Be Professional

Since college I’ve had a folder on my laptop called “Be Professional,” where I keep the various versions of my resume, my professional headshots (a thing I never thought I’d need), my business card InDesign file, and my cover letter templates. Since childhood, I’ve had a pretty clear understanding of what my professional path would be. It was gonna be great- I’d go to a small liberal arts college somewhere in Oregon or Washington, graduate with a creative writing degree, write novels, and work as a barista until I was published.

It’s misleading to say that was always the plan, I guess. I had a brief flirtation with law school after my first year doing speech and debate in high school, and I dabbled with graphic design because I was an early (and young) adopter of Photoshop and rudimentary web design. In both cases the plan was still to be a published novelist (and maybe YouTuber- John Green I’m comin’ for ya), but I knew I needed a survival job that paid well in the meantime.

I didn’t really have ambitions in the film realm, and I certainly never imagined myself working for a series of exciting media start ups where I’d use skills I’ve cultivated as hobbies for literally two decades, but here we are. In an attempt to explain to my family what exactly the fuck I do for work, and in an attempt to showcase how the strangest things end up being professionally important, I wanted to go through the steps that brought me to where I am now. Unpack my career path as it were.

TL;DR? I am currently employed as the Film Community Manager for Seed&Spark, a film crowdfunding platform, and as an adjunct professor for two MFA programs- one in Brooklyn where I teach a class on web series production, and one in LA that’s low residency (meaning it’s 95% remote) where I am the thesis advisor for four students writing a web series for their capstone script.

High School: Finding My Voice

I have always been loud. Loud is my default setting, and I’m not just talking about speaking volume. Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this characterization so I know to call you a liar. Loudly.

Despite being loud in Every Imaginable Way, I was also excruciatingly shy and awkward, mediocre at reading social cues because I hated socializing, and deeply unhappy. Eventually, I learned I could channel all the stuff making me awkward and disliked into jokes about how awkward and disliked I was, almost as a way of beating bullies to the punch. I wasn’t untouchable- far from it. But redirecting my Weird Energy into becoming Intense and Serious with a side of Humor added a +3 to armor.

Skill acquired: self deprecating jokes.

I also can’t overlook how much of an impact speech and debate had on me, despite my high school career ending in soul-crushing sadness after having to throw my final debate round because my partner didn’t want to go to Nationals and having to leave Nationals (which I qualified in another event for) early because my team was bullying me so relentlessly that I spent most of my time having panic attacks in the bathroom. +3 armor only goes so far if everyone else is rolling nat 20s.

Regardless, speech and debate is where I finally learned how to assimilate into normal society by knowing how and when to say things to have the most positive effect. I used to just blurt things out and then double down without realizing everyone else had started slowly backing away because I would Not. Stop. Talking. Speech and debate helped me refine what I had to say, and how to say it clearly and persuasively, and then how to stop when it was enough. I learned how to make eye contact, how to come off as intelligent without being cocky, and most importantly, how to manipulate boys into thinking I was just a sweet little thing who’d never hurt nobody before completely demolishing them. It also taught me to be confident in my own opinions by being articulate and knowing when someone else is arguing in bad faith and how to either leave with dignity or navigate a less toxic interaction.

Skill acquired: public speaking.

During high school is also where I really doubled down on my interest in the internet (which was still shiny and new) and internet culture. I was an early adopter of most social media platforms, and that, unsurprisingly, worked out well for me.

Skill acquired: social media.

Something worth nothing before we graduate to college is that one of my worst traits, especially in high school, was being judgemental. I didn’t drink or do drugs or have sex like a normal teenager, and you better believe I looked down on those who did. I didn’t lie to my parents except for that one time, which I considered a core part of my identity. And I always got good grades (well, eventually- we aren’t gonna talk about that C in language arts in 6th grade because of my own forgetfulness). I was a gifted student, a teacher’s pet, and an ideal daughter in a lot of ways (most of those ways boiling down to: you never had to worry about me because I didn’t do anything, ever, outside of school and sports), and that gave me enough confidence to believe that I was better than everyone. I knew better than them, I acted better than them, I was better. I was the best.

Skill acquired: ego.

