What I Know Now
A retrospective on my measly 26 years on Earth.

Going into my 26th year, I can easily say that I still carry a lot of the assurances of my youth: a shiny earnestness (yes, even after the 2016 election), too many band t-shirts, and a little bit of an ego.
When I first moved to Austin in 2012, I had written down a list of the things I wanted to see myself doing within five years. I handed it to my mom, pink ink and all, so she could keep it safe while I started out the next phase of my life.
It was not a short phase. There was a time where I slept on my friend’s couch for four months. There was the ramen on ramen, the mattress on the floor, the spending way too much on drinks and not enough on healthy food.
“Take care of yourself”, my mom would say. “Yeah, uh-huh, sure” I would reply, inching ever closer to the five-year mark.
After about a year, I got a job at a fabric shop in Austin. When that didn’t work, another job at a B2B software company, called Journyx. It was an incredible learning experience, rocketing my real-world marketing education from sophomoric to practically junior-level. We strategized year-long marketing plans and A/B tested the hell out of campaigns. We wrote blogs, targeted emails, and social media posts. We mapped out our press rotation to make sure enough people found different parts of the business in ways that appealed to them directly.
I was 21, and it was the best job a girl without much experience could ask for.
Years passed, experience earned, lessons learned. A friend reached out on Facebook and asked me if I was looking for a job. On a lark, I said yes. That lark became one of the best moves for my career.
“Alyssa, do you remember what you put on your list?”
I was 25, having hit that five-year deadline, and totally couldn’t remember that pink ink. “By 25, you wanted to work in an agency as a copywriter. That’s all you put.” And that’s what happened.
If that sounds like it was easy to suddenly make it happen, it wasn’t. If it sounds easy to keep it going, it isn’t.
So much of client work is unforgiving, frustrating, heartbreaking. It’s easy to want to say, “well, they’re just total assholes”, but they’re not.
Dealing with clients now is a little easier than it was when I was 21, yet still, what I know now is not much. It’s that people have good days and they have bad days. It’s as simple as finding my groove on one project, and smashing into a wall on another. It’s knowing that not all my writing is going to be A+, sometimes it’s going to be sub-par. But that’s no reason to oscillate between thinking I’m a hack and I’m a god, or that the client is dumb for not liking it.
On worse days, I’ve said to myself, “they just don’t understand art”, or “it’s just so subjective”. On flat out awful days, I’ve said to myself, “they’re just total assholes and are taking it out on me.”
Inversely, sometimes my writing is bad, sometimes I haven’t tried my hardest. Or maybe the client is having a bad day, and that’s okay, too. But most days aren’t like that, not really.
What I’ve learned at 26 is that I know less now than I did five years ago. That coming into your own can sometimes feel like a literal rebirth, blinking and bleary-eyed, staring into the sun as I figure out my next move. Other times, it can feel as easy as taking good news, bad news or even no news in stride.
After less-than-stellar reviews in the past have sent me reeling, here’s what I now keep in my back pocket to remember: look at your work with objectivity (or at least as much as you can). Know your good days and bad days. Know that some clients can be assholes, but for the most part they’re just looking for whatever represents their brand the best. Sometimes they don’t know what they want, sometimes they have bad taste, but none of that needs to break me. I can keep going, work harder, do better. If, at the end of the day, I can look at myself and say, “I’ve done my best today”, then I can take pride in my work. If I feel I’ve dropped the ball, I can pick it back up and try again.
I’m learning to thicken my skin, because copywriting can be one of the most fulfilling things I can do with my time, or it will break me, if I let it. But it doesn’t need to — the only person I need to convince to believe in me, is me. The rest will follow, or it won’t. It doesn’t matter either way.
