2018, in Conclusion
Everyone always says, “I can’t believe where the year went,” and now that we’ve reached December, I echo that sentiment. But it wasn’t until about two weeks ago, when I got around to starting to draft this email, that I felt that this year had gone by quickly. For most of this year, I found myself thinking, “This year is eternal and I can’t wait to close the book on it.”
If you talked to me pretty much anytime before about two weeks ago and asked me how I was doing, you had 75–25 odds of hearing a less-than-rosy perspective on myself and what I was doing with my life. In the last two weeks, the tide has shifted, and those odds have flipped to 75–25 in a positive direction.
I attribute the flip in part to seeing a former coworker and now dear friend, the same friend whose wedding I attended out in SoCal wine country in June, which you might recall from the last update email. She’s the kind of girl you’d hate out of envy if you didn’t find it so impossible not to love her: smart, ‘real’, optimistic, beautiful inside and out, a goodhearted cheerleader of a friend. She’s one of the people who encourages me the most around nurturing my creative dreams and building a career as a writer. I adore her and respect her tremendously.
We met for coffee on Monday afternoon and in between our respective work calls, we got to talking about the year. It’s hard for me to be around this friend sometimes because my tendency is to compare myself to others, and whenever I compare myself to her, I feel wholly inadequate (one of my new year’s resolutions is to spend less time comparing myself to other people). On her end, it was pretty obvious to me how much had happened in her life in 2018, even since June: getting married, going on her honeymoon, moving apartments within the San Diego area, switching jobs, and taking steps toward starting a lifestyle business. On my end, I didn’t feel like I had much to report: still in Boston. Still in the same job. Still writing once a month but not any closer to turning the monthly blogs into “the book.” Still doing jiu-jitsu and still a white belt. I told her how I was stuck on writing this update email because of this feeling of overall stasis.
“Maybe you can’t see it, but from where I stand, you’ve come a long way this year.” She rattled off a few things that I hadn’t considered ‘big’ milestones, but were indeed significant. In talking to her, our conversation inspired me to take a new form for this year’s update: instead of doing the usual “here’s the professional overview, here’s the personal overview, and here are some miscellaneous highlights,” I’m structuring this post in a way that’s reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Chapter and Verse,’ writing out the ‘chapters’ of things I’ve learned this year and the corresponding ‘verses,’ the songs that remind me of those lessons. Here’s the playlist if you want to listen to the songs below in one fell swoop.
Lesson #1: “I want to live and work in Los Angeles sometime in the near future.”
Lyrics: “(More Bounce In) California,” Soulkid #1; “Los Angeles,” Sugarcult.
In November, I took a vacation to San Francisco and Los Angeles to reconnect with old friends, attend my best friend’s 30th birthday party, and, perhaps most importantly, to determine whether I legitimately wanted to live and work in California. That trip gave me the confirmation that there’s no way I’d work in San Francisco unless it was at the right company and the right price (and even then, I’m not sure I’d work in San Francisco), but that I love Los Angeles and it’s only a matter of time before I move out there for a reprieve from Boston and the whole East Coast life and ethos. The scene for startups is less obnoxious than San Francisco’s, the weather is unbeatable, the lifestyle is my speed (California chill but with plenty of creative hustling and striving), and the jiu-jitsu gyms are outstanding. I wrote 7 blog posts on the trip to California (rivaling the 7 that I wrote on my less-fun trip to Peru), and by the last one, I own up to the fact that my LA love isn’t a passing phase or a sudden infatuation. It’s something I genuinely want and is going to happen, sooner or later.
Lesson learned #2: “Don’t give up. Don’t settle. Don’t take the first thing — hold out for the right thing.”
Lyrics: “Wait For It,” The Hamilton Soundtrack; “You’re The One That I Want,” The Grease Soundtrack.
The above revelations about LA were complemented by a 24-hour hour, post-Thanksgiving whirlwind that took me to Renton, WA for an on-site interview with Boeing. I heard about the job from a classmate from business school who was hiring for her team for a new strategic initiative within Boeing with an intriguing e-commerce spin — and one that didn’t require applicants to have any significant experience in aerospace. Two weeks after dropping my resume, I landed on a phone screen, and two weeks after the phone screen, I was invited to come out west for a final round interview. I wasn’t sure about the role or about Seattle and was one click away from declining everything until consulting a few friends of mine, all of whom said I had nothing to lose by going through with the interview and just seeing how I felt out there. So I took the plunge. I figured, at best, I’d find a job, team, and place I could love; at worst, I’d get in an interview ‘rep’ and have good, serious practice for future interviews at other companies.
When I got back from trip, and eventually received an offer, the whole experience had me evaluating whether I could be happy working for Boeing instead of SAP and in Seattle instead of Los Angeles. The conclusion I came to was that this wasn’t the right job in the right place at the right time for me. I was — and am — willing to wait for the right opportunity, not just the first opportunity. When I left Wayfair almost a year and a half ago, I went with the first offer I could get, one that came to me out of a fortuitous cold-message on Linkedin. Not to knock my current gig at SAP — it is a great company and I’m convinced there might be other roles for which I’d be a better fit elsewhere in the company — but my offer wasn’t the result of some deliberate, thorough job search. It was an escape hatch. I reached for the life raft off the sinking ship that was my situation at Wayfair.