College: Learning to calm the fuck down

In case I didn’t make it apparent, I left high school full of myself and full of anger and resentment. The first year or two of college was about deprogramming the way I had become as a result- a series of concentric walls that alternated between self deprecation, self hatred, and general depression. I was just so angry. Two of my best friends (and two of the only people whose bridges I hadn’t burned after high school) abruptly ghosting me during this period did not help. I’m sure one of those ghosts has a lot to say about that (“You just treat your friends SO WELL that they never talk to you again”) but it’s been a decade and this is still my blog so go drunk hate comment somewhere else, Craig.

It was in college that I finally got to take classes that weren’t designed to help me pass a standardized test, meaning for the first time in my life I was actually learning. For learning’s sake. I had incredible professors who taught me how to think critically not just about the world around me but about myself and my place in the world. I learned the world outside of Grand Junction, Colorado (and inside of it too) didn’t operate on a merit system the way I was taught. Because even the concept of “merit” is rotten as it’s applied in reality. I wasn’t better than everyone, I was just insanely privileged. Half of my identity I was so proud of wasn’t earned at all- I was born into it.

Skill lost: ego.

Skill acquired: empathy.

I also continued in speech and debate, where I expanded on the confidence I’d learned in high school. Because I had to compete in twice the number of events in college, I got the opportunity to really stretch my wings as a performer- someone who wasn’t just well-spoken, but entertaining. It became clear pretty early on that while I could certainly deliver straightforward critiques and argumentation, my strengths were in injecting levity. This was a revelation, particularly because a lot of the things about my competitive events that people found amusing and entertaining weren’t self deprecating- they were jokes I workshopped with my coaches and teammates that had appeal beyond what a judge would reasonably know about me as a person. Wait, people could enjoy listening to me talk if I wasn’t being mean to myself? I could just be a person?

Skill lost: self deprecating jokes.

Skill acquired: jokes.

And because I joined speech and debate as a freshman, as the team grew year over year I became one of the team captains alongside my best friend and soulmate Colton. We were the senior members of the team and took that shit seriously, because we had to. The class beneath us was a bunch of drama makers, and multiple times Colton and I had to take the initiative to gather the team together outside of practice to talk things out. “You don’t have to like each other, and you don’t have to be friends,” we told them seriously one evening in our dorm living room. “But you have to respect each other. And whenwe’re in practice or at a tournament, you will be civil.”

Skill acquired: leadership.

Skill acquired: conflict mediation.

My writing improved during this time, naturally, because I was studying writing. In high school I had been adamantly against any kind of writing that wasn’t narrative or fiction or, at the very least, first-person opinion. But I had a hell of a lot of essays to write, and eventually was hired on the alumni magazine and by different departments to work on social media copy, and I had to learn to adapt.

Skill acquired: non-narrative copywriting skills.

Skill USED: social media.

Skill acquired: social media management.

My last two years of college I found steady work-study employment at the Tutoring and Learning Center, helping underclassmen with their essays for a few hours a week. Eventually, I somewhat expanded my tutoring repertoire because of a particularly harrowing class called Mass Media Law and Ethics myself and the other media arts seniors had to take our final year. It was a famously brutal course where a B- was hard-fought and an A was a laughable dream. Luckily for me, my college nemesis was also in that class, and my brief flirtation with a career in law made me particularly interested in the subject matter, so I was (as I remember it) the only person pulling an A. Barely, but still.

The point is, even though I was employed as an English/writing tutor, by the end of my senior year I was also booking slots for my classmates in Media Law on the DL.

Skill acquired: teaching.

Of course, I didn’t want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a writer, and whenever I told someone that, they said “oh so you’re going to be a teacher!” and I said no, I’m going to be a writer. I am not getting an education degree. I will not be a teacher, I will never be a teacher. And that, friends, is called dramatic irony.

I graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in Creative Writing, with minors in Integrated Media and Editing and Publishing.

Skill acquired: basic graphic design.

Skill acquired: editing for publishing.

Grad School: boy New York City is awful big

Towards the end of college I made the ambition switch from novelist to screenwriter, and a month after graduation I moved to Bedstuy, Brooklyn for the only MFA program I’d applied to. Because I was trying to limit the number of loans I took out (which turned out to be irrelevant because I’m at the point where I will absolutely never pay off my loans so who cares, let’s throw about 100k on the pile), I needed a job to pay for things like food and my very small room in a 4 bedroom apartment I found on Craigslist. So I started working at a coffee shop called FIKA.

