Daily Musing #1: I am an Expert Failure.
I’ve been on a journey to turn my life around since 2015.
I’ve met with many failures, but one thing is for damn sure: I didn’t come to this planet to race 9 am to 5 pm away on the hamster wheel of daily, office-oriented existence.
That’s not my jam. I can’t do cubicles anymore.
I’ve become a workplace hazard and tend to infect teammates with the sort of productivity-draining conversations that interrupt workflow and steadily erode corporate profits.
That’s no good.
Here’s some context: it starts with the rebrand.
My wife and I moved to Austin, TX from El Paso, TX in 2015. In 2016 I was hired as a copywriter for a multi-level marketing company amid a rebrand.
Rebranding is the process of changing the image of a company or product. The aim is to make the new image more attractive to consumers. It is a marketing strategy that involves changing the logo, name, symbols, or a combination of all of them. (MBN)
Those were long, trying months during which I pushed my writing skills to a new level of precision and pliability. It was truly miraculous to form part of a team at the corporate level. I learned that together we could kick more ass than we could alone.
And indeed, I spent my time burning the midnight oil with other members of the marketing team during the rebrand. We weren’t getting paid overtime, naturally.
We were salaried creators, but we were creators first and foremost and boy did we believe in our creations.
It was the first time in my life that I was regularly getting home from work past 9 pm. It was the first time in my life that I was entrusted with so much responsibility, and it was the first time in my life that I had to juggle that responsibility with the needs of someone else.
During this time my wife was also adjusting to her new role in the veterinary field. Part of the adjustment period was learning how to cope with the emotional ramifications of daily euthanasias.
It was a highly charged, stressful time for both of us, but I believed in what we were doing and we had each other’s support.
It was also exciting and challenging to strategize, synergize, and coordinate with a group of highly talented and proficient individuals. Together we raced against deadlines, delivered tenfold on the demands of the executives, and even became friends in the process.
I won’t go as far as to say that it was a dream job. I’ve always loathed corporate culture and I hate ironing shirts, but it was great to work with such a dedicated team and it felt nice to put my stupid Creative Writing degree to use.
It ends in failure.
The rebrand issue always gets me into trouble during an interview. Without exception every hiring manager I’ve encountered will brandish this rarified bumpkin face as they glance over my resume and ask:
“Why are there two company names listed on one entry? Did you work at two different places?”
Moi: “No señor. I came in during a REBRANDING CAMPAIGN. I know 2+2 is 5, but c’mon mate, I explain this in the first line of the entry. How are you even the one conducting the interview? Something is wrong here.”
This always cracks me up.
Back to my exploits on the marketing team. After toiling for many months on the rebrand, the entire department was laid off from one day to the next without so much as a severance package. Shortly thereafter the company went poof — and I mean it no longer exists in this reality.
Seriously, if you Google the company’s name all you’ll get are church listings, which is great if you’re into worship, but not so great when your resume lists you as the corporate author of a website that’s not real. Lmao omg.
This is going to be a continuing theme in my failure tackle box: the wealth of my professional experience comes from projects that no longer exist. As you can imagine, this makes it very difficult to prove my pedigree as a professional copy-writer.
However! I’m not here to bitch about corporate injustice or my short ended stick or whatever. These things happen; corporate executives can be inept, petty, stupid people.
Life can getcha. I understand. I’m over it.
And I’m glad that I was able to save snippets of my corporate reality before it completely faded from this timeline. I’ll often go through my portfolio just to reassure myself that yes, all that writing did happen.
Yes. I am a versatile copy-writer.
I had no backup plan after getting laid off, but luckily, my former teammates were happy to help me network with big names in the MLM industry.
Thus began my excursion into the world of freelance contracting.
More failure.
All cards on the table: I have not been a successful freelance contractor. The first client I worked with was SS. He had a ton of work for me and paid well. We worked together for many months building out his brand and product.
I slowly found myself shifting roles from a copy-writer to a kind of de facto project manager.
It didn’t occur to me then to ask for a rate increase. I’ve learned from this failure.
Things were going well: we figured out a sophisticated uni-level compensation plan centered around hotel discounts and a slew of other perks for frequent travelers.
We had branding, we had a website, we had videos, and I was busy creating marketing collateral for months. SS and I had many meetings; I got to hang out with very wealthy people and meet published authors and entrepreneurs.
The only problem is that I worked too hard, too fast, and too efficiently. What should have taken a year lasted only about 8 months, and before long SS realized he was paying me to do very little.
I screwed myself over.
In the end, SS pulled the plug on our project without ever launching the damn website. And there I was, caught with my pants down, wading through a thick sludge of experience with absolutely nothing to show for it.
This too feels like a distant alternate reality that’s slowly vanishing from my memory.
After working with SS I started my own business, which I promptly ran into the ground due to not knowing how to properly manage my own business.
Whoops.
I think that’s all I’ll say about that for now.
Continued failure.
While working with SS I was introduced to MH and he eventually became one of my clients. MH by far is the most frustrating person I’ve ever worked with. He also came out of the shady recesses of the MLM industry.
