Generation Meh

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  • It’s Not A One Shot World

    Recently, I saw one of my favorite new artists live. Before the show, I busied myself with reading reviews of her latest cd – a pretty radical departure from her debut – to see if my opinion that she’s taken a turn for the Stevie Nicks (a very good thing in my books) was shared by music critics. In the course of clicking around, I stumbled on this snippet (bolding mine) from The Boston Globe:

    “The sweet sass of ‘Bible Belt’ has given way to more scorching moments. Birch is not the one to be messed with on “All the Love You Got,” which presumably dresses down a former lover. Birch could have included songs like that on her debut, but she realized that for the sake of consistency, she needed to commit to a cohesive sound and collection of songs. There would be time to make other records. There would be life after ‘Bible Belt’.”


    I’ve been struggling with a big new project and there was exactly the perspective I needed in a few lines of a cd review. I had been thinking about this particular opportunity as my one and only shot. If I didn’t cram anything and everything I ever wanted to say into it, I might never get to another chance to share my thinking with the world. Consider it in food terms. Instead of focusing on making the best possible apple pie I was capable of and whetting diners’ appetites for future dishes, I was fretting over trying to pull off a six-course meal because I was worried no one would ever agree to try my food again. I was stressing myself out over self-imposed scarcity.

    A friend is working on his PhD dissertation and battling with the same urge to accurately and critically represent all corners of a vast subject area for fear of missing something or not doing the field justice. Instead of a tightly-focused argument, he’s been driving himself crazy thinking about his dissertation as a state of the subject treatise. No wonder trying to wrap up his doctorate is giving him gray hairs.

    The truth is no one project – a paper, an album, a resume, a work of art, a dessert – can capture everything you want to say or that you’re capable of thinking, creating or sharing with the world. You can, however, make that entry point to your expertise compelling enough that people will be primed to come back for more. You don’t have to show your audience everything you have inside all at once for fear you’ll never get another kick at the can. Instead, you simply have to deliver something valuable, interesting, enlightening and strong enough that that same audience is excited to experience your next offering in whatever form it may take.

    Come for the apple pie. Come back next time for the gnocchi. And the Stevie Nicks homage.

     

     

  • 16 And A Half Years

    I don’t know how to calculate dog years, but I do know that 16 and a half human years is pretty damn old for a dog. That’s how old the family dog was when my mother texted me yesterday morning to say that Ginger had suffered a stroke in the night and my parents had to haver her put down.

     

    I really did think Ginger – a beagle mix adopted from a flea market – would outlive us all. She was more cat than dog, really. She eschewed toys, wouldn’t fetch if her life depended on it, couldn’t swim, hated being petted. She was born old and cantankerous, so it seems odd that we never really got along. She peed on my bed twice during a week-long visit home after college. No one ever knew how she got upstairs.

    She mellowed slightly in her last years. She let my parents give her a bath. She tolerated my little sister putting stupid hats on her and taking pictures of it – a biteable offense in bygone days. She would bark at the other (much younger) family dog until that dog would chase her around the house.

    Of course, I’ve been thinking of mortality. If a seemingly immortal dog can die, so can and will everyone else I care about. Which, duh, of course they will. TImes like these makes me want to heal every old wound, patch over ancient hurts and grudges, create a figurative (and maybe literal) blanket fort of love and kindness and care and find someone to crawl inside with. Because time is moving. The time you have to start things, finish things, mull things over, create and destroy, embrace and let go is so chest-crushingly finite. Righteousness and pride and someday plans and waitlisted dreams aren’t keeping any of us warm at night. What we make as individuals and with others is all we get and the time we don’t spend making and being and living are days and weeks and months and years we can never call back. And we only receive so many reminders of this truth, most of them painful. Why waste another?

    16 and a half years seems like a long time. It isn’t, though. It really, really isn’t.

     

  • Another Year Older And Deeper In Fret

    I remember the first time someone accused me of being fretful. It was at a journalism conference in college. I was heading up a committee and my co-leader and I were working late into the night trying to finish some bureaucratic task. I chafed at being told to stop fretting, that everything would be fine. Such a musty, Victorian word, I thought. I wasn’t a handwringing worrier, was I?

