Updates

An open letter to people no longer in my life.

Dear friend, family, coworker, ex-boyfriend, former roommate, or person I knew for a time and no longer keep up with outside of Facebook updates:

I really cared for you.

Having you in my life was (probably) very important to me in some way or another.

I learned from you (I think).

Our experiences (hopefully) made me a better, smarter, wiser person.

But I’ve moved on.

You’re no longer in my life for one reason or another. Maybe we had a fallout and can’t remember what was said, but we’re still angry at one another. Or, maybe you have another relationship that I don’t approve of. Or, maybe our relationship just reached its expiration date and we lost touch. I’m sorry that happened.

I don’t think you’re a bad person.

I don’t dislike you or resent you for anything you’ve done or feelings you may have toward me.

I don’t regret any of the time I spent with you or on our relationship.

But I’ve moved on.

Maybe one day one of us will have the inclination to get back in touch and see how the other’s doing. Maybe I’ll want to know what your kids look like or if your kitten got fat and less adorable like I told you it would. Maybe you’ll want to know if I still like that show with that guy because it makes you think of me every time you watch it. Maybe I’ll want to know if you listened to the new Tom Waits… because I still can’t.

I can promise you that I won’t do that. I won’t rehash the past no matter how much I miss you after a conversation with a new friend that reminds me of you. I won’t send you a text, out of context and three years too late. I won’t continue to poke and prod about what went wrong and continue to search for answers. I won’t open those wounds again for either one of us. I hope you extend the same courtesy.

I’ve moved on. I’m pretty sure you have, too. I don’t need closure anymore because I have acceptance. I hope you do, too.

Closure, I’ve realized, is a selfish, dirty thing that only leaves you wanting more. It’s not that I don’t miss you or think about you or care about how you’re doing in life it’s that I’ve come to terms with you having a life that no longer involves me, and vice versa. I don’t need to know the how or the why, just that it is the way it is. However, I accept that you were important in my life for a particular time, era, or purpose and thank you for that.

Thank you for making me who I am,

Always,

Nicole

Go away, October

Never have I ever experienced a more trying, emotionally exhausting, draining month in my entire life. I don’t think I can physically or emotionally handle another October experience.

In October, I…

• Moved into a new house.
• Went on a 10 day business trip on two day’s notice.
• Worked 18 hours a day for each of those 10 days.
• Lost two debit cards.
• Lost my Gramma Hershey Park after she suffered for 10 years.
• Had a guy call me his girlfriend for the first time in 3 years.
• Ignored my mom’s phone calls for 3 days while she was in the hospital because I thought she was still on vacation.
• Received an apology from my ex (whom I haven’t spoken to in 3 years) via text.

If October has taught me anything it’s that I need to reflect more on my current and past relationships because people aren’t around for ever. You often can’t control the shitty things that happen to you, they just happen. What you can control is how you relate to the people you want in your life for a long time to come.

Thanks, October for the massive amounts of (painful, trying, draining) learning lessons you provided. I’m done with you now.

Look, ma! I ate a burger!

[Note: since writing this post, I've been told everything I've ever known about this story is a lie. However, this is how I remember it, so this is the story you're getting]

It all started when I was two years old.

My mom had cooked a delicious meal for her, my father, and me. As she went to feed me a bite of the meal, I immediately spit it out, probably made that awful face a child makes when they don’t like something, and cried. It was my first burger.

This, combined with several other childhood tantrums, got me pegged as a picky eater. My mom got into a habit of telling me that I didn’t like things because she didn’t want to deal with my fits and because she, too, is a picky eater.

At family functions, I was teased because I’d never eat a burger. When it was burger night, we had to buy hot dogs because I wouldn’t even go close to a burger. When my dad was first dating my stepmom, she didn’t know I was adamantly anti-burgers and brought home 3 burgers one night. I didn’t eat anything for dinner that night and ignored her for a week.

It got so ridiculous that it even became family folklore. My parents would tease me about my distaste for burgers and it even became a joke that if I found a man that could convince me to eat a burger, I should marry him.

One night, in college, I was buying steaks for my boyfriend and myself and had to call my mom to ask her what the different types of cuts meant because I only knew of one – venison. My dad was a hunter, so all I’d known was deer steak. I didn’t know that steaks were made from cows and I definitely didn’t know what a Ribeye was because that doesn’t sound very deer-like. I was traumatized because I didn’t know that cows were steak – I associated them with burgers, therefore, they were disgusting.

This long-standing hatred of burgers lasted so long that it just became a thing. I’d randomly tell the story over the years and people wouldn’t believe me. Family, friends, boyfriends all tried to get me to eat a burger, but I just didn’t see the point. I’d lived that long without it, why did I need it now?

I lasted 23 years without another bite of burger.

Until Saturday, July 23rd.

It’d been in the works for months now. I promised myself that I was going to stop out of my comfort zone this year, do things I’d never thought I’d do. So, I ate a burger.

