This is a Post about My Career

In college I spent nearly three years as a technical writing and editing intern at a software company. I was very well paid and had a lot of responsibility and was deeply miserable, at least for the last year or so. Had I stayed there, I’d have had an all but guaranteed full time job after graduation. That would have been the smart thing to do, but, like I mentioned, I was miserable. So I left.

My last semester of college, I was a social media intern for a printer. I was paid four dollars less an hour than I was at my previous internship, but I was over-the-moon happy. I got to brush elbows with publishers and talk about books every day. I got to watch famous books getting printed on massive machines and get woozy from the smell of ink and chemicals in the plant. I talked ice fishing with the managers in the plant and fell in love with the mesmerizing efficiency of the Timson T-32 web press. My boss let me work from home when the weather was shitty or between classes and brought me soup at my desk when I was sick.

I started applying for jobs in March of 2018 in anticipation of my graduation in May. I had a few phone interviews—one with a publisher in Chicago I’d connected with through my internship—and my future was spread out before me with seemingly endless options (I’d insert the fig tree passage from The Bell Jar here but if you know me you know I’ve already beaten that one to death.) Maybe too many, honestly.

My degree is in English, and my heart is in publishing. The heart of publishing is in New York, but there are small presses in the Midwest doing neat stuff and I’d rather die than move to New York. So when it became clear that the job in Chicago was not going to work out, and my partner and I solidified our plans to live together, we had to narrow down locations for the job hunt. We settled on the Twin Cities.

There are a handful of indie presses in Minneapolis, including Graywolf and Coffee House Press and Milkweed Editions, which publish beautiful books and nurture a vibrant literary scene committed to diversity and inclusivity. They are indie presses, so their staffs are small. What I’m getting at, reader, is that none of them have hired me yet, despite my brilliance. More on that later.

After I graduated I decided to move home to save money—although I’d end up paying rent at my place in my college town through the summer—and had a hodgepodge of jobs that mostly kept me afloat. First, my boss from the printer offered me the opportunity to continue my social media job as a freelancer, just through the summer, while I looked for a full time job and they looked for their next intern. Second, a professor and mentor signed me on in an unofficial capacity to continue my work with the press at my university; I helped with a few projects here and there and got to keep my foot in the door of the small press industry. It’s not a paying gig, but it feeds my soul and I’m happy they’ve decided to keep me around. Finally, I picked up where I’d left off at the funeral home—I’ll write more on that another time—as office assistant for my aunt Pam and her team.

Admittedly, I spent very little time working and a lot of time poolside with the dog, applying for jobs in and around the Twin Cities while my partner applied and interviewed for teaching jobs in the area. By the end of July he’d accepted a job offer and we began to earnestly look for somewhere to live. We found a great apartment, signed the lease, and were set to move in at the end of August.

The first week at our new place, I had an interview for a job that would turn out to be a horrible fit. I continued applying and interviewing and freelancing for the printer until they cut me loose in September. While we waited for my partner’s first paycheck to direct deposit we lived mostly on salsa made from tomatoes and peppers from my mom’s garden. With no income, I got more desperate with my applications and things were getting bleak. How had we moved to one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the country and still I couldn’t find a job? I wasn’t even looking in my field anymore, because those jobs were limited at best.

As of right now, I’ve been on the job hunt for over a year. I’ve turned down one offer. Reader, it fucking sucks.

I work in retail now, which I’d never done before, and it fucking sucks. I like the people I work with. They’re kind and funny and make an interesting cast of characters in the stories I tell my partner and friends. But it’s retail, and I have a degree, and it makes me feel like shit. (And knowing that deep down I think me and my degree are “above” working retail also makes me feel like shit, believe me.)

