write me well

Tag: development

  • The Apocalyptic Thing About Change

    It’s been a good eight months since I last camped out at Foyles. Considering this was an almost weekly haunt of mine before the world imploded back in March, it’d be surreal sitting back down here even if it wasn’t in a room where everyone is distanced in their support bubbles, masked and sanitized and hopefully not infected. Needless to say, the then-and-now difference is hardly just linear.

    How different is my life since I last sat here? Very, but again, not just because of COVID. On a personal level, so much has changed in those eight months. I started a new job, my first outside of true retail (the word retail still hovers, linking me to the past decade of my work, but there are other words in my job title that will hopefully lead to the next decade). Not only that, but I’m a month into a part time masters’ course at Queen Mary University, something that still feels a little wild to me, if I’m honest. Less so now than it did in my second lecture at the end of September, when one really-not-that-silly question suddenly made me feel so deeply out of my depth that I spent the next seventy-two hours scrambling for an eject button. But still wild.

    I like to blame my whimsical Piscean flighty-ness when it comes to my love of the eject button (nothing says commitment issues like an inability to go on a second date nearly seven years after I left my last relationship), but the truth is I think it’s a pretty natural reaction. As much as you think it’s going to be a comfort to discover the thing you want to do with the rest of your life, it’s actually fucking terrifying. My genuine love of castles and Empress Matilda and medieval anything sustained me through the application process, the visions of my rural English future in the heritage industry suddenly validated when I was accepted into QMU’s Heritage Management program in July. But the reality of taking steps down a new professional path shook me more than I was prepared for, and I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking myself down (read: panic texting) since logging into that first virtual seminar.

    On an emotional level, the last eight months saw the last two-thirds of being in therapy. I had two major blows that kicked off that particular journey: first, the sudden death of my dad last July, and second, being forced to step down from my job at Regent Street. The death of a parent is traumatic by nature, and I wrote an essay about why my personal experience of it was such. But in a different way, my demotion shook me even further. For someone whose only adult concept of commitment was to work, suddenly being told you’re not nearly good enough at your job (whether true or not) makes you doubt what you’ve been doing with yourself for the last ten years. So the two experiences, which happened within two months of each other and were equally blindsiding, kind of, y’know, crushed me.

    Being a natural optimist, almost incapable of seeing “cons” and described on more than one occasion as sunshine personified (a favorite compliment I will remember until I shed my mortal coil), I did not handle being crushed particularly well. When my best friend suggested I look into therapy, I listened. Therapy looks different for everyone, and I worked through a goodly amount of my struggles from January to July of this year. I think more than anything the lasting benefits of knowing what it’s like to be heard and give yourself space make therapy for any amount of time worth pursuing.

    So, again still ignoring COVID, we have a career change, the discovery of a new life passion, a return to academia, and the finishing (a loose term) of therapy.

    Mixed in with the life-altering nature of the pandemic, there’s the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, and the personal stock-taking of privilege, being party to, and engaging and benefiting from systems of oppression and learning how to become an ally. Of expanding my awareness beyond the borders of these personal things that have happened to me in the past eight months and processing the experiences of others.

    I remember posting about Ahmaud Arbery back in March, making my first calls to a DA office to leave a voicemail, and being terrified of doing it “wrong”, and almost letting that fear stop me from talking about it. Fast forward to Breonna Taylor. To George Floyd. To it becoming belatedly apparent that staying silent in the past was to be complicit, that to be “apolitical” is (and always has been) synonymous with “my life isn’t effected enough to care, and I don’t care that yours is”. What kinds of changes has this wrought in my life? Adding antiracist reading to my regular book stack. Educating myself on systemic racism, and diversifying my feed, my shopping, and my cultural consumption. Learning that you never stop learning, and that it is a privilege that my education in this subject is academic and not physical.

    And then, we have COVID.