No matter how ‘meh’ my current job situation is, I’m not drowning. When I leave this role, I want to be consciously choosing where I’m going — not stumbling into something or just letting the next gig happen to me. I want to leave my current role for something great, not just something ‘good enough’ — and I’m willing to wait for it.
Lesson learned #3: “I’m not broken by or living in the shadow of my romantic past anymore.”
Lyrics: “How A Heart Unbreaks,” Pitch Perfect 3 Soundtrack; “Love is Mystical,” Cold War Kids; “Sanctuary,” Welshly Arms.
The first half of the year was romantic mayhem, beginning with another breakup, continuing with a Tinder blaze and blasts from the past, and concluding with a round of “sh — ing where I eat.” In the summer, getting over all the fears associated with dating someone with whom I train jiu-jitsu, I finally made things official with a guy I met at my gym over a year ago. I’m holding off on writing too much, since there’s an essay I have on him in the works, but in short: he makes me laugh, treats me like gold, pushes me to be my best, and understands me better than anyone I’ve dated ever has. He encourages me to be tough while making me feel safe to be vulnerable. I like myself better when I’m around him and I’m a better person for having him in my life.
Outside of traveling to jiu-jitsu competitions in the last six months, we traveled together to New York, where I brought him as a +1 to a wedding in the tri-state area last month. He met pretty much everyone important in my family at that wedding except for my dad. (I’m waiting on that one a little longer). He handled the whole weekend, with its highly-animated cast of characters, impressively. I think he’ll be around the next time I craft one of these semiannual updates.
Lesson Learned #4: “Fighting’s not easy.”
Lyrics: “We On,” Ace Hood; “You Be Killin Em,” Fabolous; “Respect,” The Notorious B.I.G.
Jiu-jitsu has been going well. I’m still training about 6 days a week, haven’t sustained any injuries I can’t work around, and have collected a few more stripes on my white belt, meaning that I have some reason to hope that I’ll be invited to test for my blue belt next year. I don’t get to determine the timeline on that though — it’s completely at the instructor’s discretion. The best thing I can do is continue to train and to “chase better jiu-jitsu, not chase the belt,” paraphrasing his words to the class after the last group of students tested for belt promotions in September.
I competed in three tournaments in the tail end of 2018, and they all went well, more or less — as one of my training partners once told me, “You win or you learn.” In the matches that I didn’t win, I certainly learned, with the biggest learning experience coming from the match in which I unwittingly went unconscious from a choke. These occurrences aren’t uncommon, but since it was the first time it had happened to me — and in a tournament, of all places — it had me severely shaken up.
It took me another 3 months to find the courage to compete again, and I’m glad I did. There are plenty of days I feel tired and not in the mood to train, but when I haul myself to the gym and step on the mat, I never regret it. Similarly, while I don’t love competing for a variety of reasons, I never regret doing it. It’s like a jiu-jitsu pop quiz where you get to apply what you’ve learned in class while benchmarking yourself against folks of similar size and skill. There are only so many women in my gym, and there’s a big disparity between the girls who have been training less than a year and the girls who have been training over two years. Because I’m right in the middle of those two groups (I’m coming up on 2 years of training at the end of March), getting to compete against other women in the same weight class and relative experience is valuable for me because it’s not something I get to do every day.
On the note of training with other women, I accidentally broke the arm of a girl at the gym right before I went to California in November. For the following week, I couldn’t stop tearing up at the memory of the whole scene: tightening up on the kimura, waiting for her to tap, and then hearing the sickening pop of her arm. Luckily, it was a clean bone break (no weird surgery needed on account of random tendon tears, which are frequent in jiu-jitsu), and I’m told she’ll be able to train again shortly after the new year.
Recalling it now, a month and a half since it happened, still makes me feel nauseous and guilty. These things happen as the cost of doing business in a combat sport, everyone tells me, and the girl, who I’ve seen twice since, told me herself to not worry or beat myself up over it. Regardless, this experience taught me a few things, too, most importantly that this jiu-jitsu stuff does work and it can do some damage.
Lesson learned #5: “If I’m going to get anywhere with writing in the next year, I will need take it as seriously as I’ve taken training jiu-jitsu in the last year.”
Lyrics: “Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream,” Aretha Franklin; “Be As You Are,” Mike Posner.
If there’s one dream I have, it’s to be a bestselling author one day. Truthfully, I’ve put more time into training jiu-jitsu than I have into writing over the last year. If I’m brutally honest with myself, I haven’t put enough time into writing to expect any significant progress in reaching my goals: to be extensively published in outlets I respect, to have a book to my name, and to have a full-on career as a writer and creative public figure.
