I have been trying to tell this story for months—I’ve been writing it in the shower, telling it to myself while scramble for a G train i can already hear passing me, walking around town, thinking about nothing and then a little about this. By the time I get back to my computer, though, it doesn’t matter anymore, or i can’t find a way to tell it that matters.
Well, let’s try. This is a blog after all.
I started my blog in February ‘08, almost three years ago because Lindsay kept posting links to jakobandjulia videos and I thought, Well why can’t we do this? I remember sitting on a bench with Halle while we babysat our charges at a playground, lump-throatedly trying to justify why it was a worthwhile waste of time and not simply keeping me from doing any Real Writing.
I started to spend more and more time on it, pretty soon amassed a following of a few thousand people who seemed to like my funny little videos and transcriptions of conversations I had with the kid i was in charge of, and then more and more and longer things about what I can only classify as “trying to be an adult.” More people read my blog, I started to make friends from it, spend more time on it, write emails to strangers late at night, gchat with people I didn’t know all day, people that seemed sometimes like the kind of people I had always wanted to know but never found. The internet was cool that way. There was something to this.
By that time I was working part time as Jonathan Coulton’s assistant while the kid was at school and soon I saved enough money to move out and just do that. I remember the email, vaguely, where he asked me for my new blog’s URL so that he could add it to his Google Reader. I hesitated, weighing all the things I knew about professional boundaries or making Facebook photos of oneself at parties private so that future employers don’t hold them against you.
Wouldn’t that be weird, my boss looking at my blog?
I decided that I read his blog, and his Twitter thing—I answered his friggin email for him for Christ’s sake, so why couldn’t he read my blog? He was Cool. He was a Musician. Maybe it was okay if he knew I sometimes used profanity and occasionally listened to Bonnie Raitt. I sent it to him.
He probably said, “Sweet,” and added it to his RSS feed. Maybe he got annoyed with it after a few days since I’m pretty sure following a Tumblr in RSS is (purposefully) annoying as shit. I have no idea.
At that point, a few years ago, Boring Internet Analyzing People talked a lot about professionalism and what that was supposed to mean now. I guess they still do. Certainly plenty of people have had some things to say about my lack of professionalism the past year or two. Fine. Digital PR strategists the world over are welcome to scratch their heads, tab through Tweetdeck, and wonder how the hell I have managed to keep a job while talking about my period for the 3rd month in a row. As much as I despise their trumpeting of opinions just to have them, I don’t really mind it. I know that being myself on the internet, or speaking freely, or being a writer, or keeping a blog, or saying fuck, or using all caps means I am constantly in negotiation.I lose a bit of defensibility. People can call me an idiot and, when accompanied by screencaps of certain afternoons of my Twitter feed, sane people could have legitimate reason to agree.
I worry sometimes about it, too, but only in passing. I think about the first day I saw Coulton after he read my blog. I think maybe he dropped the F bomb? We started joking about all of the crazy emails he got. We started bitching about all of the fucking t-shirts he had to pack into suitcases and take on the road. He asked me about my writing. I was a human being. I was before, too, but I was more of one now, or so it felt.
I will never be happy sitting at a desk, afraid to say what I think, doing shit work and not allowed to complain about it. I will never feel bad about saying a bad word, even in a meeting in a boardroom full of people much older and more accomplished than me, who don’t know who I am, aside from maybe a cursory Google before they shuffled over from their cubes (from which they undoubtedly found an insane rant about this mouse I have and how no one will ever love me or something like that).
I will rely on my charm for a long time, I think, professionally speaking. That is a little scary, yes. You’re right, I don’t have any real skills. Before I worked at Tumblr I was a nanny, yes. I have this blog where I talk about my feelings too much, and I certainly fucked up a few things in public a few times. What did I even do there? How did I even get that job?
I got that job, I think, because everyone on Staff read my blog, a few of them knew me, and I seemed smart and friendly. I “got” the platform. I didn’t write Mashable articles about how to best leverage the platform. I used it. They needed someone to talk to people for them. They needed someone to help people learn how to use Tumblr. I had a popular blog, I was nice and seemed insightful, a few of them knew me, followed me, had met me at Tumblr Meetups. John called me one day on the phone. He asked me what I was doing, professionally. I said I was an assistant part time, but that I spent most of my time on Tumblr. He said well, we should talk.