    When I finally got the call that my Italian citizenship had gone through back in 2014, I spent the next few years hemming and hawing about actually making the move back to England. Those were the days before Brexit seemed remotely possible, so instead of being plagued by potential red tape, the primary case I made for staying in the states could be narrowed down to one thing and one thing only: the movie Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.

    Really? you ask, understandably judgemental of the fact that a plot that involved Keira Knightley and Steve Carell as a plausible romantic couple could make me feel anything other than bafflement. Yes, really. For those unfamiliar, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a black comedy that chronicles the last days of earth, after a final attempt to stop a meteor flying towards our home planet fails (…emphasis on the black in black comedy). Keira Knightley and Steve Carell live in the same apartment building, but they don’t meet until he happens upon her, crying on the fire escape, because she has just found out she missed her last chance to fly back to the UK to see her family before the world ends.

    Call me crazy, but that movie and that circumstance really fucked me up. I empathized with Keira Knightley’s character, because choosing to live across an ocean from most of the people you love does relinquish a certain degree of control you have over your life. Sure, it’s unlikely that if I lived in Philadelphia and needed to get home to my family under emergency circumstances, that I’d be able to do so on foot. But if it came down to it, physics wouldn’t stop me. You don’t need a plane (or a pilot, for that matter) to make that journey. If I moved to England, though? That was no longer true, and, ridiculous or no, that fact kept me stateside for years.

    Obviously, my feelings eventually changed. Not my feelings towards that fear – it’s still deeply rooted within me. But my practical side caught up with me, and egged on by the nagging dissatisfaction I had with my life back in California, I made the move to the UK in 2018. I figured the chances of an apocalypse that would somehow stop me from visiting home and seeing my family was too absurdly unlikely to sacrifice my dream.

    Writing this in October of 2020, I think I owe my past self an apology. COVID may not be the apocalypse, but as impossible as the possibility seemed then, we do now live in a world where any minute my ability to go home can suddenly be, well, disabled. More likely than not, it’d only be a temporary problem, but still. Talk about things you never saw coming. (Or did. But wrote off because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.)

    So, now, not ignoring COVID, it’s been a long eight months. A whole lot has happened and I am grateful that if nothing else, Foyles is still standing, and I’ve been able to return after all this time, in this unfamiliar world, to something familiar.

    Change has many guises and I don’t know that I have anything more philosophical to contribute to the discourse than that. But it would be remiss of me to sit in this café and not share the experience so as to commune even the slightest bit with that old life of mine. I’m pretty busy these days, whether with work or study or just existing, but I’m going to do my damnedest to try and be here a little more. Despite everything that has happened and continues to happen, writing brings me joy, and we can all use a little more joy, right?

    And while all that means in the context of this blog is that I’ll post a little more, I’m not sorry. As Carl would say, I will not apologize for art.

  • The Impossible Thing About Self Worth (…and capitalism)

    I sat across from my friend at the Market Hall in Victoria, warmly sequestered inside brick walls, surrounded by nine-to-five suits on their trendy lunch break, drinking the best latte I’ve had in months, wondering how on earth this beautiful person in front of me could possibly feel incapable.

    To me, she had so much to offer. A ceaseless, passionate energy, a way with words that a troubadour would envy – blonde mermaid’s hair and a knack for making any marbled knit sweater drape perfectly from her well-postured shoulders. And I sat there, thinking these things, knowing that she was envious of so much about my life. My career, my stability, my trajectory. She was afraid the way so many of us have been throughout the course of our lives, because she has no idea what’s next or how to get there. As we both sipped our lattes and went about splitting a chocolate muffin between us, I realized I was just as jealous of her.

    It struck me like a crack of cold air in that rosy warm space that the both of us thought we were in exactly opposite positions, when really, we were exactly the same. And I can’t help looking around me and feeling strangely like many of the amazing women I know in my life are in this same position and that it is total and complete bull shit.