Looking to blog post data on Medium, the posts that have gotten far and away the most traction are one piece about jiu-jitsu, my #metoo story, and a post about product management (specifically, how I transitioned into my role out of my MBA). I could probably write a book on any one of these subjects and have a solid, focused audience for it, but the book I feel most called to write is something more like a memoir-ish book of personal essays.
Even though I have 6.5 years of blog material and plenty of my best stuff still unwritten, so much fear has gotten in the way of me sitting down to create the manuscript I’d told myself I’d have written by the end of this year. I still pulled together at least one new blog post a month, but that manuscript didn’t happen. I didn’t dedicate enough time to the goal, and when I did set aside Sundays as “book time,” I spent so much time cringing over my old work, agonizing over each word in my new pieces, envying all the people I know who already have books, and fearing that nothing I do will go anywhere or be good enough that I essentially stopped before I started.
One of my best days this fall was taking the day off of work to meet and get a book signed by one of my favorite authors and graduation speaker — Michael Lewis (his ‘Don’t eat fortune’s cookie’ speech is 110% worth the 3-minute read). Because the bookstore magically wasn’t mobbed, I was actually able to have a conversation with him. After telling him how much the wisdom from his speech from six years ago still resonated with me, I told him how I worked in tech but wanted to become a writer. The piece of advice he offered was that it wasn’t too late, and if I’m going to take a page out of anyone’s book, it’s his (the art history major-turned-trader-turned writer), speaking as the comp lit major-turned-MBA-turned tech worker-hopeful-turned writer.
2019 will be about breaking through or tricking myself out of the fear that has held back my best work. It’ll be about treating my writing as seriously as I do my jiu-jitsu: writing even on the days that I don’t want to, showing up and trying my best even if I’m not performing at my best for one reason or another, training for this book as if I were training for a competition — with consistency and discipline. Even if I don’t end next year with a full book, I intend to begin each day with a means of making tiny steps on the book so no matter what, I won’t be able to dispute my own progress, even if incremental. I want to end the next year with pieces of writing that I’m deeply proud of and to be able to say that I’m walking the path toward writing a great book.
Inspired by Mary Oliver, these are my own three things to remember on the journey to writing this book:
- I’m not a bad writer. Even if I’m self-critical, I have reason to believe I am good at this and I am capable of writing things that people enjoy reading, find valuable, or both.
- There are plenty of people who can barely string together a sentence and have published books (cue tons of self-published stuff on Amazon). There are plenty of bestselling authors who aren’t great writers (50 Shades of Grey, anyone?). If they can do it, so can I. I have no reason not to believe that I can’t.
- “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” Keep showing up and “don’t quit before the miracle happens.”
Lesson Learned #6: “There’s a difference between standing still and moving slowly.”
Lyrics: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” originally by Radiohead, arranged by Off the Beat; “Sometimes,” Alle Farben; “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen.
If you ask me how I’d describe this year, I’d still stay that this year has been “boring” in that I still live in the same place I was living last year, am still working at the same job I was working last year, and am still practicing the same hobbies I was practicing last year. In my depressed moments from this year, the thing I complained most about was feeling as if I was standing still, like nothing in my life was moving forward and I’d made no meaningful progress on anything I cared about mastering (in my career, in writing, or in fighting).
Last Monday at coffee was when I realized that this “life standstill” wasn’t true. I wasn’t actually going nowhere. I just wasn’t looking at everything I’d done from the appropriate lens. A lot has happened. It just hasn’t been on the surface. This was not the year of conspicuously sexy breakthroughs. A good relationship is a huge deal, but a very personal one that I keep mostly private. A revelation of needing to find another job and consciously deciding to take steps towards it is major, but needs to be kept under wraps for at least the 40 hours/week I’m in the office in my current gig. I’ve come a long way in jiu-jitsu, but in the lineup, I’m still a white belt.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last year, it’s that the external validation for anything I do is going to come on a longer timeline — if it even matters at all. All the startup founders I admire didn’t hit it big until they’d been in the trenches for at least five years, long after the novelty of their business ventures wore off. All the black belts I look up to have been training for at least a decade to get to where they are. All the writers I respect worked at their craft for a long time before they found any readership. Anything that’s worth doing is going to require more than just a year or two of my casual effort — it will demand something more like a decade of devotion.
I’ve never been someone who was great at “embracing the process,” “enjoying the ride,” or otherwise believing “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” I live for the exciting beginnings and satisfying endings of things. 2018 was a tougher education on the value of being in the middle of things and what it takes to stay the course when it would be far easier to suddenly conclude or start over. Muddling along in the dark, moving step by step through the ambiguous, unsexy middle of the journey — that’s where you learn what you’re made of, by pressing on through the mind- and soul-numbing plateaus until the eventual breakthrough.
In the words of some motivational image that popped up on my Pinterest feed: “It doesn’t get easier. You just get better.”
~~
Many thanks for reading this to the end. Sending you my best, wishing you only good things in 2019, and hoping you’ll stay tuned for all that comes next!
Erica