I called my mom and told her I had an interview, and also that I was broke. I couldn’t afford tampons, or the metro card to actually get to the interview, so she put 20 bucks in my checking account for me, from Florida, and I went to meet with John at Starbucks and talk about Tumblr. I was myself as so was John. We joked about stuff and theorized about internet things and I said, “I have no idea,” maybe more than someone in my position should, but I’ve never been much good at bullshitting.
I wonder what I must have seemed like to him—24, kind of a mess, never had a Real Job before, didn’t use the word “startup,” or even really know what that meant yet. A few emails later, after I was hired, I think, I asked him if I should send him my resume. He said, Yes, of course, like it was obvious. God knows what that thing looked like, or what it even said. What were my OBJECTIVES, as they related to Tumblr? Mostly to be around smart people, to learn, to afford a monthly unlimited metro card, to get out of the house.
My job changed every few months at Tumblr, but mostly in good ways. It seemed like every time my work started to feel useless or monotonous, I’d be in Starbucks with John within the week, near tears, asking him what I was even doing here. And he would say to hang in there, that this is how startups work (and I understood it then, all the nuance of a phrase that makes most normal people eyeroll), and we would make big lists, and I would start emailing like crazy, and Peter would make a poster, and we would hold a film festival, or send David and Topher to the Grammy’s, or redesign the Meetups page, or decide not to help “VIPs” anymore because handholding never scales (“scaling” took me a little longer to comprehend, another obnoxious phrase to everyone but the people who live it). We hired Coatney, I got an intern, I went from “VIP Concierge” to Director of Marketing to Director of Outreach because marketing felt like a dirty word, to in charge of Creative Community because David felt like that’s where my heart was, where my interest was veering. What I mean is that this was 18 months of my life where I showed up in the morning and could leave brand new. We’d talk at lunch about Replies to Replies and that would transition to clumped around David’s desk, walking back and forth and yelling and joking and writing on the whiteboard and staying late without noticing, all revved up with talking about things and then doing them. I was surrounded by empowered people and this empowered me, too. I was the queen of TL;DR, I was the girl who gave everyone romantic advice in line at Chicken Deli. I was nurtured, believed in, ignored for weeks and then suddenly in charge of the world, or so it felt. I spent whole days in taxis and other people’s offices, and whole days on my computer doing nothing. I spent whole days dreaming up new ways of helping people come together better and then wondering if they would happen, or when. I participated, often begrudgingly, in conference calls. I demo-d Tumblr to big magazines with my Dashboard full of naked women and the tracked tag “COMING AND CRYING.”
I stayed late at work to write, I came in on the weekends to write. I loved my desk, my chair, my coworkers. This was my family, a bunch of boys who played video games and all had girlfriends, who knew I was the crassest of them all, the one who only got scolded for talking about porn on my Twitter feed once, who didn’t have any aspirations for any of this until the week it happened, and never once apologized for any of it.
I miss all of them, and plenty of it. I feel like it’s all going on without me, and it is, and that is hard. The day we talked about me leaving I cried, I said I wished I could be everyone’s friend, professionally, that I could stick around the office and give my opinion when they needed it and then send emails to my friends all day. I could wait for my stock options to vest while refreshing my Dashboard. But there is work to be done there. There are people who will start new and hustle more than I did, in the end. There are people who deserve to sit around the lunch table and debate the new Directory for hours, shouting out jokes and profanity and laughing too loudly and not apologizing for any of it.
I work at Kickstarter now. They knew me because I used their website. I went to some of their parties. I met with Yancey, we joked around, we theorized about the Internet, he said he thought I’d have a home there. I still haven’t given them a resume.
Before I started I took a few months off from working and barely looked at my computer. “Barely” is a relative term. I didn’t go on vacation. I really didn’t even write. I made lists of goals but they were more like, “read books!” and “learn to cook!” I slept a lot. Yep. I think I only went to the gym twice, and never before 5 and never when it was empty, the way I always thought I would if I ever only had the chance. I fell in love, got sick a few times, had coffee with a handful of smart New Yorkers and had panicked phone calls with plenty more people I look up to. I wrote in a notebook again. I didn’t tell you about everything. I thought about stuff, and I knew what I did was right, even if change does make me want to puke.