    Oh, how times have changed.

    Yesterday was my birthday. I spent more or less the whole day fretting, as I do every year. I tried to remember a birthday that didn’t involve crying and I realized I’d probably have to go back to my early teen years. As an adult, birthdays have been, as a rule, depressing and unmemorable and it’s not for the reasons you’d think. I don’t particularly care about presents or acknowledgements, or people making a big fuss. A surprise party would likely give me a panic attack. Nope, it’s that my brain fixates on November 22 as the date on which I should take an annual inventory of my life in the most unflinching manner possible. Every year, I come up short. There is no list of achievements, accomplishments or milestones that will satisfy my mind. Some years, I fixate on career success, others, it’s character flaws. This year, it was gnawing loneliness. I feel it acutely and I feel like I can’t get away from it and I certainly haven’t put a dent in it from last year.

    Every Nov 22, I vow not to arrive at the next one in the same condition. And while I do make progress on some fronts (have my own company, don’t live with my parents), it never feels like enough and my brain never quite lets me forget what I haven’t accomplished in the last 12 months. It’s not self-pity, it’s self-recrimination. So, now, when the day rolls around, I simply brace myself to be soaked by a steady drizzle of mental discomfort. I try to be gracious about birthday well wishes, but there’s no polite way to tell people you’re trying to ignore the day without sounding as if you’re nursing a high-maintenance martyr complex. Oh, plans? Does sitting in the tub thinking about how I suck at life count? Because it’s kind of an annual tradition. Yes, going out for drinks and cake DOES sound better. Maybe next year.

    It’s an unseemly practice that I just can’t seem to shake. Another year older and deeper in fret.

  • I Am Too Soft For This City

    That’s what I thought as I waited for the F train. It wasn’t because I saw a rat skitter across the subway tracks or the fact that my rental turned out to be across the street from the projects (the neighborhood was perfectly safe). No, it was the trio of high school kids performing on the platform behind me – one on guitar, another on trumpet and a vocalist. She was what got to me. Easily good enough to be on The Voice or X Factor and, instead, singing in the Delancey St. subway station. As I willed myself not to cry, I realized I was probably too soft for this city. And that I should probably drink more water.

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    And, yet, I’m too hard for other cities. I can’t seem to find the right fit. As I told a friend this morning, being friends with me involves weathering periodic freakouts in which I contemplate burning my current life to the ground and starting over somewhere else. Three sublets in eight months and not having owned a bed since 2010, you’d think I’d want some roots of my own by now. And yet, I’m scouring Craigslist for options in Portland, in Chicago. I’ve driven across America and not found a permanent resting spot. I think of cities I feel affection for –  San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh – and wonder if the affection was a product of time, circumstances and never outstaying my welcome.

     

    It sounds glamorous or at least intriguing to hear me tell it. I have no idea where I’ll end up next! I’m currently location independent! Everything I own fits in two suitcases! What’s less glamorous is wondering if you’ll ever find a place you look forward to coming back to after a trip or fretting about having to replace a stranger’s kettle when you accidentally burn the bottom out of it. A bed, a sense of belonging, something resembling a home. I watched Frances Ha this week and while I thought it was a pretty weak effort overall, I did identify with the character’s unmoored existence. She’s 27 and bouncing from apartment to apartment, putting a “free” sign on one of her chairs and leaving it on the sidewalk because it won’t fit in her storage unit.

     

    As I remarked to another friend, this kind of life gets less charming with age. Eventually, you need commit to a place or commit to a nomadic existence. Either way, you’ve gotta settle at some point, for something.

  • One Is The Loneliest Number Or The Truth Entrepreneurs Don’t Tell

    When people ask what it’s like being an entrepreneur, I usually joke how running your own business is like a crash course in handling rejection. There are sales you don’t make, clients you don’t land, proposals that go nowhere, offers that get turned down. If you don’t make the ask, you don’t get the work and if you don’t get the work, you don’t pay your bills. So, you ask and for every yes, there’s a no, or maybe there are ten nos or even a hundred. Eventually, it stops stinging as badly.