    Waxing poetic about the downsides of capitalism isn’t something I’m generally drawn to. In fact, writing about anything that has a semblance of cultural importance is almost always beyond both my interest and remit. But the past few weeks have been such a trial and filled with instances of questioning what is worth – what is value – why do we do what we do? That even I, Piscean and ENFP and optimistic to a blistering, painful fault, feel compelled to address it. Why is it that we so aggressively measure ourselves against anything other than wellness and happiness? Why are so many careers, about things that so resoundingly do not matter, valued so highly?

    I wonder these things, three hours after my latte with my friend, in a different hipster coffee shop, now upgraded to a matcha latte, and realize that there is a very simple reason I don’t often contemplate these kinds of things. It’s fucking terrifying. If I think about it for more than five minutes, it’s like trying to wrap my head around a black hole (or space in general, which to me is not the final frontier: it is a terrifying endless mystery that I have no interest in considering or peering into).

    Only this black hole isn’t something I can wilfully ignore (because really, will I ever have to confront SPACE?). I have to participate in and engage with this black hole every day. I have to try and figure out what it’s actually all about so I can decide what my next career move is. I have to measure myself against its fathomless fiscal depths before I can give myself a speck of confidence that I’m on the right path. And that’s what really scares me.

    Keeping my nose stuck firmly in the past has long been my defensive tactic. A belief as unshakeable as it is absurd, that not knowing what the future holds validates not planning for it, sits nestled at the base of my spine, and it impractically refuses to dislodge. I focus on the lives of people that lived eight hundred years before me, people who even had we shared the same time would have been worlds away from me, and I can’t stop. I visit the places they lived, see the buildings they built, stand in the churches they prayed in, and feel a sense of connection and belonging, a strength of spirit, that I’ve come to live for. I tell myself that those experiences are the ones that matter, that they’re more important than the big picture – because maybe there is no big picture. And as far as defensive tactics go, it worked really well!

    Right up until everything blew up in my face.

    In the back of my mind, I always had a deeply underappreciated belief that not only was I great at my (capitalist) job, but that I would always be great at it and that there was nowhere to go but up. It wasn’t until about two months ago that everything changed and suddenly I was sat on my own, looking in the mirror, wondering what I was really good for, and where I could possibly go.

    A crisis of career confidence is never a pleasant experience. This was my first. I’ve had them before in the sense that I wished I could be a writer, a novelist, a columnist – anything that involved people loving my writing and paying me to produce it – and that I never was granted said wish. But then, I never really tried that hard. I always knew that the only thing to regret in that regard was that I hadn’t truly bothered. As a manager, though, since the moment one of my first DM’s sat me down and told me I was great, I had the luxury of lacking self-doubt of any kind. I knew I was good at my job, I knew I deserved good things, and I loved that about it. It gave me value and worth and I reaped wonderful rewards from it for years. This crisis of confidence was about that job, the one I was actually doing, not some intangible dream job crisis. It profoundly shook me up and prompted a resounding, excruciating, “WHY?”

    When I was living in San Jose before I moved back to England, I had everything going for me. If there was a time to be complacent, that was it. Stellar roommate, great job, ace colleagues, and my family close by. But I knew I was missing something and it was that sensation that brought me back over here. In attempting to answer that big old “WHY”, I’ve realized that maybe I had reached a level of stability that was endangering my life’s path, leaving me complacent when that wasn’t in the cards yet. Because let’s be real – would I be out here, asking these big questions, reconsidering a path I long since thought was sorted out, if the past two months hadn’t happened? No fucking way!

    Wasn’t this supposed to be about other women too, though, you ask? And capitalism in general? You’re right. Selfishly, my own turn in fortune has brought to light a bigger picture conversation about valuing a bottom line over the hard work of the people you employ. Customer service and retail are the absolute bowels of that aspect of capitalism. Where else can you work your ass off and yet everyone you work for – customers and big wig bosses – have a free pass to shit on you over PRODUCT?

    OVER PRODUCT.