Once, my partner’s boss, the principal at his school, came into the store and I spent an hour dodging behind racks of clothes while she browsed so she wouldn’t see me. Once in a while I’ll see his students shopping and have the same reaction. I know there’s no shame in working to pay your bills. I know that, degree or not, labor has value, but that value doesn’t have a direct relation to the person doing the labor. I know all these things, but seeing people who maybe have a different idea about me when I’m wearing my nametag and folding underwear makes me want to disappear. I guess I’m not afraid that they’ll think less of me for working retail, but that they’ll feel bad for me, because they know I have a degree and ambitions that more directly align with a cubicle than a checkout lane. I kind of want them to feel bad for me, because I feel bad for me.

Even on days when I don’t mind my job, I am reminded of the tiny ways in which capitalism still manages to make it miserable. For example, during my interview, I was told in hushed tones that the starting wage would likely go up to fifteen dollars an hour within the next year or two. That’s on trend with a lot of states, so I wasn’t really surprised. There wasn’t much more talk about it until recently, as we began implementing new practices determined by the corporate office.

These new practices were introduced with the tease of that raise to fifteen dollars an hour and the suggestion that a higher wage will mean more responsibility.

Sure, if you get a non-performance-based raise in an office job, it typically means your position is changing, along with your responsibilities. But our jobs aren’t changing, even if the way we do our jobs is a little different. The wage is being raised to fifteen dollars an hour because that’s a living wage these days. We’re not being rewarded for hard work; this is a response to the economy we’re living in. But this raise is being dangled like a carrot in front of our noses so that we are led to believe that’s not the case. And that makes me want to puke. Nobody is sacrificing so that we may eventually make a living wage. It’s not something we should be made to think we must work harder to earn, because making a living wage for your labor is a right, not a privilege.

I guess at least I’m familiar enough with corporate condescension and can recognize it in the wild? Gag me. My coworkers are mostly adults, and they deserve better than being made to feel like they’re not earning their keep, even if it doesn’t bother them as much as it does me.

I haven’t worked in an office in a year but am still feeling those same middle-management irritations. In moments where my motivation to apply to other jobs stagnates, I’m reminded of this attitude and kick it back into high gear.

Interning at a software company, in a corporate environment, turned me off such employment forever. The more experience I got, the more responsibility was piled on. This makes sense, right? Except that I was doing more work than most of the full time employees in my department within the confines of 20 hour weeks, and with no benefits. For a long time I thrived off that responsibility and knowing that I was good at my job. But middle management—or, rather, mismanagement—made it impossible for the pros to outweigh the cons. And now I’m getting the same bullshit at a place where my greatest responsibility is marking down men’s underwear? C’mon.

When I get really depressed about not having a “real” job, I consider what it would be like if I’d have stuck it out with that software company and gotten my guaranteed job offer. I would have health insurance, and regular hours with weekends off. I would spend my days at a desk instead of on my feet. I would still get to hang out with the friends I made there, and I would enjoy yearly bonuses. My partner would get to teach and keep living near his home and his family. I would be closer to my family.

On the flip-side, I would also, undoubtedly, be even more miserable than before. I would be getting underpaid—although interns were paid handsomely, full time employees in that role are pitifully compensated, well below the industry standard—to do more work than most of my peers and have little room for growth. I would be working in my field, but on mind-numbing technical documentation rather than interesting or inspiring or weird stories. I would still be mostly without a creative outlet.

It doesn’t really help me at all to wonder “what-if?” I didn’t stick around because I wasn’t happy, and applying for a job there now would feel like defeat after leaving on not-great terms. I don’t think a meager benefits package would make me feel better.

In a way I’m hoping this blog will help fill in the gaps. I have a semi-creative outlet, I’m keeping up on my writing skills—debatable, you may be thinking—and if I’m as lucky as a thousand mommy bloggers in Utah, someday I can monetize this.

In five to ten years it’s possible that the press I worked with at my university will have the funds to make me a full-time paid fixture. That hope keeps me going most of the time. It would mean moving back to central Wisconsin where we’re closer to our families and the community we love so much. But five to ten years is a long time, and clinging to that very narrow hope is dangerous.