As a former awkward kid, despite my now 6 years of speech and debate, small talk still eluded me. I could perform on stage to a group of people no sweat, but a one on one interaction? Where I wasn’t guaranteed uninterrupted attention and several weeks of memorizing exactly what I would say and how to say it? But after a rush hour shift on register at a cafe, you learn how to be efficient yet still polite. Bonus if you can also convince someone to give you a tip for an interaction that lasts fewer than ten seconds.

Skill acquired: small talk.

If you’ve ever worked in food service, the next skill I’m about to list as acquiring won’t be surprising.

Skill acquired: being friendly to terrible people.

I had a lot of wonderful regulars at FIKA, like those that gave me bottles of wine on my last day. But we were a fancy independent coffee shop and wine bar in an incredibly affluent area of TriBeCa, so we also had our share of rich assholes. A trick about rich assholes: if you flatter them and don’t take the bait when they’re rude to you, they’ll tip you well for being fiesty. After a year and a half at that cafe, I was a rich asshole whisperer, and it might be my most marketable skill to date.

My second semester of grad school began, which marked the class I was most excited about: digital media. I knew from the syllabus that we were going to write and produce an episode of a web series, and since Lizzie Bennet Diaries was still fresh in my mind, it struck me as an exciting thing to learn and a good time to be learning it. I think you all know what happened next…

Skill acquired: web series.

Skill acquired: collaboration.

It was around the end of Brains season 1 that I realized how much my years of solitary novel writing didn’t fulfill me. Filmmaking was the most rewarding thing I’d ever done. I met so many talented people so quickly and with our combined skill sets we created something amazing, and I discovered I never wanted to do anything else as long as I lived.

Then FIKA pulled some real shady shit on me and I quit. Well, first I got a dramatic haircut, and then I quit. That’s important.

I had about two months of living expenses saved up, so the timer began. As I went into my second year of grad school I was unemployed but riding the high of Brains season 1, which sorta evened out. Then, I got a call from Viacom. I’d applied for a paid internship in the production department, so that I could be on set for the Daily Show and other Comedy Central late night programming. I didn’t get it, because those internships were the first to get scooped up. However, they’d noticed my resume listed a lot of social media management experience from my various college jobs. Would I have any interest in interviewing for a paid internship with the research department?

Skill USED: social media management.

MTV Internship: what are the teens up to?

I only spent one semester with the research department at MTV, but I learned a tremendous amount and met some really cool and wonderful people. Though I was hired for my experience with social media and was therefore a good Youth Spy (a person who spies on youths so MTV could stay up to date on slang and pop cultural interests), my real strength was rather unexpected. See, I was releasing the first season of Brains this semester, something I talked about pretty frequently because I was so excited about it. So they started asking me to report on web series- narrative short form content from innovative digital creators that they might be interested in acquiring (either as IP or as talent).

Skill USED: web series.

As my internship wound down, I realized that I was about to be unemployed again, which would have been a bummer. So I started asking around the office for other open positions- I’d done a good job at my internship, and they all knew I was invested in short form digital media and writing in particular. Why did they know that?

Skill USED: small talk.

At one of our many 25th floor parties (thrown and catered whenever we could fake an occasion, which was about once a week), I got to talking to a woman named Lori who was the executive assistant to the president of MTV. She’d been in that position for years, and as it turned out, was looking for a temp. See, around the same time as I started working at MTV, they’d hired a new president, Sean Atkins. He was a former Discovery exec and in the transition a lot of his contacts had gotten muddled. Lori needed help updating his over 2000+ contact book in addition to her actual workload… would I be interested in a short term work contract to do that with her?

MTV Temp: is this still your phone number?

I actually really enjoyed being a temp. My job was simple and straightforward: make contact with as many people from Sean Atkins’ contact list as I could and update their contact information in his Outlook. What was their current profession? What was their preferred email address and phone number? Was I really working for Sean Atkins or was I a scammer?

Skill USED: being friendly to terrible people.

I’m not saying everyone in the contacts list was terrible, but I had a number of unpleasant interactions with very powerful people who did not want to cooperate with me. Lucky for all of us, I was prepared for this from my time at FIKA.

I also helped out Lori and the other EAs on the floor with things like ordering and picking up lunches for big meetings, filling in when people went on vacation, and helping organize office supplies. It was honestly really fun- nothing I did was overly challenging, and it never followed me home. I worked my shift, learned about what happened at a big media company behind the scenes, and went home to work on Brains season 2.