    I have long been in this career for two reasons: people and their development. I am actively looking out for the people the brands I work for employ, trying to help them find what drives them, making sure they have a good thing going and that work isn’t just a place they come to pick up a pay check. My teams drive great service because they are supported and validated. It’s certainly not because they’re being paid exceedingly well or feel like they’re changing the world. But every day, we’re doing our job, and doing it well. If people can’t see that – or if they can, but they don’t think it’s enough – then maybe I am in the wrong field. And maybe I did need a kick in the teeth to realize I need to do this somewhere else.

    Which brings me to today’s coffee with my friend. That moment where we spent hours talking about the endless spread of opportunities in this world of simple rules – work for the man, get your money, do your thing on your own time – that starting from scratch is just as inspiring as it is terrifying. And I wondered at the ridiculousness of being able to preach that so confidently to her when I knew that I as soon as she got on her train and I went my separate way, that I would do anything but give myself the same advice. If she has endless choice, why don’t I?

    The answer is, I do. We all do. If we really want to take the advice that (particularly when you’re inordinately privileged by birth) the only thing stopping you is you, we can. But it feels real fucking impossible right now even though nothing is really that bad. So the next step is to get myself to believe it.

    How am I going to do that? Start with small truths, the ones that are easiest to swallow. I’ll begin with the illusive bright side, the mercurial silver lining of essentially getting demoted. Maybe the universe realized I didn’t so much need a job that was stressing me out beyond all belief, but that I needed the friendship of all of my amazing colleagues, something I’d denied myself due to a rigorous belief in drawing professional lines as a manager. Maybe I needed that kick to dislodge that feeling at the base of my spine – that not planning for the future is an okay life policy – and create a long game strategy. Maybe I needed the spare brain space that having less responsibility leaves me with to wrap my head around the exhilaration (and terror) of a fresh start.

    I genuinely have no idea where I’m going to go from here. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way about my life. But slowly, one day at a time, I’m going to indoctrinate that philosophy deep in my bones until I breathe its truth every day. Because the world IS filled with opportunities – I do believe that – and it’s up to me to grab them. And sure, there’s a lot of really shitty shit out there too, but if I can’t be one of the people out there turning it around, helping to give value to those amazing women that feel like they don’t have anything to offer, then what else am I gonna do?

    Time to get out there, to motivate, to encourage, to make them laugh and smile and get inspired. I may not yet drink my Koolaid, but I’ve got a tepid matcha latte, and that’s kind of the same thing, right? It’s time to do something bigger and be part of a solution. Retail isn’t shitty because it’s unworthy and filled with people that never tried hard. It’s shitty because all too often it thrives on the ceaseless and thankless work of countless people all for the glory of capitalism. While I’m in it, I’m going to continue to fight for those people and the struggles they face every day. But big picture, it’s time to figure out how I can do that in a bigger way.

    The unknown I’m about to face while I try and figure that out is not like space because it is terrifying (it is).

    It is like space because it is limitless.

  • The Bucket Theory

    I’m a chronic mom-caller. Like, I may live over three thousand miles away from my mother, and I may be a grown-ass thirty-year-old woman, but if I go more than 2-3 days without speaking to my mom, it’s weird. I used to call her on my way home from work, and now that I have my own place, I call her as soon as I’m home, eating my pre-made dinner on the couch while I tell her about my day and listen in turn about hers. I’ll call her on my days off when I have literally nothing new to tell her. I’ll call her when I discover pre-filled strawberry jam and cream scones for sale at Tesco. Chron-ic.

    Whether it’s because I do such a faultless job of this on a regular basis, or because my mom has a tendency to feel like she’s a ‘bother’ if she’s the one that calls me (“I never know what you’re doing! You’re so busy. You could be at work.” “Mom, I keep telling you. If you call me and I’m busy, I just won’t pick up the phone.” I digress.) – my mom hardly ever calls me. But this afternoon I was off work, sitting at a coffee shop, when my phone rang and it was my mom. Calling me!