I want to work in publishing, but really I want to do anything that means creating. I want to work with people whose lives are totally different than mine, who have a unique story to tell, and who want to make the world a better place to be a person. Most of the jobs I apply to now are in corporate offices, which make me want to throw up, but it’s something, right? It’s an increased income with benefits so that I can springboard—a nasty, corporate word—into something more rewarding and less soul-sucking. But I can’t even do that. Just writing about it is bumming me out.

I know I am smart and talented and hardworking, and I am just waiting impatiently for anyone to say, “Alright, let’s give her a shot.” My main consolation when I get passed up for jobs is that at least it means I am surrounded by people who are extremely talented and someday I might get to work with them.

All this grumbling comes with the crushing reminder that I am very, very privileged and things could be much worse. I am healthy! I have a strong support system! I am college educated! I eat three meals a day! I have a job! My herbs are starting to sprout! Quit your whining, dummy!!!

My life is good, but it is hard sometimes. Feeling professionally unfulfilled has intensified my depression, which was worsened by a nasty winter. Something will come up eventually—I know that. But the wait sure is a bitch.

Lexie

This is a Post about Love

On Friday my partner and I celebrated three years together. I didn’t plan on this post lining up with that occasion, but serendipitously it has. Here is my love story.

I’ve always been pretty cynical about love. My parents are divorced. My mom remarried and sometimes I wonder if she and my dad—not my “bio-dad,” as a counselor once called my biological father—are even in love anymore. As a preteen I used to agonize over the question of love. I remember once asking my mom frantically, “But what if my soulmate lives across the world or doesn’t speak English or we never meet and know that we’re soulmates even though we are and I never find love?” I think she said something like, “Chill out,” which I now have to admit was perfectly fair.

I have a history of ending relationships at the drop of a hat. My romantic attention span is mortifyingly short. Boo-hoo. But, like most people, I cling to the shred of hope that someone will come along and all the fairy tales and romantic comedies will make sense.

I know I am not the first person to say this.

I feel embarrassed to call myself a writer (but why should I?). Even so, as a young writer I always found myself crafting the same story over and over again. There was a charmingly mismatched couple who would fight a lot, but love would always bring them back together again until, one day, it didn’t.

Annoyed as I was to be trapped by this trope, I couldn’t shake it from my system. All my stories reflected some weird, failed relationship of my past or present, and it felt like analyzing it and trying to make it poetry made it okay to have failed. But had I failed? Is tragedy beautiful? Blah, blah, blah.

I think a big misconception about relationships is that they need to lead somewhere. But what I’ve observed is that I’ve learned more about myself through relationships than I have about love. My past boyfriends have taught me the kinds of qualities I hate, the qualities I love, and the ones I never thought about before. I thought my past boyfriends taught me I have a hard time saying “I love you” but now in hindsight I can see that I don’t. I’d just been hanging out with guys I wasn’t in love with. (And that’s fine!)

But then I did it. I met him: the “I love you” guy. It happened by accident, the way it always does. He’s funny and he thinks I’m funny. In fact, while I was drooling over him the spring of my sophomore year and tweeting brazenly about my infatuation, he was researching me online and, seeing those tweets, suspected they might be about him. Of course, when I found this out I was mortified. He was kind enough to tell me on my 21^st birthday.

But maybe there’s something charming about diving headlong into it. Maybe it’s funny or brave to be publicly vulnerably. Maybe not. But he saw it and was into it, and that’s been the basis of this whole thing since we decided to give it a shot. But back to the “I love you” thing.

It took me about four months to realize I felt it and wanted to say it. Then it took another three to muster up the courage to actually do it. I wanted the perfect place, the best possible timing, a calmness in my gut that would make the words tumble out easily.

Here’s a secret, free of charge: it doesn’t happen like that.

It went like this:

We had class together and peer-reviewed each other’s essays. I complained about my next class (Intro to Linguistics, taught by a guy who hated all my opinions, answers, and explanations) and he said, after telling me his next class had been cancelled, “Skip it.” So I did.

