Career Advice For Fuckups
I was 30 when I realized I had missed the mark of where someone my age “should” be in life. The biggest relationship of my life had just ended after I’d asked him if he loved me and he said, “I mean, I thought I did? But if I love being away at camp this much instead of at home I must not.” So I moved back to my home city and took stock of my life. I reviewed my assets (none), my career (nonexistent) and my love life (HA!). By the three biggest societal metrics I was losing the race and losing it badly. While my peers were getting married, buying houses, and taking paternity leave from their steady jobs to start families, I scraped by as an administrative assistant and had moved a whopping total of ten times in as many years.
When you are a person who sailed through school without much effort and lived a life of oblivious privilege, it comes as a blow to realize that you are not entitled to a good job, a partner, or a happy life. In fact, when you finally realize that up until adulthood you have been the exception to the harsh social, racial, and economic realities of existence, it’s difficult not to feel contempt for yourself. My life up until that point had dripped with entitlement, and when faced with the reality that I was not where I expected to be, I had to ask myself why I felt I was owed everything on a silver platter. The truth is that I wasn’t, and it took years to accept that and work…