    We talked about a lot of things, as we always do. Work stress, life stress, good things, challenging things. And at one point, somewhere between good things and challenging things, I mentioned my Bucket Theory. I feel like I tell everyone and their mother about my Bucket Theory, so I was 110% sure I’d already not only mentioned it to my own, but explained it in depth. But it turns out I hadn’t, and because I will never not enjoy the sound of my own voice – especially when expounding my own life views – when she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard about your Bucket Theory” – I LEPT at the opportunity. And as a result, the topic is fresh on my mind, and I figured no time like the present to infect the internet with it.

    So here, un-asked for, is my Bucket Theory.

    We spend an inordinately large amount of time while we’re growing up and getting older being told exactly What Will Make Us Happy. People, society, strangers, LIFE. They all act like there’s a one-size-fits-all formula for how to make a life for yourself that genuinely brings you joy.

    What I spent my twenties doing was unlearning all of that.

    Attaining happiness is only universal in that it can always be broken down into buckets. One bucket, six buckets, twenty buckets, every person is different. The buckets come in all different sizes. Maybe yours are all tiny and easily filled; maybe some are bigger, and need a regularly scheduled top up. But the constant between everyone’s buckets is this: the sum of their parts is a Satisfying, Happy Life. (Accidentally just typed Lie, and I’m gonna go ahead and ignore what that typo is trying to tell me.) The only way your buckets can be Wrong is if they hurt people in the process of being filled. As long as you have peaceful, kind buckets, I truly think your only priority in life should be to define them and fill them however you see fit.

    I believe I’ve gotten to the place I am in life because I figured out what my buckets are and made a big deal out of prioritizing filling them the fuck up. Having my family in my life is a big bucket – but for me, geographic closeness isn’t a requirement of keeping that full. I rely heavily and happily on technology to do so. Having a job that’s satisfying, but also allows me creative freedom in my style and on my days off, is another big old bucket. It needs a regular top up in that I always want to feel driven and like I’m developing the people around me, but I’m quite certain my career bucket will never get any bigger. It will always play second fiddle (second…bucket?) to others.

    And then there are the surprise buckets – Being Near Medieval English Things turned out to be a pretty major one. Nobody told me when I was thirteen that where I live would bring me more happiness than my college degree itself. Tattoos. Financial Independence. Writing – well, no surprise there. Seven year old Kathy could have accurately drawn the size of that bucket right after she wrote her first short story about a girl sneaking off from a family picnic to find a dragon in a hillside cave. It will probably always be my biggest bucket.

    But if your career bucket is your biggest, wahey to you! You will find no judgement here. The same if being physically close to those you love is a big bucket. I get that too. Making a family. Having a dog. Achieving fame. Immersing yourself in other cultures. Helping the environment. Listening to great music. Chocolate chip cookies. They are your buckets. It is your life. Too many people get down on themselves because their buckets are different or strange or maybe even because they’re not different enough. I assure you, it doesn’t matter. Nobody has to deal with whether or not something brings you happiness and fulfillment except You.

    So on this doing-its-damnedest-to-pretend-its-not-Spring April afternoon, if you’re looking for an extra bit of happy in your life, take a look at your buckets. And once you figure them out, there are only two things you need to do: chase their fulfillment like nobody’s business, and never apologize for it.

  • Elixirs

    I can’t sleep.

    I can’t sleep because MY BEST FRIEND WILL BE HERE IN LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS.

    As I type this, she’s probably somewhere over Wyoming, or possibly far-north-Canada because flight paths boggle the mind and almost always curve way more than I expect them to. So, instead of watching Season 1 of Sons of Anarchy for the fiftieth time (this week’s background show, I love you Opie Winston), I’ve thrown on Something Corporate like I’m fifteen and am getting PUMPED for the next six days and spending every minute with one of the most fantastic, comfortable, FLAWLESS humans on this planet.

    (I could not be more thrilled that Linds’ trip (LONDON BABY) landed when it did. We’re gonna grab some well-earned relaxation, hit up the TOWER OF LONDON FOOD FESTIVAL, celebrate my recent promotion, and have first-time-Dublin experiences together. It’s going to be a killer six days. Real talk: even if we sat on the couch the entire time, it’d still be killer. See Kathy’s 2015 Seattle trip for reference.)