I had been agonizing over saying “I love you” for months, as you know, and kept giving myself these arbitrary deadlines to finally bite the bullet and do it. Another part of me insisted I’d say it when I was good and ready, god damn it. That day I skipped class out of pressure to meet my personal deadline before I’d go home for the weekend.

So we walked back to my apartment from class and he told me about issues at the student newspaper (at which he was the managing editor) while I packed my things. I drove the three blocks to his house and parked outside. He unbuckled his seatbelt and I panicked, grabbing his chin and blurting, “Listen.” Don’t ask me why that was my move—to this day, I’m still not sure.

He said, “What?”

I said, “I love you, and you don’t have to say it back. I just wanted you to know.”

I watched him smile and heard him say, “I love you, too.”

I positively melted. Then we kissed goodbye and I told everyone I knew, hives spreading across my chest with a vengeance.

So it happened like that. It was imperfect, and weird, and terrifying. But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Gag!

What’s your point, idiot? Fair enough. My point is this, and don’t hate me if you’ve heard it before: it pays to let go and take a chance. Look at each relationship as a learning experience. If it goes south, it’s fine. If it changes your life, it’s fine. If it’s the most boring thing ever to happen to you, it’s fine. Take it and learn from it. Indulge in it. Enjoy it. Laugh. Allow yourself to appreciate that, at least for a time, you were happy with the person. Figure out why the bad stuff made you unhappy so you can avoid it in the future.

Most importantly, say what you think, and say it like you mean it. Be vulnerable. Like asking your boss for a raise, you can’t approach love without putting yourself out there and risking failure. The beauty of it is that you get re-do’s forever and ever, until you croak happily alone or happily hitched to some other weirdo.

Find the “I love you” person. Find ten of them. Find the happy things.

You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips, airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living, breathing, screaming invitation to believe in better things. –Jamie Tworkowski

Years later, literally, I realized the moment my “I love you” guy knew he was falling in love with me. He was having a panic attack. (Stay with me.) I wonder if he even realizes this was the moment. On the other hand, maybe he’ll read this and ask me, “How’d you get this from that?”

Anyway.

We’d talked about our struggles with anxiety and depression and, admittedly, we were both having a tough time that first summer we spent together. He’d just come back to school to try a new path and I was just generally depressed. Also, my car had taken a shit and I needed to buy a new one, and soon, but I didn’t have any fucking money.

Anyway, we were in his bedroom at the house he shared with two other guys and a dog named Poncho and he was lying on his back in his bed, raking furiously through his hair and perspiring. I don’t remember what we’d been talking about, but this sort of came out of nowhere. Now, this is a telltale sign of a panic attack, but at the moment, I couldn’t get a read on the situation at all. He wouldn’t say what was wrong. I lay down next to him and put my head on his chest and his heart was racing. It was a hot summer and the panic was overheating him and he was uncomfortable with the closeness so I sat up again and just stared into his rumpled face.

Finally, after some more prodding he said, “I’m just scared.” And I instantly felt better and probably even smiled a little, which I’m sure he didn’t appreciate at the time. “I don’t know how to do this,” he added.

That was all? He was scared? Of me? (Well, to be fair, he wouldn’t be the first one I’d scared off.) I had never been in love before, not really—although I once asked my mom how she knew she was in love and, thinking of a certain boyband member, admitted that I was in love—but something about that moment was calming where before it would have thrown me into a panic attack.

In the past, any time I could feel a boyfriend getting too attached, I bristled and sent him packing. Don’t be dependent on me, don’t be in love with me, and do not ask me to reciprocate, please. But this was very different.

When this guy said he was scared, it meant he was getting attached, but it freaked him out a little, too. And although I was scared of getting attached because I was new to love, it felt like trying and failing with this guy would be worth the trouble. So, in response to “I don’t know how to do this,” I think I laughed and said something along the lines of, “Uh, me either, dummy.”