A delicious, medium-well, bacon and cheese and lettuce and tomato and onion covered burger. See! There’s even evidence:

Does this mean I’m converted to the world of ground beef eaters? Probably not. Meat isn’t really a big part of my diet and I’ve lived so long without a burger that I don’t feel the need for it. But it was delicious.

I apologize if, over the past few months, I’ve promised you I’d get a burger with you. I specifically chose people I knew wouldn’t judge me if I publicly vomited and wouldn’t make a big deal about my burger cherry being popped. Now that I know I won’t make a scene, I’m more than happy to get a burger with (almost) anyone, (almost) any time.

Why I will not meet the ‘man of my dreams’ in Starbucks.

All single ladies romanticize about where they’ll meet the next guy they date. Will I bump into a cute bearded boy with glasses on the bus? Will someone find this book I’m reading really interesting? Will a guy on a bike accidentally hit me in a crosswalk and I’ll fall into a coma and he’ll nurse me back to health? … or maybe I’m just crazy.

Either way, I’m not going to meet someone at a Starbucks. There are a few reasons:

1. My drink makes a… statement. No one’s going to start conversation with me over my drink. At Starbucks, I order a venti soy vanilla (or hazelnut if I’m feeling CRAZY) latte. What does this say?
   • Venti: I’m about to drink 20 ounces of milk and espresso. I’m probably going to pee every hour on the hour for the rest of the day.
   • Soy: I’m lactose intolerant. Want to talk about what dairy does to my stomach? Huh, huh?
   • Latte: I’m about to consume four shots of espresso. DO YOU KNOW HOW HYPER I WILL BE IN 30 MINUTES?!!?!?!1111???1!/LSLDKFJ
2. I generally look like a zombie. I am not a morning person. I do not like to talk to anyone, look at anything, or think about anything before 9:30am. I’m especially not going to do this before I have 20 ounces of latte streaming through my veins. This early in the morning, the chances of a wardrobe malfunction are exceptionally high, too. I’ve been known to put on a shirt backwards and/or inside out, forget to zip up my fly, and even not brush my hair.
3. I’m not a good conversationalist. I try to be, but I’m really just not. I… just… yeah.

It’s not just coffee shops. There are a lot of other places where I make a fool of myself and no person in their right mind would think, “Oh, that girl’s interesting. I’ll strike up a conversation with her”:

• Bars: I’m too short for 90% of bartenders to see me. Unless I’m at a table or booth, I usually have to jump up and down and/or wave my arms to get a bartender’s attention.
• Bookstores: I don’t read. I’m “of the Internet.”
• The Internet: I talk about cats. A lot. No one wants that.
• Anywhere in DC during the summer. It’s gross and sweaty.

Moral of the story: I frequently make a fool of myself. There’s nothing that can be done about this. Someone’s either going to find this foolishness endearing or I’ll literally trip and fall into their arms. Hopefully, I won’t lose the coffee because that would just be tragic.

Where were you?

There’s that moment that defines a generation, so they say. That moment that you’ll always remember where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when you heard.

We’ve now had four. Four defining moments in just a decade. Not even a generation, just a decade.

• On September 11th, 2001, I was walking to my 3rd period chemistry class as news broke out in my western Virginia high school that terrorists had hijacked four planes. We watched as the towers were on fire, the third plane crashed into the Pentagon, and the towers eventually crumbled. I remember the exact outfit I wore to school that day; how they locked our school down; and how I sat down in class crossed my arms on the table, put my head down, and closed my eyes trying not to cry.

Before September 11th, I used to visit my grandmother in DC all the time. When she’d drive me home, instead of driving down Constitution Ave from her Capitol Hill apartment, she’d take me down E Street. At that time, you could actually drive in front of the White House. To anyone who moved to DC after 2001, you probably didn’t know you could do that. Those guards sitting in their stations all day, every day, weren’t always there.

• Three months before I graduated high school, I was on a field trip to New York City with my year book class when a girl on the trip got a call saying that George Bush declared war on Iraq. The group was sitting in the Stardust Diner in Times Square not sure what to do or what it meant. The next day, instead of going to workshops about font types and page themes, our chaperones let us walk the streets of the city and catch demonstrations from anti-war protestors. The images of hundreds of women covered head-to-toe in black outfits walking through the busiest streets of Manhattan are still etched in my head, even if my Photobucket account has expired and those images are gone.

When I got home from this trip, an acceptance letter to The George Washington University was sitting on my desk at home. I instantly knew I was going to go to GW, but, because campus is so close to the White House, my family and I actually sat down and planned an escape route in case something were to happen.

• Fast forward 5 years and 5 months later, and I’m back in New York — this time Queens — watching MSNBC turn Virginia blue for the first time in 48 years and announcing Barack Obama as the first African-American president of the United States. A coworker was stuck on the Subway and finally made it up to my friend’s apartment seconds before Obama made his acceptance speech. We were yelling as she ran up the three flights of stairs to get to the apartment telling her to hurry. She plopped herself down on the couch and we all sat in silence as we watched this amazing thing happen. A few hours later, I found myself and a few others walking to a bar in Brooklyn, high-fiving and hugging strangers on the street at 3AM. We all ordered beers, but none of us cared about finishing them — we were still glued to the television coverage being shown in the bar.

