Generation Meh

Photo by ginnerobot

New post tomorrow. In the interim, I thought I’d update you on a couple of new projects. Firstly, I’m joining RAW as their personal finance and career management expert-ish type. The site hasn’t officially launched yet, but feel free to poke around.  And no, I will not start using the word tribe.  Anywhere. Ever. Not how I roll.

Also, the Autumnal Absolution post got a ton of great feedback. So much so that I’ve decided to give it its own site. Look for daily reminders that it is indeed okay and submit your own okay affirmations.

Finally, a piece I wrote for Primer Magazine (look for more of my content appearing over there) was picked up by Jezebel. I have my own issues with Jez and am no longer even a sporadic reader, but I appreciate their reach and am not gonna argue with approximately 25 000 additional sets of eyes on a feature that I put a lot of effort into crafting. I did skip the comments, though.

The other night, I found myself standing in the condiment aisle of the supermarket debating about whether to buy the regular peanut butter or the natural, organic stuff. I wanted the former, but knew I should stick with the latter. It’s 10:00 PM, they’re playing The %^$#@& Fray over the PA system and I’m standing there clutching two jars of peanut butter in my hands, feeling as if I’m facing my own nutritional Waterloo. Are you serious? Has it really come to this*?

Photo by addicted Eyes

And I’m not alone. Maybe it’s a product of fall and the ghost of unfinished homework assignments past, but I’ve been hearing reports of scattered guilt outbreaks across the country. People feeling as if they’re falling down on the job of being upstanding citizens, as if they’re lacking or slacking, stressed out over doing the right thing and convinced that  the right thing couldn’t possible involve scuffling through a pile of leaves while sipping a pumpkin spice latte (Those leaves need raking and you could make that latte at home for 48 cents!). That simply will not do. In the interests of giving everyone a breather and ratcheting down the angst, I hereby offer up a little autumnal absolution. It’s okay and it will continue to be so on all of these counts (most culled from real-life examples I’ve heard recently) and so many more.

• It’s okay to wish perfectly swell people would STFU about their perfectly swell lives.
• It’s okay to feel sad/angry/out of sorts/tired and not really know or have the energy to find out why.
• It’s okay to turn your phone off.
• It’s okay not to be passionate.
• It’s okay to leave dishes in the sink overnight.
• It’s okay to take a nap or sleep late.
• It’s okay to eat kettle corn and a Kit Kat for dinner. For three nights in a row, even.
• It’s okay to take whatever job pays the bills and not care about what this says about your “career”.
• It’s okay to hate poetry.
• It’s okay to feel jealous about others’ lives and not have a rational reason.
• It’s okay to gossip as if you were back in high school.
• It’s okay to worry about dying alone, but still not do anything about it.
• It’s okay to get all your news from The Daily Show.
• It’s okay not to vacuum or sweep for weeks on end.
• It’s okay to hate Betty White.

You get the idea. Now, go start a bonfire or something.

*I ended up with the Jif. Life’s too short, kiddos.

So, I was discussing a piece I glanced over for a friend last night and I realized that the point she was making in her analysis was exactly what I was grappling with in terms of my own writing/social media presence/artfully constructed persona – where does performance end and unintended self revelation begin and just how much control do we have over that intersection? Paging James Franco, Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix! The point further hit home when a Twitter friend assumed that a tweet about my applesauce-making woes was actually an emo metaphor for my life’s larger woes. If you read it in succession from the day’s earlier mini-missives, it was a logical enough conclusion. But really, it was just about apples. And I was a little surprised anyone was keeping tabs.

Photo by Youssef Hana

I try to walk the line (here and in other writing venues) between baring it all and being one of those insufferably coy types who only deal in passive-aggressive cliches. Too much disclosure is gauche and too much reticence is just tiresome cloak and dagger posturing that doesn’t exactly encourage trust. And this whole thing doesn’t work unless you believe that you can fall backward and that I’m gonna make damn sure you don’t hit the ground.