I don’t think that sentiment was particularly comforting to him at the time, but our shared anxiousness about being together—maybe forever or maybe ruining the whole thing somewhere down the line—comforted me, because it meant we were on the same wavelength. This was new and freaky and we were both stumbling around blind in the dark, but at least we were holding sweaty hands. When before I’d have taken the first signs of trouble and run far, far away, this one seemed like he was worth the work.

How embarrassing!

Being in love with the guy who panicked at the prospect of being in love with me has been an incredible gift. I can see futures where our love crashes and burns and I am devastated beyond repair, and I can see futures where we grow old together with kids who are stone cold weirdos like us. Any way I imagine it, the time we’ve spent together has helped me grow into myself.

I am still depressed a lot of the time. My career is nonexistent. My January rent check bounced. The handle on our fridge is broken and our landlords won’t let us get a dog. Things could be better. But I am so genuinely happy. My partner is a sentimental packrat who knows exactly how to make me laugh and exactly what kind of beer and/or ice cream to bring home when I’ve been tweeting about being depressed all day. He has sacrificed a great deal to make it possible for me to chase a career in a new city. When I was still figuring out I was gluten intolerant he’d whip the car around at the drop of a hat to get me to a gas station so I could have an emergency poop. He makes French toast on Sunday mornings and makes mine extra eggy because gluten-free bread is intolerably dry. His family has pulled me in and doused me in love and encouragement.

And if we crash and burn in five years or two months or whatever, it will have been worth it. It’ll rip me to shreds, to be sure, but it will have been worth it. I could write about him all day, and sometimes do. What a gift.

You may be reading this and thinking, Lexie, you guys sound insufferable. You’re right. That’s fine. Or maybe you’re reading it and thinking, This sounds nothing like my relationship, but I’m happy, or, This sounds just like my relationship, but I’m not happy. Love—platonic and romantic—is, fortunately, not one-size-fits-all. It’s a combination of your best and worst pieces matching up with the best and worst pieces of someone else and that match enriching your days. And if the match doesn’t enrich your days anymore, it’s okay to fall out of love or friendship or whatever. You’ll find it again.

Although sometimes it feels like it’s dragging along, life is genuinely too short to try to force companionship with people you aren’t compatible with anymore. IT’S OKAY!

Love is funny and weird and hard but what else is there? Romantic love and platonic love are at the root of so many of my greatest joys. Girls grow up with all these notions about what love and relationships should look like, but once you figure out it can be whatever it is—within reason, of course—you’re free to love how you like. You can see that falling in love many times with many places and things and people is a good thing. Love isn’t a finite resource. It’s actually, spectacularly, renewable, when little else is. Give and receive it generously. Why not?

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Love”:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

This is a Post about Heartbreak

Mom, don’t read this. Or maybe you should. Proceed with caution.

I had an epiphany recently, but not the fun or productive kind. This epiphany sucks. It’s this: my parents—and by extension, most of my family—liked me better before I became myself.

To be sure, I was never a perfect mold of them, but until I became myself I guess I was still mostly palatable, mostly them, mostly a polished fun-house mirror they were proud of. I don’t think they’re not proud of me anymore, and I don’t think they don’t love me, but perhaps they don’t like me very much.

The things that now make them bristle are the very things they taught me all along, more or less. We have always had many of the same values—work hard, treat others the way you’d like to be treated, be honest, be kind, etc.—but now that I’m myself I see that there have been caveats I hadn’t been made privy to. Maybe you see where this is going.

This is the story of how my mom was the first—the only—person to break my heart.

There was a band called Meg & Dia I used to listen to in the early aughts that sound exactly like 2004. That’s the only way to describe them. A quick Google search tells me they were active 2004-2012, but I guess I was just a fan of their early stuff (you can imagine me wearing a fedora and then you stuffing that fedora up my butt if it makes you feel better about that whole thing).

I think it’s corny—although I did it a lot growing up, and admittedly still do—to posit that a song describes you perfectly, especially by some obscure alternative band that has no legacy. (But if it were a poem, wouldn’t that be highbrow? That’s a conversation for another day.) But Meg & Dia have this song called “Masterpiece” which, after it shuffled back into my brain, triggered this stupid epiphany.