At the beginning of this new position, I also connected with a web series creator I’d been a fan of for a while, a woman named Tara Jayn. She had a show with a similar-ish tone to Brains, and generally just seemed like she knew what she was doing. She did, and graciously Skyped with me for two hours to explain all the things I should be doing if I actually wanted people to see my show and take it seriously. That two hour chat was a masterclass, and I will always be grateful to her for taking the time.

Skill acquired: rudimentary marketing.

Brains season 2 went a whole lot better than season 1, for basically every reason in the book, but also because I finally put to use two rusty skills I had started to develop back in college:

Skill USED: leadership.

Skill USED: conflict mediation.

Lori managed to keep me on for much longer than we’d planned, but at the end of the day, I was in a temporary position, and I couldn’t stay there forever. I was also about to graduate with my MFA and I needed to get serious about what came next. Thankfully, as I continued to develop and act upon my web series and small talk and collaboration skills, my former internship coordinator got in touch- would I be interested in her passing along my resume to the digital development department? The department at MTV that made all the short form digital-first content that I was uniquely suited for?

Associate Producer, Digital Development, MTV

Though “associate producer” is a title that existed, my particular job in the digital development department was brand new and designed explicitly with me in mind. They knew I could produce high-quality, digital-focused content on a budget because of Brains, they knew I was organized because of my work as a research intern and temp, and they knew I had ambitions in creating digital content because of my never shutting up about it.

Sadly, it wasn’t a great time to be hired in the digital department at MTV, because they were going through a lot of changes and quickly a few things became apparent.

1. The production pipeline document I was meant to create and curate already existed and someone else was in charge of it
2. While I reported to the SVP of development, he wasn’t directly in charge of any particular productions or departments, so that meant I didn’t have any associations with particular productions or departments.
3. I was hired to be a liason, but that position turned out to be redundant and there wasn’t really a fallback thing for me to do.

In my nine months as an associate producer, I only actually produced one video. It’s a great video, and I loved doing it, but it was a little bit of a reality check about the slowness of the corporate machine, even in a digital department. I tried to produce other things- I went to pitch meetings, I had fellow producers trying to get me on their own projects, and I sat in more meetings than I can count about the new direction of the MTV digital footprint. But ultimately, I wasn’t a part of anyone’s team, so no one knew who I was or what to do with me. [Note: about two months after my contract with MTV ended, like 75% of the other digital development employees were let go as well, including the long-time producer who was the supervising producer on the one video I managed to help finish]

Brains season 2 was in full swing during this period, and I was excited to show off not only our increased production value but my new marketing plan. I’d gotten us press, interviews, and a handful of new fans because of a comprehensive, Tara Jayn inspired system, and throughout my new exploration had discovered a website I thought would really take us to the next level: Stareable, a website exclusively for web series.

Skill USED: rudimentary marketing.

I’d started networking with a number of web series creators online over the course of my time as an intern and temp (aided in large part by the fact that I was behind a computer all day where it was encouraged to be on social media to watch The Teens), and a few of them ended up being in New York like me. And when we realized Stareable was also based in New York and was hosting a happy hour soon, we thought: great! We can go meet these folks who are promising to help us find audiences, they can buy us beer, and more importantly, we creators can finally meet up!

Skill USED: web series.

Skill USED: social media.

Skill USED: small talk.

I was the first one there, because I’m a crazy person who’s early to everything, and ended up talking to the CEO uninterrupted for about twenty minutes. He was a quiet guy with a tiny Moleskine notebook named Ajay Kishore, and though he was a huge fan of web series and television, he wasn’t himself a creator. He was an engineer who wanted to solve the problem of “great content with no audience.” He knew the audience existed- he himself was among them- but the best way to find web series were to wait for end-of-year compilation posts from a handful of major publications with limited exposure and insight into the overall ecosystem.

I had a lot to say that first meetup about the subgenre of LIWs (literary-inspired web series, like the Lizzie Bennet Diaries), which Ajay hadn’t heard of. He suggested I write a guest blog for them, if I was interested. Sure!

Skill USED: web series.

Skill USED: small talk.

Skill USED: non-narrative copywriting skills.

A month later, he held another happy hour meetup for web series creators in the city, and again I was the first to arrive. We talked some more, I name dropped a few web series creators that Ajay wanted a better connection to, and he asked, “how do you know all these people?” I laughed. “Twitter!”

So then I wrote Stareable an article about Twitter, and how to use it for marketing and for networking.

Skill USED: social media management.

I also did an interview with another creator I’d been a fan of for a while, Kate Hackett, about transmedia and creating an expansive web series universe, at which point Ajay sent me an email asking if we could have a conversation. It was becoming abundantly clear that I wasn’t going to leave him alone even if he wanted me to, and thankfully, he didn’t want me to. They’d built something really cool, but they needed a filmmaker on board to help shape their future and speak to their users with more familiarity. I was still at MTV, though it was getting increasingly clear there wasn’t a future there, so we started small: I would be their Community Liaison. It was an unpaid, low-commitment job where I’d largely be attending meetups like I already had been to convince creators to join Stareable and writing articles for their blog that the community would want to read in order to do the same thing online.

Then my boss at MTV called me into his office a week later. It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a bummer: in two months, when my contract was up, they would not be picking it up again, and I was going to be out of a job.

The Summer of Sadness and Freelancing

Stareable was small enough and new enough that they didn’t have funding for anyone outside of Ajay and his cofounder John, who built their website. They did manage to scrape together funds to pay me for 15 hours a week,  but once MTV was over I was really struggling to make ends meet. Quinn and I had also just moved into our first solo apartment, so my rent was higher and my moving fees were mighty. I tried to pick up some freelance contracts- I’d been doing contract voiceover work since my internship days, but consistency and fair pay were never part of the equation.

At one point, I fully ran out of money, kind of unexpectedly because I was too nervous to check my bank account. It was bad. But by the end of summer 2017, I’d fully taken over the Stareable blog, I’d helped them launch a forum for creators to network outside of our regular NYC happy hours, and I’d helped them program and run a screening. I was absolutely working full time hours, and finally they signed on a new investment that meant they could bump me up to full time pay and a fancy new title: Community Director.

Skill USED: web series.

Stareable: Community, Creativity, and Tons of Content

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What did I do at Stareable? Uh, do you have three hours and A/V available? From a “skill’s used” perspective, I did just about everything. I completely took over and reinvented their blog…

Skill USED: non-narrative copywriting skills.

I signed on a number of creators to write their own columns for the blog that I managed….

Skill USED: editing for publishing.

I took over most of the social media accounts…

Skill USED: social media management.

Skill USED: rudimentary marketing.

I made graphics for the website, the blog, events, and investors…

Skill USED: basic graphic design.

I networked with the web series community online and off to sign on new users and tapped into those channels when we needed to get feedback on new projects…

Skill USED: small talk.

Skill USED: being friendly to terrible people. (99.9% of my interactions were with non-terrible people, Stareable friends. I promise. But when you’re the main point of contact for every user on a pretty big website, every once in a while…..)

I helped Ajay and John and, eventually, Alex design a platform for web series creators to take control of their careers…

Skill USED: collaboration.

I hired and managed 5 interns over the course of two and a half years…

Skill USED: leadership.

I hosted and produced our podcast and our webinar series and developed a number of workshops I presented live at film festivals and film schools around the country (and once in Canada!)…

Skill USED: public speaking.

Skill USED: teaching.

And I helped program, produce, and run two years of our 300+ attendee film festival Stareable Fest…

Skill USED: small talk.

Skill USED: web series.

Skill acquired: basic graphic design.

Skill USED: public speaking.

Skill USED: collaboration.

Skill USED: social media management.

Skill USED: rudimentary marketing.

Near the end of my second year with Stareable, my old MFA director, Norman Steinberg, retired, and the new director, Ken LaZebnik, of the program needed a person to teach their web series class. You know, the web series class where I originally produced Brains? The web series that got me a job at MTV and then Stareable? Yeah, that class.

Adjunct Professor, LIU-Brooklyn

Norman connected me to Ken, I got it cleared with Ajay, and in January 2019 I became an adjunct professor with LIU-Brooklyn’s MFA for Writing and Producing for Television program. I made a number of tweaks to the original syllabus, now having created two web series, produced seven others, and having written and directed two short films, and turned the podcasts and webinars and blogs I’d written for Stareable into a comprehensive curriculum. In just ten weeks, twelve students with zero production experience would develop and write their own web series pilot, produce it, and learn to market it.

Skill USED: web series.

Skill USED: public speaking.