It’s the part of personal branding they don’t tell you about. There’s only so far your micro managing impulses can get you. As carefully as you structure your communications, choose your words and your images and your associates, you still can’t spoonfeed people your intended meaning. They get it, they don’t get it, they draw their own conclusions and their own picture of you. As soon as you gain an audience, you start to lose ownership. And anyone on the internet who tells you that this doesn’t frustrate them is a filthy liar.

There’s only so much you can write and reveal (be it a Facebook status or a link to your piece in the New Yorker), before you’re faced with this truth and the necessity of figuring out how you’re going to negotiate it – push past it to embrace words like “rawness” or “authenticity” or retreat to arms-length safety. I won’t presume to suggest what will work best for your individual circumstances, but  conventional wisdom (and Regis Philbin) would suggest that this might be a fine time to ask the audience.

After all, who knows “you” better?

I’m sick of passion and exhortations to discover it, embrace it, follow it, stay true to it, etc. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of Top Chef lately (pairs well with rebounding from food poisoning) and have heard contestant after contestant blather about being passionate about food, or maybe it’s because the internet is downright lousy with folks throwing around passion-related platitudes (their own or ones they’ve cribbed from Bartlett’s Quotations), but enough is enough.

Photo by Sebastian-Dario

Passion and all the talk about it is overrated. It breeds self doubt. It’s okay not to be passionate with a neon capital P. That doesn’t mean you’re dead inside. Some folks just aren’t born with the potential for obsessive devotion gene and making them feel like slackers or outliers for not having an all-consuming passion (Cooking! Teaching! Collecting vintage Pez dispensers!) is not cool in my books. If that’s not how your brain and heart work, there’s no amount of pep-talking, cheerleading or example-setting that is going to convert you. You can’t get there from here. And worrying that you’re broken for not being able to name the one thing that defines you is unnecessary and stressing about the absolute imperative of discovering your passion (because it must exist, yes?) keeps you from living in the here and now and blinds you to what would satisfy you/content you/meet your needs, which is some pretty useful intel to have.

And even if you are one of those fiery types, what if you haven’t found your passion? Or you’ve found what you thought was your passion, but you’ve reached the exhaustion point with trying to master the perfect crepe or you realize that paying the rent has to come before indulging your love for micro-brewing or photography? Does that mean you’ve been doing it wrong? No, it just means you’re human. And like the rest of us, you don’t have an unlimited attention span and boundless energy and you realize that caring 110% 24/7 about X (or Y or Z) is exhausting and untenable, even for the most single-minded. It’s normal to feel burned out and feed up sometimes. Think about when you’re battling a nasty cold and even the idea of your favorite food in the world (prepared by someone other than germy ol’ you, obviously) is of little interest. Same deal. Doesn’t mean you fail at Authentic Living 101.

So, let’s ditch passion (and god, please let authenticity die with it). Forget about zeroing in on it, pursuing it, measuring it, rhapsodizing about it. Focus on persistence instead. Rather than trying to identify the one pursuit or calling that is supposed to transform your existence into a unicorn-filled, adrenaline-fueled zen paradise, identify the values and activities that keep cropping up in your life. What endures? What persists? What do you keep returning to? Maybe it’s writing in one form or another. Maybe it’s activities that involve being around children, or solving problems, or building things. Maybe it’s boys who make you laugh or girls who remind you of your third grade crush. Start identifying the (positive) patterns in your life. Boil them down to their essence (helping, creating, fixing, seeing the humor in life) and then think about all the contexts and circumstances in which you could find or recreate these ideas. Suddenly, it’s no longer about trying to find one all-encompassing ardor to last all the days of your life, but making a list of 38 careers and 29 volunteer possibilities that could satisfy your desire to work with people or a page of potential sport-related activities that could fulfill your need for outdoor adventure.

Bottom line? Persistence trumps passion. And opportunity opens more doors than obsession. It might not be as quotable, but it’s much less exhausting.

Eons ago (okay, more like a couple of months), I enlisted the very talented Jennette Fulda at Make My Blog Pretty to whip me up a cute little vanity site. And then life happened and I didn’t get around to filling the site with content and officially launching it. UNTIL RIGHT NOW. It’s live, it’s pithy and it’s going to net me tons of amazing freelance opportunities, right?

Photography is courtesy of my fab friend, Katherine.  Hair is courtesy of genetics.