this is me

i never thought i'd be 34, unemployed, and living back at home with my mom. it's not even that i had a whole life plan where i'd be married with 2.5 kids and a range rover. i don't even have a driver's license (i grew up in brooklyn, and never needed one. and since i made my life in nyc, i never even thought to try and get one). my plan was always about me and my career; i figured the husband and kid thing would work itself out later, when i was ready, when the right guy showed up, blah blah blah, when it was meant to be. clearly that hasn't happened yet.

i'm a working girl in the best sense of the phrase, not in the hooker on 42nd street sense. i'm smart, talented and creative. i'm a good worker. i get things done. a lot of my identity came from that; i'm not proud of it, and i never thought i would be that person who got their identity from a job. and i am not even sure that i got mine from my job persay, but just the fact that i was making a living writing, when the whole time growing up, everyone always told me to play it safe and become a teacher. and let's face it, children never want to settle for second best. they shouldn't have to. don't kill a dream before you get to plant the seeds and watch them flourish. adults are great at that; maybe it's fear or foresight, i don't know. what i do know is that i never wanted to teach, but apparently the whole summers off thing was something adults dreamed of. i didn't know what i wanted to do except write. doctor, lawyer, teacher were not for me. so i got my english degree, went into publishing, realized working on someone else's dream was slowly killing my soul and became a copywriter. it was a perfect fit. it couldn't have worked better if i'd actually planned on becoming a copywriter in the first place.

i did at stint at macys.com for about 5-1/2 years, and then headed over to avon products because i have been obsessed with beauty products ever since i can remember. basically since birth. i was there for about a year and a half until the day i was sitting at my desk and my creative director's assistant came over to me and said DL wants to see you. so i knew i was out because in the entire time i'd been there DL hadn't said anything more than hi to me, and you could tell that trifling salutation caused her physical pain. there was nothing that DL had to say to me except get out. it wasn't that simple; there was a whole HR thing, a package to discuss, blah blah blah, this is us telling you you're life as you know it is over. at least that's what it felt like.

i don't even know what to say. i thought about blogging about my unemployed/moving back home/slowly going insane experience, but resisted it because i always thought that people who blog about their daily lives are narcissistic a-holes. get a journal and get a life. i keep a journal--morning pages actually, thank you, julia cameron--and that's where i let my stuff out. then i was having dinner with my friend R and she was like you should blog about it. you're a writer, it could help. so we will see.