more aligned with my real interests? I couldn’t be sure, so I decided to grade this choice on courage and gave myself an A for bravery.
This job is where my writing career began, and it firmly fits into the category of paying one’s dues. I learned to manage an editorial calendar, to write fast on demand, and to stick to word limits. I also learned to tolerate an erratic editor prone to striking red slashes across whole pages, to throw away and rewrite copy again and again after the scope or messaging got changed by someone else, and to meet deadlines that mysteriously bounced around the calendar. (I also learned to avoid being alone in the break room with a male colleague who once looked at my wrap blouse and asked, “If I pull that string, will your shirt come off?”) I believe every working writer needs a starter job like this. Minus the asshole.
Unfortunately, our departmental budget got cut after I’d been there about a year, and after that our boss’s boss left and the resulting backlogs made productivity a joke. People started quitting and not being replaced. Overwork led to disorganization. Chaos.
I developed a rash on my neck, and my dermatologist asked, “Are you often around sources of irritation?” Yes, I was.
I knew I had to leave, but I was disappointed to have to change jobs again. I wanted to get somewhere and stay. I wanted to run right up to some final prize and touch it and hear a ding! for done. I just didn’t know what the prize was.
* * *
When I joined the national home office of the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, I thought, This is it. Finally. In my role there, I wrote the first company-wide editorial style guide, which meant I got to tell people, We use apostrophes like this, not like that These are the rules. I wrote speeches about the fight against cancer that were then spoken from the mouths of CEOs and celebrities. I met President George H. W. Bush when he received a medal of honor for his work promoting research. I worked on ad campaigns that played on the radio and aired on TV and won awards. (Awards!)
Three days after September 11, 2001, my boss asked me to accompany our chief operating officer across the street to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters, where they needed to create a crisis communications plan to use in the event of biological terrorism.
“Why me?” I asked. I didn’t even work for the CDC—they were just our neighbors.
“They need someone who can understand what they’re saying and write fast, and I told them you could do it,” he said.
Me! They needed me. Because I was good at what I did. Something breathtakingly terrible had happened in the world and everyone felt helpless, but I could do a tiny thing to help. That felt like success, for a few days anyway.
* * *
As the “war on terror” raged, the world spun into a state of heightened unrest. The longer we lived, it seemed, the more terribly human beings treated each other. The nightly news became more frightening, not less. The planet suffered more, not less. And I felt more aimless at work, not less. The hits of success at my ACS job were regular and sweet, so why, when I got home at the end of the day, did I often feel as adrift as I did after a day at SuperBank? I waited for a sense of completion, the peace I expected from a job well done, but it didn’t come.
What did I think would happen? That I’d do the job for a few years and then they’d say, Well, cancer is over, you solved it. And then I’d do every other job in the world to finality, and every company on earth would eventually close because I finished everything? Step forward to accept your prize and be turned into a rainbow—the work of the universe is over!
For the first time in my life, I began to realize that I couldn’t reach that prize I was searching for, because there was no such prize. Not in these jobs, or in any job. I could plug away toward triumph and fulfillment, which shimmered on the road ahead, always so close, but no accomplishment would ever be the A+ I needed to feel I’d done enough. The best I could hope for was to make some small dent of impact on the ever-increasing mess of our world and to enjoy it for the fleeting moment it lasted.
What I’d learned about entropy came back to me: We are always moving deeper into chaos. That thought lodged in my soul and got stuck. What if this is it? I often thought. What if work is just a thing we do to distract ourselves from the fact that the world is falling apart? In that case, it doesn’t even matter what job you do or how well you do it. Why do any of us clock in and out every day? Is this why people take early retirement from their accounting firms and go work as fishing guides?
* * *
A month before I left to have my first child, I told my supervisors at ACS I wouldn’t be coming back. Take your maternity leave and get paid, they said. You might change your mind. I said no, I couldn’t take money from a nonprofit for a job I didn’t intend to return to. I wanted to be with my baby for a while, to figure out what parenthood was like and consider the future. I would always work in some capacity, I knew, but I needed to think about how. I needed to think about this:
All this time, I’d wanted to do a job so well that I’d feel done. I wanted to accomplish enough to be good enough. But if that wasn’t possible, then the very condition I’d been working so hard to avoid—being uncertain and unfinished—might be unavoidable. It might just be how life was, and everyone else had known it all along, like they all knew what a lobsterman was, and I’d been working my ass off like a mouse on a wheel, not realizing that I was running toward cheese that wasn’t even there.
This Guy
Hootie and the Blowfish played a concert in our college gymnasium. (Hellooooo, 1990s.) It was the last campus show they did before hitting the big time; the next night, they were on David Letterman. As they launched into the opening notes of their breakout hit, “Hold My Hand,” some inebriated boy off to the side of the speakers threw his hands into the air. “HOLD MY HAND!” he yelled. “HOLLLD MYYYYYY HAAAAAAAND!”
Who is that drunken fool? I wondered.
Ladies and gentlemen, that drunken fool is now the father of my children.
(For the record, he is not regularly drunken or foolish.)
If you met him, you would want to marry him. But you can’t, because I already did. You know how people say, “You just know,” and you roll your eyes and make that gagging motion with your finger in your mouth? Well, I just knew. We officially met my junior year, his senior year, a week or so post-Hootie. He walked over to my group of girlfriends where we were leaning up against a fence watching a soccer game and asked us, “So what are you all doing tonight?” We had plans to go to an off-campus house for a guy’s birthday party, so I said, “We’re going to Dan’s.”
“You’re going to dance?” He started dancing, waving his arms around in an approximation of a hula. Then he took my hand, lifted it over my head, and twirled me.
* * *
On one of our early dates, we were curled up on the sofa in his apartment watching a movie. I was in agonizing pain from monthly cramps. I didn’t want to
make a big deal of it—nothing fans those sexy flames like period talk—but it had reached a truly distracting level of misery. Eventually I had to fess up as to why I couldn’t get comfortable. “You probably just need some naproxen,” he said. “I’ll go get some.” He paused the movie, put a blanket over my legs, and drove off to the pharmacy. When, upon his return, I marveled at his behavior, he explained that he’d grown up with a twin sister. “Girl stuff,” as he said, didn’t faze him.
Later, I overheard him on the phone with his sister, whom he’d called for no reason other than that he loved her and wanted to check in. He did this with his parents, too. His side of the calls with them was all “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” and “What can I do for you?” His Southern manners reminded me of my grandparents, and I loved how sweet he was, how naturally loving.
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