Like I said, they sound like 2004, so bear with me.

The first lines are: It’s too bad you knew me / when I wasn’t ready.

God, okay, so we’re off to a prolific start.

I have always been close to my family, particularly my mom’s side. My mom has five siblings, four of whom are brothers, who have spent my entire life poking fun at my hipster glasses and weird sense of style and teaching me to play guitar. My aunt and I, thankfully, still get along great; she’s young and fun and raised me on the Beastie Boys and Daft Punk and shooed me into her bathroom when I had to fart.

My mom’s side of the family is fun. They are hardworking, blue-collar people who are kind and silly and alarmingly Polish and somehow all great at cooking. When we get together there are three to five conversations happening over the dinner table at once, and we’re all participating in all of them like it’s the most natural thing in the world. We always end up talking about poop at dinner, or someone’s weird ailment. There’s always coffee with dessert.

I remember seeing my grandparents fight—it was more of an argument, in hindsight—once when I was a kid, and it really startled me. They liked to poke fun at one another and play bluegrass music on the speakers outside by the pool. My grandpa was almost always plucking away some lick at his guitar by the dinner table and my grandma was—is—always cooking and fussing over the rest of us and telling us there’s too many people in the kitchen.

I spent a lot of time with them as a child, swimming in their pool in the summer or sledding down their giant hills in the winter. Once we walked out to the river and built a fire right there on the ice and I felt like I was in the coolest children’s book ever. We would walk out in the woods to look at the princess pines and birch trees and moss and climb up the sand dunes with the dog, always a German shepherd, tagging along behind. In the summer Grandma would make a pile of cucumber sandwiches and a pitcher of iced tea and bring it down to us in the pool on a tray like we were royalty, and our pruny hands would drip in the bag of chips until a grown-up noticed and shooed us away. My childhood was full of exploration and imagination and magic.

When my grandpa died suddenly and tragically my freshman year of college, things began to fall apart. I’ll write more about that another time at length, but that’s where all this comes from, I think.

Up until this point, I was convinced my family was pretty normal. All the families on TV shows and movies were full of some scandal or other, but my family was just fun and weird and normal. My childhood was good and without trauma. I guess that’s why when my grandpa died things went off the rails for all of us.

In the wake of my grandpa’s death there were tide pools of grief that we’d all trip into randomly throughout the day and devolve into sadness. Well-kept secrets oozed out from the cracks and I learned that my family was not so normal. It wasn’t anything crazy or dramatic, but it was enough to open my eyes.

My foray into depression had happened years before, in high school, so when my mom got sucked into depression, I was there to help. The older I got, the closer we became, and she was without a doubt my very best friend. I had friends at school, of course, but Mom was my rock. Now I had to be hers, and I was ready for that role.

By and large, my grandpa’s death broke what made my mom’s side of the family silly and carefree. Therapists everywhere would be horrified by the many ways we did not deal with that trauma. I was horrified. Grief made my family bitter and miserable. The easy comradery was gone. After the funeral I had to go back to school and take my first college finals, and my family was left without me to stew in their misery.

That went on for months and years. Then came a little demon called the election. By this point I was a junior in college and, far from my family and my small-town upbringing, I had changed a lot.

Actually, no. I don’t think I changed much. I matured a lot. I learned a lot. I met a lot of people who taught me about privilege and inclusivity and injustice and the values I’d been raised with finally had roots in reality.

It’s too bad you knew me / when I wasn’t ready.

By my calculations, I was basically a half-baked person when I was closest with my family, which probably isn’t uncommon. These were the people with whom I spent all my time. Their worldview shaped mine and, before it was rocked by tragedy, was pretty harmless. They knew me best when I was the closest approximation of a sum of all their parts. It makes sense. Then, when time and distance and trauma were added to the equation, we weren’t ready to meet each other anew. They were—are—all very much elbows-deep in unprocessed grief, and my whole worldview had been shattered and glued back together a little differently. No wonder we felt like strangers.

The refrain of “Masterpiece” asks, Isn’t it strange to think that you created all of me? And then the chorus challenges, Aren’t you proud you’re the one that made me? Two sides of the same coin. Woof.

College made me different. Duh. I was raised with all the Good Values you hope to see in a person: kind, hardworking, generous, honest, loyal, devastatingly beautiful, hilarious, etc., etc. (That’s a joke. Things have gotten pretty heavy.) Those things never changed, but they evolved and were given depth when I met more than two people of color and learned that trans people exist and that my middle class upbringing was a walk in the park compared to some of my friends’ lives.

I still had—have—all the traits my parents instilled in me. But they have different meaning to me, which is maybe not what they planned. I care about issues that never occurred to them to even think about. The woman who was once my best friend doesn’t really recognize me anymore, can’t smell herself on me and identify me as her own. Our conversations are strained and shallow and, although I miss my family, whenever I go home to visit I feel like I’m holding my breath.

Either I speak up when someone says something shitty and actually stand behind my beliefs, or I keep the peace and feel like a useless ally. I still can’t figure out which is worse.

It’s possible—and probable—that all my family’s worst bits were well hidden beneath the surface when I was a child, and the bitterness I see now was just dormant or above my head. Certainly ignorance and bigotry were always there, like they were in me before I was forced out of my very narrow comfort zone. But where had all those Good Values gone? When my grandpa died, they became less important, I think, because they felt as if life was unfair to even the hardest working, most honorable people. So fuck working hard and being kind, because what does it get you but pain? Never mind that tragedy knows no bounds, no race, no class, no religion or any other arbitrary category. That’s the best read I can get on it, anyway.

And I see it differently, I guess, so we find ourselves at a frigid impasse. We are strangers cut from the same cloth, which has been the greatest heartbreak of my life. I miss them. They will read this and feel betrayed, probably, or misunderstood. They are tired of confrontation with me and my sister and my cousin and the scant others in our family who hear some off-color comment at the dinner table and exchange looks that say, “Are you hearing this shit?”

This isn’t to say we don’t still have fun together, because of course we do. Just this weekend my mom and younger siblings came to visit and we had a great time. There were no political arguments, no hurt feelings. When I make it back home to visit, we mostly get along fine. For a while things were tense, but now we just avoid certain topics.

Maybe that’s why I’m still bitter. I feel as though I have two options: speak on my beliefs openly and effectively shred the fabric of our family, or not talk about anything really important and enjoy our time together when we have it. I think most people do the latter, because it’s easier and less painful, but it sucks. I don’t want to play nice with bigots, even if they’re the people who raised me. But I also know the people who raised me are mostly good, so how has it come to this? Isn’t it my responsibility as a Woke Person to speak up when I hear someone being an asshole? Can’t I take the easy way out and just let it go in one ear and out the other so I don’t have to feel like shit all the time?

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry I didn’t turn out as they’d planned, except I’m built from all the materials I was given. I think I am you but more empathetic, and that makes you deeply uncomfortable because it challenges what you thought made you Good. It’s not easy for me to write any of this, or to choke it out tearfully every couple months when we decide to talk about it. I’ve tried time and again to articulate my heartbreak. I miss you, but I cannot look you in the eyes as you are and say that you are my best friends. I need you to work harder. I know you won’t say that you’re disappointed that I’ve turned out so different than you expected, but Now that I’m all that you planned, tell me, what do you think?

Lexie

Recommended reading for “This is a Post about Heartbreak”:

The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina

Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson

Here Goes Somethin’

This blog started out as a book idea, which is hilarious, because I am not qualified to write a book or even, really, a blog. I used to write a blog after I graduated high school about hating my body and being depressed and homesick and declaring my major in college. That blog was cathartic for me, but it led to some dean of students or someone or other knocking on my dorm room door to do a wellness check because someone was blogging about being depressed on campus. Whoops.