    My latest writing project has been collecting stories from the seven years after graduating from college and turning it into something like a collection of essays. Right now it’s pretty structure-less and my commitment to it will likely wane in perfect opposition to the upcoming peak retail season, but for most of the summer I was fairly on-fire creating decent, funny content for the first time in years. I’ll pick it back up any minute here (I have lots of funny content…somewhere, stored away between my childlike boundless enthusiasm and certainty that life IS A MOVIE and every decision should be made as if you’re driving the plot, obviously), but in the mean time I’ve been admiring some of the keener observations these mid-what-the-fuck-years have inspired. And one of those resoundingly true blurbs is an in-the-works story about friendship.

    I won’t poach on the territory my future collection of stories will cover, but the gist of what I realized while writing about friendship is that there’s a very real reason that adult friendships are hard. You can argue it has everything to do with not having time, with not wanting to put yourself out there, with meeting decent funny relatable humans of any gender being equally impossible whether you’re trying to befriend them or (be-?)date them. But I posit that what makes it the most impossible is that the older I get, the less interested I am in spending copious amounts of time downloading all of the necessary life details that are required to understand (and appropriately criticize/commentate/rapidly agree with vim and verve) my reaction to a thirty second conversation I’ve had with my sister. Or other friend. Or coffee lady that I get coffee from every day. Just, who has the time for that? Who has the energy? This is why there is a deeply satisfying level of comfort with old friends. You’ve been through a ton of shit, sure, but sometimes it is just real nice sitting with a person that’s lived through fifteen years of your vibes. Having that common bond isn’t irreplaceable, but dear god the thought of even attempting to replicate it is EXHAUSTING.

    So. This brings me to the level of skin-thrumming excitement inspired by the thought that LINDSAY will be here this time tomorrow. We’ll only have six days together, and we will both be the first to admit that by the end of that six days it’s probably for the best that we part ways because I love that woman but long-term co-living, our souls were not meant for. But those six days will be a laugh-filled elixir of magic best-friendiness, and I need me some of that. Life’s no fun if you don’t get to share it with someone, and as a semi-permanent single person I’m in the camp (roasting s’mores and) insisting that we all spend way too much time acting like that someone has to be the love of our life. I’ve got my bestie. My pallo. And I’m a pretty happy clam.

    Other contributing factors to Happy Clam Status: that promotion I snuck in a few paragraphs ago. When I got the good news last week, I did what used to be the cool thing and I made a Facebook post to commemorate the occasion. I can’t even call it a #humblebrag because it made no bones about my belief that the STARS ALIGNED to make this happen. And even if it was a #humblebrag, sorry for the post I am not, because do you know what it did? It reminded me of how many stunning humans I’ve gotten the chance to work with over the course of the last seven years. Even people that I haven’t spoken with since 2013 and managed in my first leadership position were happy to congratulate me and internet-celebrate how far I’ve come. It was just such a visceral (the internet is not visceral I know but metaphor okay?) way to be reminded of how much I love humans and peoples and teams. Being a manager has afforded me so many opportunities to be silly with people, to work kick-ass hard during a murderous peak day, to share potlock food with, to pick fantastic playlists and badly belt out tunes with. Nothing about the last seven years has been simple, or direct, or easy. And I know the coming months will have their own challenges. But so many amazing humans made the experience worth while.

    And dude – do you know how many amazing people I yet again find myself working with? This world is full of them, guys. If you’re not at a job where you like the people you see every day, you’re not living your best life. (Yes. I know. Best Lives don’t generally include work. But tbh? Mine does. I’d be bored as a Bored Thing without it.)

    In summary: I still can’t sleep. Linds is probably somewhere over Lake Ontario now. Life’s pretty amazing right now.

    AND MY BEST FRIEND WILL BE HERE IN LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS.