Archive for November 2010

December to Remember.

So, maybe that’s the title of a Lexus holiday sale, but it’s also the topic of my upcoming blogging project.

I’ve been writing, inconsistently, since 2nd grade when my teacher, Mr. Carmichael, gave us those elementary school journals — the ones where you have the space above the entry to draw a picture and the extra large lines with the guidelines to learn how to write cursive. I would fill the journals faster than anyone else in the class and had to keep asking for more.

When I got to middle school, I joined the newspaper staff and started writing as much as I could. I stayed on that for a few years until I got to high school when I joined the yearbook staff. For two years, I slaved over a sub-par 96-page yearbook before I was finally made editor my senior year. I was so dedicated that i locked myself in the journalism room while my classmates decorated for Homecoming for 4 hours. If only I would’ve known, I could’ve helped them spell sophomore right (they forgot the second o).

My collegiate writing consisted of about 30 articles written over the course of three years for the arts and entertainment section and papers for classes. I’d occasionally write on my LiveJournal (or three) about overly personal things like troubles with my boyfriend and my roommates.

Now that I’m not writing for school or publications, it’s harder to force myself to write, hence the inconsistency. I keep looking for blogging challenges and projects and never find anything that really suits me. So, that’s why I made this one up.

Over the past few months, I’ve really thought a lot about the art of storytelling and what it means to my writing. I’m not the best writer, but I constantly want to learn and grow and continuing to write is the only way to achieve this. I’ve always wanted to tell stories and I’m beginning to do that in my professional life, so why can’t I do it in my personal life, too?

So, here’s my December blogging challenge to myself:

1. Write 750 words every day before 9 a.m.
2. Tell a story that means something to me.
3. Hit publish every day.

This is a lofty challenge, I know. I only updated once in October and I’ve updated more times this weekend than the entire month of November. That said, I’m going to try it to get back in touch with my writing, my blog, and my voice.

If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

As a do-gooder, bleeding heart liberal, I constantly struggle with finding fulfilling work. I constantly need my job to grow, change, and evolve. It’s stressful and demanding and this doesn’t work for everyone. Some of the smartest people I know have jobs that rarely change or they stay in the same position for 3, 4, even 5 years.

That’s not me. I’ve gone through three career changes in the 28 months since I’ve officially graduated from college.

When I started in the music industry, I thought it was a great opportunity. I thought that I’d be able to make connections with agents, musicians, and publications and freelance for The Voice or Rolling Stone. None of that happened. I was constantly searching for something else to do, constantly wanting to utilize skills I’d gained while obtaining my fancy-pants degree. I asked to write. I was turned down. I asked to work on contract. I was turned down. I asked to attend marketing meetings. I was told to kill the ambition. I should’ve realized, at that point, that the job wasn’t for me. However, I kept trucking along accepting my fate until I finally got laid off.

Moving back to DC for the nonprofit job was a big step for me. It was the first time in my life I accepted that I wasn’t going to be the next feature writer for Rolling Stone or an editor for one of the many now-defunct music and pop culture magazines I used to read. Things were great at the nonprofit at first. I learned a lot, and I learned it fast. I learned how to develop email marketing campaigns, engage with people through social media, and execute online communications plans. I was good at it, really good. Not too long after I started, I realized there was no overall communications plan for the organization (a result of an ad hoc marketing department created 20 years after the organization started… 20 years too late). No one had developed boiler plates or elevator pitches to describe our services and couldn’t justify spending resources to do it now. Furthermore, I hated that I had to sugar-coat everything to make it environmentalism more palatable for our audiences. I fought for 8 months to make our writing and efforts more pointed, more advocative until I eventually gave up.

Leaving the nonprofit job was hard. I liked my coworkers, I mostly liked my boss, and I liked the responsibility I was allowed to have. In my job hunt, I decided I wanted to work for a creative firm that works with nonprofits who need help executing their online communications campaigns. I thought that we’d be able to pitch them grand, exciting, out-of-the-box ideas knowing sometimes they’d stick, sometimes they wouldn’t. I quickly learned that wasn’t the case. Instead, we work under contracts that rarely change. Once a year, we can go to our clients and tell them how we can improve their services, make their online communications better, and deliver better results. Even though the change isn’t as rapid and extreme as I was expecting, I can at least see where this is going and the potential it has to grow.

These career changes have taught me one important lesson: I can’t get everything I need out of one job. That’s never going to happen. What I can do is supplement my work projects that mean something to me and to others. Also, if I don’t start taking advantage of the skills and knowledge I’ve obtained in my various jobs to better myself, my community, and others, what value do I really have at the end of the day?

Ever since Digital Capital Week, I’ve been floating around ideas about digital literacy, community computer education, and generational divide in my head. This morning, I finally thought of an idea so crazy, it might actually work. It was one of those stop-blowdrying-your-hair-and-write-this-down type of ideas. I have all the resources in my head or at my fingertips (through the connections I’ve made in social media) I need to make this happen.

So, here goes.

All cannot be forgiven.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for being crushed, repeatedly, by life. Without those lessons, without all that heartache, I wouldn’t be grateful for the amazing opportunities and people life is handing me at the moment.

I’m a firm believer that the only way to truly know if you love someone is if they have the capacity to hurt you. Think about it. If you don’t care what someone has to say, or they don’t add to your life, what does it matter if they stand you up? What does it matter if they say something mean? It doesn’t.

When you start to let your guard down and accept that person for who they are, and what they mean to you, that’s when you set yourself up for soul-crushing heartache. Sometimes you get crushed, sometimes you’re the crusher. Both rip your heart out.

I’ve been crushed a lot. I used to think it was my fault, that I deserved it or that there was a reason people kept doing this to me over and over again. It wasn’t until my last good crushing that I finally figured out the reason I kept getting crushed: I kept allowing it to happen. I kept setting myself up for situations by being insecure and allowing others to take all the control, losing myself in the process. I kept thinking, “everyone deserves a second chance.” I kept forgetting about myself.

The three great, big crushings in my life have come at the result of a boy, a family member, and a job… and all within 8 months of each other. In each one of these circumstances, neither me nor the other was entirely to blame. Admittedly, I made a lot of mistakes. I kept repeating these patterns over and over again before finally realizing: no matter how much you try to fix something, the hurt will never go away.

Maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe you don’t need to forget the hurt, but learn from it instead.

• I’ve learned not everyone and everything deserves a second chance… for several reasons. Sometimes, you’ve been hurt so much you can never go back. The damage can’t be undone and no one can ever make it right no matter how much you try. Other times, you need to make that clean break when something hurts you so both of you can become stronger. Only then can you apply the lessons you’ve learned to your next situation. It doesn’t make you or the other bad or damaged, instead, it makes you better. It makes you better prepared and capable to deal with future situations.
• I’ve learned you can’t force something to better itself. Personally, there are things I cannot get over or accept. I now know where these boundaries lie. I know that, no matter how much you love something or someone, there are certain things they don’t deserve forgiveness for. That doesn’t make them a bad or terrible person, but it makes them not right for you.
• I’ve learned to speak up and be confident in what I have to say. I’ve been set myself up for failure by being too optimistic, brushing important things to the side, and even speaking my opinion too loudly. However, only when I exercise the latter do I not feel as though I’ve cheated myself.

So, for that, I thank you — thank you for crushing me. Thank you for dealing me heartache so painful, so unbearable I never thought I’d get out of bed. Thank you for forcing me to learn lessons the hard way. Thank you for reminding me that no one or no thing is perfect. Thank you for making me accept that all cannot be forgiven.

Thank you.

Where do we go from here?

My story isn’t unique.

When I got laid off from the music industry in early 2009, I built myself a social media campaign with Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging presences to get a job. I was one of the lucky ones that was able to do so in just two months, but so many people are still looking for jobs in this industry. At the time, these stories were unheard of, but now they’re a dime a dozen (I’ve since found two different jobs through social media).

Everyone and their brother is trying to be a social media expert, ninja, guru, evangelist, cat wrangler or whatever the buzzword is that week. The first thing they do to achieve that goal: build an online persona. Anyone can attend a webinar and read a few things on Wikipedia to get themselves started. That isn’t the tough part, though; the hard part is figuring out what to do with it if and when you have a devoted community of individuals helping you achieve your goals, promoting your messages, and interacting with you both offline and online.

Over the past two years, I’ve built myself my own online community of 999 individuals (okay, there are probably some spammers, too) that listen to what I have to say. I’ve met close to 200 of them and formed close and/or meaningful relationships with 15 or so that have gone far beyond the online spectrum.nNow that we know each other and realize we have shared interests beyond 140 characters, people, including myself, have a hard time not blurring the lines between personal and professional for one simple reason: we are human. The brand manager for Coca-Cola knows exactly what the boundaries are for what can and can’t be said on the company’s Twitter or Facebook account; we don’t have that external force providing a filter over our Tweets.

I’ve had similar conversations with people about this very subject over the past few weeks. These conversations have been pretty much the same: where do we go from here? How has it evolved so fast? What do I do with this now? What if the internet blew up tomorrow?

I often think about the following questions:

• How human is too human for your personal brand?
• How do you keep your personal brand human, true, and real without exposing parts of yourself you don’t want others to know?
• How do you keep people interested in your personal brand when you’re not actually “selling” anything?
• When does social media stop adding value to your personal brand?

The funny thing is, as we build these personal brands for ourselves, we become locked into handles, themes, and users we connect with on a daily basis. We strive to become more and more like a brand when brands are striving to become more and more human.

After all these conversations, I feel I’m at the point where I’m not really sure what to do with any of this. Do I shut down my Twitter account and cut my losses and forge strong, lasting connections with the people I’ve met so far? Do I keep going and tweet whatever the hell I want to tweet and continue to build this “brand”? I’m not sure.

I guess I’m going through a sort of “social media identity crisis.”

Note: I originally wrote this as a potential topic of discussion at BrandsConf in December. It was rejected, but I still like the idea of this discussion.

Halloween is cursed.

I have a long Halloween-hating history. It all goes back to when I was in the Brownies. The same girls won the Halloween costume contest every year. They were in pageants and always dressed as princesses and their moms actually owned my makeup (my mom turned 49 this year and only wears mascara) so they looked like they were 30. I tried two years in a row to win that damn contest, but failed miserably both times. I was so traumatized that I quit Girl Scouts after just a two years.

The last time I dressed up for Halloween was in 11th grade, nine years ago. I don’t even remember what I went as, but my best friend went as Britney Spears and we walked her little brothers around our neighborhood. I felt highly uncomfortable going trick-or-treating at 16 years old, but she made me do it anyway.

Other Halloween #fail stories:

• I spent my first college Halloween at home celebrating my little brother’s first Halloween ever. I went to bed at 9:30PM that night. Two of my roommates went as “nudists on strike” and one went as a Playboy Bunny. I head the nudists had to take care of the bunny all night, so I’m alright I missed that party.
• When I was 19, my boyfriend and I got into a huge nothing fight. We decided to make up by having a movie marathon including the movie High Tension and we ate dinner from 7-11 (not your typical romantic dinner, but we made it work). The last scene of the movie created such a physical reaction that I threw up when I went outside to walk him to his car.
• The next year, I had my costume all planned out and said boyfriend I planned to go trick-or-treating. Yet again, we got into a huge fight and I wound up watching Grey’s Anatomy season 2 with my roommate and drinking a bucket of cosmos.
• My first and only Halloween in New York was actually spent on a train. It was 2008 and I neglected to request my absentee ballot in time (I moved to New York in late September). Virginia had early voting that weekend, so I spent 12 hours on a train in a matter of 36 hours. But, my vote was counted, and my state went blue for the first time since Johnson’s election in ’64. The party in the streets of Brooklyn on election night far outweighed anything that would’ve happened on Halloween night, so I’m mostly happy with that outcome as well.

This year, I fully intended not to let Halloween get me down. I came up with a costume idea in July and realized that I actually owned every piece of the costume. However, when I put on my green blazer, yellow tank top, and black skirt, I looked nothing like Daria Morgendorffer. Apparently, cartoons are literally just stick figures with clothing that would not fit an actual human being, especially ones with curves (like me!). I made this discovery at 7PM. My Halloween party began at 8PM.

With just an hour to spare, I came up with a costume: Nerd. It was actually really simple as I play this role every day of my life. Oversized glasses, plaid skirt, cardigan, knee-high socks, and saddle shoes. It was no sexy crayon, but it did the trick and I stayed warm all evening.

How was your Halloween?