I’m only 22 now and my life, in the grand scheme of things, has not changed much since I first blogged my way into the hearts and worries of strangers. I will be 23 in June, which will make me an expert on life and adulthood. Kidding.

But, I have spent the last four years learning more than I ever wanted to know about myself, and I suspect that trend will continue. And because I spend too many hours a day scrolling through Twitter and Instagram, absorbing the successes of others while my five-year-plan disintegrates before my eyes, I think it may be good for me to talk about that, because I know I’m not the only one. In fact, I love stories about failure, and sadness, and grief, and disappointments. Life on Instagram is, more often than not, shiny and exciting. And I get it. Sharing photos of ourselves when we feel good, or our families when we’re having fun, or the meal we made that looks amazing, feels good. I don’t think it’s vapid and I don’t think it’s necessarily ruining all our self-esteem.

Fortunately for me, as much as I love sad stories, I love success stories too. I love seeing my friends’ selfies when you can see in their eyes that they feel good about who they are. I love seeing their travels, and the gorgeous food they eat, and the goofy things they do with their families. It doesn’t make me feel bad, which is a giant blessing considering how much time I spend on the internet. But I know it’s not the whole story, and so do you…I hope.

I don’t know what this blog will become or whether it will last very long. I don’t know whether anyone will read this post or any beyond it, but what I do know is that my life is at a weird point and if I don’t have some kind of creative outlet, I’m gonna lose it. So because I live for oversharing, I’m going to try to overshare in more than 280 characters, publicly, because maybe some of the epiphanies I’ve had lately are ones that haven’t occurred to you yet. Maybe hearing about poop emergencies and familial estrangement will make you feel like your life isn’t so strange. (Spoiler alert: everyone’s life is weird and full of gross, horrible, difficult stuff. We just don’t love sharing it on Instagram. Except me. I’ll make you feel better about your gross, horrible stuff.)

People have told me over the years—and you can blame them for any inflation of my ego—that I’m a good writer. So I hope that this combination of weird stories and an alright handle on communication will mean something to anyone, even if they don’t know who I am (and ten points to you if you can name that reference).

I am a big sister to two tweens who are reluctant to ask for or listen to advice. But I have always been hugely maternal, obnoxiously overzealous in my desire to comfort and advise and give input. Someone, somewhere has to need that in their lives, right? I’m your mom now.

At this point, I’m getting away from myself, and you’re surely getting bored. Since I mentioned this blog started as a book idea (honestly, who do I think I am?), below you can read my annotated introduction to that book/this blog. It’s not very good, and I know that, but what fun is it if I can’t show you how embarrassing I was just a few years ago? I wrote a few pages for that potential book and will use them to inform this blog, I guess, and it should be a treat to see how 19-year-old me informs what 22-year-old me cares about now.

I knew I was going to write this book [BLOG] my sophomore year of college as I found myself scrambling across a 2000-space parking lot on my way to work. My car was nowhere in sight, and although I had just run about a hundred errands on campus, I was convinced I’d somehow be late to work. Unless I got abducted by aliens in that elusive parking lot, however, that was impossible. Let me give you a little context.

My Wednesdays were busy–four of my five classes met and I went to my internship for a few hours between the last two. My third class got cancelled (that’s the one before work) and I had an hour to spare. I managed to cruise downtown to the post office, pick up my copy of a zine I’d contributed to from the Women’s Resource Center, and do some Christmas shopping at the campus bookstore with time to spare.

I really had no reason to believe I’d be late. In fact, I wound up in my desk forty-five minutes early. But when you have time anxiety and what feels like a billion obligations on your nineteen-year-old plate, the question where the fuck did I park!? [I still ask myself this most days, even in the tiniest of parking lots.] is enough to send a girl reeling. [We love a good cliché.]

Here’s how I make it work anyway. [Bold to say I’m “making it work,” young lady.]

Thanks for being here. Stick around if you like.

Lexie