I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(17)

I learned that after an intern has organized the office supplies, mailed the letters, made the pot of tea, and procured the sandwiches for lunch for both herself and the boss, there is a lot of workday left. Not capable of simply doing nothing for the afternoon, I applied myself very industriously to looking industrious. I stacked the Post-its by size, by color, and by shape. I walked to the post office and checked the mail twice a day. I often felt nervous, my work-engine idling uncomfortably.

Things got better after I found another, smaller storage closet in the theater attic and commandeered it as my office. I took yellow legal pads in there with me and came out periodically to announce that I had made a list of all the supplies that were running low (down one legal pad since yesterday!).

“Would it be helpful for me to make a trip to Office Depot?” I’d ask.

“No, we’re fine,” my boss would say, and I’d go back to sorting pens.

Had I not received a check at the end of the summer, I’m not sure I could prove the internship really even happened.

The biggest thing I learned from wandering out into the workforce, flipping on my “available” light, and letting myself be grabbed by the first open hand that came along was this: It feels good to be chosen for something, but making a life requires making some choices yourself, too. At the very least, one ought to know what one is applying to be chosen for. I’d been so paralyzed by the prospect of deciding what to do for a summer—because what if this one job was the beginning of what I’d do for the rest of my whole life?—that I couldn’t even pick a direction. As a result, I ended up sitting in a closet for two months.



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A few months after that internship and a decade and a half after I crushed my fellow first graders at spelling, I turned that childhood victory into my law school application essay. I wrote five hundred words on how exceeding expectations helps you (that is, me) win at life. Did I get into law school? Yes, I did. Did I go to law school? No, I did not. But I applied because that was what liberal arts majors without any clear career path did, and I desperately wanted a path. I needed to know that once school ended, I’d still have goals to reach for—if not grades to earn, then professional accomplishments to rack up. I wanted a ladder with rungs, a hierarchy with titles, some structure to place around my need to achieve. I was afraid to exist without succeeding; I just had to figure out what to succeed at.

It was only when the acceptance letters started rolling in that I realized what I had done. One Saturday afternoon in February of my senior year, I sat on my little plank of a dorm room bed and looked at the letters spread out on my lap, my dog-eared LSAT prep book lying on the floor under a pile of spiral notebooks and binders. I pictured three years in law school—taking tests, writing papers. That, I could imagine. I loved school. But when I envisioned my life after those three years were over—late nights scouring tiny print for loopholes, long days yelling about things in court like on Law & Order—I felt nothing. What an idiot. I’d been so shortsighted that I’d chased the nearest A+ all the way into a corner.

Shit, I thought.

Graduation was coming, and if I wasn’t going to law school, I had no plan at all.

One company was still holding recruiting meetings with students on campus. I signed up at the careers office, pulled off a great act of bullshitting magic in the interview, and convinced the recruiter from Accenture that despite my abject lack of tech experience, I was totally suited to a job as a software consultant. When I got the job offer, I told myself it was the same as grad school admittance, because it meant I had succeeded, I was chosen. I wrote letters back to the law schools: With gratitude and apologies, I must decline. . . .



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As a fresh college graduate and new analyst in a consulting firm in Charlotte, North Carolina, I had to follow a prescribed set of steps: (1) Go off to training camp and learn how to code software (ha HAAAA haaaaaa, WHAT?), and (2) be dispatched with a team of more experienced consultants to a company that needs some kind of software system to improve their business. My first assignment after training was at a major bank. Let’s call it SuperBank.

Here’s what I loved about my first year on the job: the outfits. The navy suit that also looked good if you put the navy jacket over gray pants, and the tweed shift that worked with either a black cardigan or the gray jacket that came with the gray pants, and the chocolate-brown skirt that went great with everything. I owned three pairs of low-heeled pumps: navy, black, and brown faux crocodile (“mock croc,” if you will, and I did). The fact that all of these things coordinated, making them practically mistake-proof when it came to mixing-and-matching, did not prevent me from wearing one black shoe and one navy shoe to work more than once. I painted my nails neutral colors to go with my professional ensembles: clear, slightly less clear, or pale pink. One time I got crazy and did metallic beige, but I felt self-conscious about it after six hours and took it off.

It was the dawn of Dilbert. The age of cubicle culture. There was a popular book out at the time called Who Moved My Cheese? I read it, because I read every how-to-be-a-businessperson book I could get my hands on, but I couldn’t tell you today what it was about. I think there was an analogy wherein business people were mice in a maze. And the cheese was whatever they were looking for . . . money? Opportunity? The feeling of achieving something that proved you were worth the oxygen you breathed? (Maybe that was just me.)