I’d just moved to New York in September before the election and hadn’t yet switched my voter registration because I wanted my vote to be counted in Virginia. I didn’t have time to request an absentee ballot so, on Halloween night 2008, I got on a train from New York to Richmond to vote early. I gave up my one and only New York Halloween weekend to make sure my vote was counted, to make sure Virginia turned blue… and we did it.

• Then, there’s tonight. Tonight, I’m alone in my apartment watching Twitter break the news. Yes, Twitter. For 3.5 hours, I’ve been watching my Twitter feed to see what was about to happen as soon as the President announced that he was going to make an announcement. I had two live-streams queued up, the front pages of every major US newspaper in a browser tab, and was flicking channels back and forth waiting for the announcement. The speech will go down as maybe his best yet (and I’m guessing will be used in a variety of reelection ads), but I’m probably going to remember watching my feed turn from boring Sunday night chatter and people dropping off to go to bed to literally seeing it being throttled by the tweets about the announcement. No one on my feed was tweeting about anything else.

Tomorrow, we wake up in a new world again. Again. Our generation won’t be defined by one moment or one thing, but by the many that shape our attitudes and society and how we move forward after them.

I hope we get it right.

It’s done.

When I first got laid off, someone told me the average job search takes 259 days in this economy. That number absolutely terrified me. 259 days is nearly 8 months, or two-thirds of a year. That’s a long time to go without a job, without a steady paycheck, without any sense of responsibility.

Thankfully, I’m already done. My job search took me just 71 days and I’m pretty happy about that.

In those 71 days, I had:

• 10 in-person interviews,
• 5 phone interviews,
• 5 writing tests,
• 3 job offers,
• wrote a job application on a box and mailed it in, and
• staged a photo shoot for another application.

As of today, I have accepted one of those offers.

On Monday, April 25th, I will have a new job, with the responsibilities I deserve, at an organization I believe in.

I attribute my success to a lot of things, mostly embracing my emotions. One of the hardest things about job searches is that you’re on a constant emotional roller coaster. Most people tell you to push through it and keep working, but I don’t think that’s the right way to go. If there was a day where I didn’t want to write a cover letter, I didn’t. I didn’t want to put that negative energy into a job application and potentially ruin my chances at an amazing opportunity.

Furthermore, I only applied to jobs I really wanted. No consultant positions, no social-media only positions, no positions at companies I didn’t believe in. I knew, going into this process, that I wanted a job where I could have my hands on a lot of different projects and would be surrounded by others who were truly passionate about their work. And I’ve found it.

Now that this chapter is over and I’ll soon be gainfully employed, I don’t for one second believe I’m done struggling with my career.

Just as it was difficult to sit around and watch my friends go to work while I laid in bed all day watching Buffy, it’ll be difficult to acclimate back to a work environment. It’ll be difficult again to acquaint myself with a new office, a new staff, a new set of duties, a new issue on which to focus my work.

However, I’m excited. The job I took comes with a director title, and a steep learning curve. There’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of opportunity to really grow a campaign that means something to a lot of people.

Wish me luck and, if you’re one of the several people who bought me a drink or a meal or a concert ticket over the past 71 days, thank you. It was incredibly appreciated. And, you will soon be paid back.

No more frowny faces.

Dear readers of this blog,

As of 1:30 yesterday, I am no longer employed. It was a situation that was bad from the start and I’m happy to no longer be involved in a situation that was bad for everyone in my department. I wasn’t meant for that job, at that company, and I’m glad to no longer feel burdened by it.

Two years ago, I was completely devastated when I was laid off. I shut down emotionally for two weeks, barely left my apartment, and didn’t even eat some days. I was 23, fired from my dream job, and completely poor because I was living in Brooklyn and making hardly any money.

I’ve learned a lot since then — mostly that there’s no dream job. It doesn’t exist. No job is perfect, no job is indefinite. A job is a job and it doesn’t completely define me. There will always (hopefully) be others.

As of right now, I’m okay. I’m fine with this decision and I wanted out of that position… I just wanted to do it on my own. But I’m fine. There is nothing sarcastic or false about that statement (and if you know me personally, you know that means I’m really serious).

I have a lot of personal projects that had been put on the backburner that I’m ecstatic to bring back to life, most notably JOBSESSED. Also, this gives me a ton of dedicated time to work on my nonprofit and see if it’s feasible. Finally, it’s going to give me the opportunity to really figure out what I want to do: move to a new city? Make a fourth career change in three years? Get out of marketing all together? Who knows?

So, if you’re reading this, I want to ask you a few favors:

• No more frowny faces. Seriously guys. Stop it.
• Don’t feel guilty for complaining about your job in front of me. Just because my situation just got a lot more complicated, that doesn’t take away from the fact that everyone else still has issues.
• Stick around. I’m fine now. In a month, I might not be. That’s where you come in: I’ll probably need your help and I’m not going to be able to ask for it because I’m too proud.

Worse case scenario? I put this guy out on the street turning tricks:

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.

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?