    What I talk about much less is the loneliness. Even if you’re successful, being self-employed is lonely and if, by nature, being isolated and unmoored brings out the darkest in you, well, buckle up. Once you file those incorporation papers (hint: do it in Delaware), you’re flying solo.

    Being a one-person empire encourages a certain kind of nihilism. There is no infrastructure or hierarchy for you to find your place in or define yourself against. You don’t spend eight hours a day rowing in the same direction as dozens or hundreds of other people who all park in the same parking lot, take the same elevators, pass the same mission statement mounted on a wall plaque outside the breakroom. No one is timing your lunch hour. Stretch it until 2 and have a martini and no one will make a peep.

    You find yourself weighing freedom against insignificance. Yes, I can go grocery shopping in the middle of the day, but does that have more to do with being my own boss or is it just because I don’t really matter and I’m not needed elsewhere? If you tell me you’ve never wondered that, I’ll tell you you’re a liar. You start to get a sense of how low your stakes are and sometimes that gnaws at your brain while you’re trying to fall asleep. If you screw up, you might lose a client or owe the IRS some money, but your carelessness won’t cripple a Fortune 500 company and be splashed all over The New York Times. The power you gain over your own self-determination is directly offset by the realization that your failure hurts only you and therefore only matters to you. Whether you have a six-figure year or close shop after six months and quietly slink back to being some else’s employee is irrelevant to the rest of the world. It will go on either way.

    Sometimes, being your own boss feels amazing and empowering and sometimes, it feels pointless and lonely. You are whatever you say you are, you do whatever you say you do. And that’s both the best and the worst feeling.

     

  • State Of The Ego Update

    “So, where are you heading after this?”

    “To my shrink’s,” I reply with a laugh.

    My business associate asks me to confirm he heard correctly and then starts laughing, too. And then he tells me about his own experience with therapy after he went bankrupt a few years ago.

    For a long time, the longest time in fact, I thought that the value I brought to relationships was my steadfast unflappability. If you were friends with me, I’m sure it was like having McGyver (with better hair) on speed dial. And then, one day, I couldn’t do that anymore. I looked around at all the feelings and facets of my life I’d been neglecting and I realized that my dogged devotion to helping other people fix their stuff (whether they asked me to or not) meant that most of mine remained broken.

    As I told someone yesterday, the last six months of my life have been incredibly humbling. For a person who has always believed her core value lies in her strength, admitting to being vulnerable is hard. It’s possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Asking for help, for compassion, for forgiveness, for support is an ongoing struggle. Being able to acknowledge my needs and present them to someone else in the timid hope that they might be met is like climbing Mount Everest to me – right down to the lightheadedness and lack of oxygen.

    So, why am I doing this? Why am I asking for things I know I won’t get and going away with my head bowed? Why am I fighting panic to meet strangers for coffee or telling my pride to STFU and reaching out to a friend for reassurance that I’m doing okay? Why am I  reviving my book proposal and considering stand-up comedy and blogging acutely personal details that would make the me of a year ago wince? Because none of those things will kill me. For every risk I force myself to take, I get a little stronger and a little wiser and the tears dry a little faster. I might not get what I want, but I do get the knowledge that I won’t die from not having it and then, when I need to do something similar in the future, I call upon that memory and it bolsters me. I’m very tired of being scared and the quickest way to stop being scared is to do the scary thing and then live to tell about it in technicolor detail. So, here we go.

    And there is a relief in this new way of being, in the ability to shrug off the mantle of perfect composure to admit incompetence and fear and confusion, to acknowledge that not only do you not know best, sometimes, you really don’t know anything at all. I am a mess. We all are. Now, I strive to be gracious when others offer compassion and kindness and generosity in the face of the weakness or need I show them. Of course, I worry about losing my place in their lives if I’m no longer the unflappable fixer, but I remind myself that even if that were to happen, I am building the capacity to deal with it via every risk I push myself to take and every weakness I steel myself to show. And then I just continue not dying from it.