Skill USED: teaching.

Skill leveled up: marketing.

That semester wrapped up more successfully than I could have possibly imagined, and my students seemed largely happy with my complete amateur status! They had some great suggestions for the next year, and one even walked away to immediately produce two more episodes and launch a crowdfunding campaign for the rest of the season! (will link when it’s live next week)

Turns out, Ken is also the director of another MFA program, a low-residency Screenwriting MFA based out of LA via Stephens College. A month or two after my first semester as an adjunct at LIU-Brooklyn ended, Ken approached me to see if I’d be interested in being a mentor/adjunct at this other program. I wouldn’t really be teaching a class or lecturing, since the program is low-residency, I would be a thesis advisor for students who want their final capstone project to be a web series season. Sign me up, I said!

Skill leveled up: teaching.

I didn’t want to be a teacher. And to an extent, the type of teacher I imagined not wanting to become is one I never did. Almost half of my students are older than me, for one, and they’re in a program they explicitly want to be in (unlike high schoolers who don’t really have a choice). I’m also able to be a lot more casual and conversational because my students are older, and I’m only teaching productive, practical, creative skills (rather than more ethereal things like critical thinking and facts).

Also two months after my first adjunct semester wrapped up, I ended up taking a small step back from Stareable- I was still their Community Director and I was still very much invested in said community, but I was back to working part time hours, and to supplement my income I accepted a part time position at another start up called Seed&Spark, a few years older than Stareable based in LA (though with much of its team living elsewhere). I’d crowdfunded with them a few times, collaborated with them through Stareable a few other times (even writing a guest post for THEIR blog!), and genuinely adored the company and the employees therein. It wasn’t really something I had been looking for, but something seemed to click as I watched the first campaign I’d given feedback to hit their crowdfunding goal. Those filmmakers raised the money they needed to make their project because I’d helped them craft a campaign that spoke to people. The ratio of who did what is irrelevant- even in small part, I got to help them achieve their dream and not go hungry doing so.

Skill USED: teaching/education.

Skill USED: marketing.

Skill USED: non-narrative copywriting skills.

Something stirred inside me when Seed&Spark broached the subject of a more full time, permanent position with them. Again, I wasn’t really looking for that big of a change. I had two new teaching jobs, a community of over 2,000 web series creators to shepherd, a new web series I’d just directed premiering soon, and a new short film on the festival circuit. But then they sent me a job description, which listed how I’d get to help not just a community of web series creators, but a community of short film creators, feature filmmakers, and music video directors. I’d still get to teach and speak at festivals and events and film schools, I’d still get to blog about how to level up your filmmaking career, I’d still get to make my own films, but my reach would be bigger.

And so, after careful consideration, I made the decision to put in my notice at Stareable Co. Importantly, not Stareable the community. I am still primarily a web series creator (though I’ve started to dabble in shorts), and you’d have to permanently ban me from the site to keep me from using both the forum and the main Stareable.com platform. I have learned so much from my time at Stareable (full remarks here if you’re interested), but something inside me told me it was time to move forward.

Film Community Manager, Seed&Spark

My job at Seed&Spark won’t be all that different from Stareable, just on a bigger scale. I’ll still be a (hopefully) trusted member of the web series community, but I’ll also be expanding to those other formats of film as well. I’ll be building relationships with creators and film organizations alike to help diverse, talented artists make their art sustainably and change the world one project at a time. I’ll be using all the skills I’ve built up since high school and, hopefully, learning a few new ones.

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This is a very long blog. Is it a manifesto? I’m not really making a point, I’m more just ruminating on how truly bizarre my career path has been to this point (and will likely continue to be). All three of my full time jobs post-grad school have been positions developed and created for me, specifically. They didn’t exist before I stepped into them. And I’m not unaware of how lucky I’ve been.

If there is a point to all of this, it’s to be empathetic and hardworking, to do as many things as you’re interested in, and keep your eyes open for opportunities that allow you to use more than one of your skills, no matter how random they might be. The world is changing and my generation is constantly finding ways to financially support itself in jobs and industries that didn’t exist even five years ago. If this weird privileged introvert from nowhere Colorado can learn to flourish in an intensely social career, there’s hope for you too, whoever you are. Probably. I don’t know your life.

If you read this whole post, leave a comment! If you didn’t read this whole post but just skipped to the bottom, leave a comment! I won’t know the difference!