     

  • Of Pre-Owned Vehicles And Pre-Owned Hearts

    My father has a theory about used cars. Don’t buy one with under 60K miles on it. If something major is going to go wrong with the car and need to be repaired, it will happen before 60K and, in that case, why not let the previous owner foot the bill for those repairs? After 60K, the major kinks are worked out and you’re probably getting a decent – albeit not low mileage –  vehicle. A friend and I were discussing this theory on the way to Enterprise yesterday to pick up a rental car for a work trip she was going on. Of course, the conversation swung around to relationships, as it often does.

    My dad’s car advice applies to people as well. There’s no need to be scared of folks with a few miles on their souls. Eventually, we all get rust spots and loose fan belts and the exhaust starts to go. If you opt for shiny and new, know that you’re going to be the one who’s on the hook for those needed psychic repairs at some point in the future. Maybe you’re fine with that and maybe helping someone else fight through their growing pains into full adulthood is more of a responsibility than you’re willing to shoulder. If you choose a pre-loved model instead, a lot of that work has – ideally – been done for you. You’re missing out on whatever the human equivalent of that seductive new car smell is, but you’re meeting someone at the point where they’ve already made a lot of their mistakes, learned lessons the hard way and have settled into the self they intend to be for the next forty or fifty years. Maybe that isn’t a self you want to be with, but you can at least be reasonably confident that it’s a pretty solidly defined one.

    With people and with vehicles, it’s all about trade-offs and where your priorities lie when it comes to allocating your limited budget. Four-wheel drive vs. sun roof. Kindness vs. ambition. Style vs. efficiency. And sometimes, it pays to skip next year’s model in the showroom and put your faith in a tried-and-true workhorse. Just don’t forget to renew your AAA membership.

     

  • An Open Letter To My Missed Connections Writer

    Dear Anonymous,

     

    I wanted to offer a public thank you. Your words were very sweet and demonstrated that we had connected at some point and you had retained some key personal details about me that I probably don’t even remember sharing. I don’t doubt your sincerity, but I am starting to second-guess my memory, which is usually impeccable.

    You couldn’t possibly know that I’ve been stressing about rejection – of all varieties –  lately and worrying about my ability to make a good first impression. When you’re self-employed, every professional interaction is like a job interview or first date. It feels as if you have to be on at all times. I run with some people who are very good at that, but I have to do whatever the non-athletic equivalent is of punching sides of beef in a walk-in freezer a la Rocky to get myself psyched up. Knowing that I managed to charm at least one person whose path I’ve crossed to a degree that they were willing to document it in public print eased some of that tension.

    Also, sometimes, I worry that I take my eyeliner to an Avril Lavigne level, so it’s nice to be validated that I haven’t ventured into raccoon territory.

    After a minor bout of worry over the possibility that you might be a professional colleague, married or possibly fresh out of high school, I’ve decided that’s pretty irrelevant to the fact that your posting made my day – unless you’re trying to recruit me into your underground polygamist sect, in which case, no thank you, sir.

    Please note that I will have a little extra bounce in my step (and it’s not just my still aching ankle) this week and that I will be side-eyeing all the men of my acquaintance – both online and offline – for a clue as to who you are and how we might know one another.

    Thanks again, stranger.

    All the very best,

    JMH

     

  • My Favorite People Are Fighters

    I once had a boyfriend who took no end of delight in making joking asides about the rugged, austere and highly frugal stock he assumed I was descended from – people who performed their own amputations, sewed their clothes out of burlap, gave birth in the field and then went back to digging up turnips with their bare hands, etc.  And as much as his mocking irritated me, the truth is that the only way I could have been more steeped in the Protestant work ethic while growing up is if I had been raised by Martin Luther himself. Although, it should be noted that my understanding of the value of hard work is entirely secular in nature, which probably makes it even more baffling. But man, has it been my saving grace this year*.

     

    Beyond talent, beyond resources or wealth and privilege, it’s dogged unwillingness to give in or up that serves you best in this life. Because if you can’t take a punch from the universe and get back up, you’re going to have a hard time of it, no matter how well buffered you are materially. The people I have the most respect for in my life are able to do just that. They’re able to stagger to their feet and manage a department of 15 engineers, turn their mental illness into a stand-up routine, bounce back from business failure to launch another company, fight the healthcare system on behalf of a loved one. They do it because it has to get done. End of story.

    These folks understand that feelings and actions don’t always synch up. Sometimes, you feel terrible without reason or rhyme. Sometimes, you’re racking up wins, but victory tastes like stale rice cakes and sometimes, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to keep the lights on in your life – circumstances and synchronicity be damned. Leaving yourself no choice but to keep going might sound like an exercise in masochism, but it’s actually salvation of a sort. The blows you take and recover from toughen you up for the next ones and they teach you that, most of the time, fear of being knocked down hurts more than the act itself. And that just so happens to be one of those lessons you have to learn the hard way. Martin Luther and my hard-bitten ancestors would agree.

     

    * That and watching professional wrestling matches from the 80s and early 90s on YouTube while sitting in the tub eating ice cream. Someone compared me to Hunter S. Thompson and I’m still laughing.

  • Why Low-Hanging Fruit Will Poison You

    A friend and I are working on a collaboration. She’s actually a friend I couldn’t have had five years ago, or even two years ago. We’re wildly different in a lot of ways (and not just because her hair is as crazily curly as mine is stick-straight) and utterly complementary in a lot of others. Before, the differences would have made me feel anxious and insecure. I would have been second-guessing myself and wondering if her way of being was better than my way and angsting out over not being 100% understood, validated and endorsed for WHO I WAS. Ye gods, am I glad those days are behind me.
    So, we’re working on a collaboration and we just can’t seem to nail down THE thing. We have good ideas that are interesting and marketable and play to our strengths, but there’s just something missing. We haven’t hit the jackpot yet, even though we have folks who will pay us for our work. After a call a couple of days ago wherein we discussed yet another avenue to explore, we agreed to regroup later in the week after we’d both mulled over the details. Something didn’t sit right, though, so I shot my friend another email: 

    What I think is also worth giving thought to is identifying what each of us REALLY want to do in our lives. Not what we like or are good at or can make money from, but what we’d want to be doing work-wise if those things weren’t part of the equation at all and then brainstorming about whether A) there is a self-supporting angle to that and B) whether there’s an intersection in our two things and a way to help each other achieve them. A little new age-y, but I think we could handle it;)

    Even if it was as simple as:

    I like to do X
    I don’t like to do Y
    I bring Z to the table

    that means we have a really clear sense of all the bases we collectively cover and what exactly a collaboration of our personalities/skill sets brings to the world.

    WE COULD EVEN MAKE A VENN DIAGRAM.

    And then, this afternoon, I received an eerily prescient email blast from the scarily talented Erika Lyremark. The message included a question that more or less boiled down to “What’s holding you back?” and an invitation to respond with your answer. I did and within minutes, Erika replied. We chatted by phone and, as she is gifted at doing, she nailed my issue in 90 seconds flat. “You’re a business whore. You keep getting seduced by throw rugs. If you keep going after the low-hanging fruit, you’ll always be stuck in this spot.” If there’s a way for being punched in the stomach to feel good, this would be it.

    What I love to do more than anything else is to tell stories – to take ideas or bullet points or nebulous feelings and spin whole narratives out of them. I love to go hunting for information and sources and perspectives (the more diverse, the better) and then compose them into a cohesive whole that you read and absorb and think about and respond to. I love taking topics that you would think would never in a million years lend themselves to interesting stories and turning them fascinating tales. I love working with people and companies to help them identify what aspects of their work absolutely need to be shared with the world and then guiding them to where and how to do that sharing. LOVE IT. And I don’t do enough of it. There are a million (give or take) absolutely rational reasons why, but they can all be neatly classified under the heading of fear – fear of failure, of rejection, of powerlessness, of vulnerability.

    My friend and I have talked a lot about “low-hanging fruit” lately in an attempt to figure out where the most accessible, easily-won market for our combined talents might be. It makes a lot of practical sense, obviously, but it doesn’t make emotional sense and it’s not lighting either of us up, no matter how much we try to sell ourselves on it. There is, as my call with Erika forced me to acknowledge, a better, truer way, it’s just not necessarily the  easy path I was hoping for. And now that I’ve admitted as much, sticking to only the apples within arm’s reach doesn’t really seem like such a solid long-term strategy anymore.