We worked on several projects. The most frustrating of which was being subcontracted out to an industrial hemp company.
The work was enjoyable — I got to scour over white papers, I established a personal dialogue with leading hemp scientists, developed a profound understanding of the Hemp Farming Act of 2018, and learned to navigate my way around the DEA’s labyrinthine internal memos.
I also got a chance to slap together a Content Style Guide based on tons of data. It was a great, high energy project. Until I realized that I hadn’t been paid in over a month and rent was nearly past due.
Am I just an idiot?
Probably, but again, I have learned from my failures.
Long story short, it took nearly another month of haggling with the person doing payroll for the hemp company before I saw payment for work already completed.
MH never told me that I’d been subcontracted out to the hemp company. I think it was an intentional move to avoid paying me directly — but I’m not here to cast scurrilous accusations.
It’s just as likely that I really am an idiot and probably could have avoided this if I’d been wiser at the time. Perhaps if I’d valued myself more I never would have gotten involved with someone like MH.
Once more, all this effort was for naught. Shortly after getting paid, not only did the hemp company drop me, they also dropped MH from his executive role for reasons I’m not even sure why.
I found myself with tons of experience and absolutely nothing to validate it yet again.
Giving Up.
I have worked with several other clients since MH, but the story follows a similar narrative arch. The stress of so many defeats finally took its toll earlier this year, 2019. In the middle of a pitch to a potential client in the beauty industry, I had a total breakdown.
I just plain gave up on writing.
I realized that I’d lost all confidence in myself as a copy-writer, and told the client they’d be better off with someone else.
I stepped away from the keyboard for months.
Thankfully, my wife has been 10,000 times more successful and despite my lack of earning potential, she’s stuck with me. That’s not to say I’ve been a total bum.
I’ve worked many odd jobs, from preparing wedding venues to becoming an optician. I’ve designed sales catalogs and I’ve done layout work for authors.
I’ve become an adept driver, mover, and online tutor. But I haven’t been able to cement myself as a real writer and as I said, I felt it was time to throw in the towel.
So I’ve been FAVORING to make ends meet.
If you’re not familiar with Favor, it’s a neat little service that allows you to have virtually anything delivered. Yup, for all my experience, my only truly reliable source of income has been the value I have to offer Millenials as a delivery man.
I do enjoy driving. I do enjoy making deliveries. There is nothing wrong with making your living like this, but for a long time I’ve felt so much shame for not having “made it.”
Here I am, 31 years old, making deliveries for a living with a shiny, practically useless BA while one of my cousins is getting his graduate degree in pharmacology at the UNT Health Science Center, another is getting her degree in nursing, and yet another just started UT at Austin on scholarship.
I’m pretty sure another one of my cousins is a successful teacher, which is a route I could’ve gone down but I have a problem with authority, and my teaching internship revealed too many layers of bureaucracy that I’d have to endure. I’m not about that.
I’m the only writer my family produced.
Maybe for good reason.
So what’s the point?
The point is that I am not only a failure, I am a spectacular failure. I admit it. I accept it. I am not successful. I have not been successful. I have not been able to perform as well as I could have as an earner, and this has had detrimental effects on my wife, and the life we’re trying to build together.
I have made nothing of myself. And there was a previous version of me who was being squashed beneath the weight of this reality. I have been stressed. I have been depressed. I have been far removed from the best possible version of myself and until about a month ago, I’d seriously abandoned my craft.
But then a couple of things happened back to back that slapped some sense into me.
It started with a text message from my former marketing manager. He wanted to know if I was taking clients. At this point, sometime in August 2019, I was at an all-time low and would never have responded to his text, but he made a good offer:
The offer was too good to be true, but it was just what I needed to foolishly believe in order to step back to the keyboard. Writers are dramatic. We never really give up. You can’t. Everything is narrative. Drama makes the world go round.
I ended up meeting with this client, and we started to build a relationship. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the right fit for the health project, but he had other content-heavy projects in mind. Before I knew it I was back in my glory days, having meetings, shaping a brand, signing terms…it was all so familiar.
A little too familiar.
The cycle was repeating itself.
Sure enough, I ended up doing a lot more work than I care to admit without ever seeing a penny. And the website we were working on…not even launched.
I let it happen again.
Just as this was dawning on me, life went from tough, to crazy. Within a month, I twisted my ankle while making a delivery, my aunt from El Paso moved into our tiny Austin apartment, and then a few days later, I lost my car — which I’d been using to FAVOR, my only secure source of income — in a wreck.
All the while I was drafting content without pay.
September 2019, was a time of serious realignment.
One morning, after the car wreck and in the middle of my aunt nagging at me to go work for TXDOT, I realized something VERY important.
I’m fucking indestructible. I am breathing, and strong, and there is something that I came to this planet to accomplish. Nothing can stop me from becoming what I want to become, and I can become whatever I must to gain the advantage.
I have since ceased interaction with my “client.” My aunt has moved out; my ankle barely hurts anymore. I’ve been getting up at 5:30 am with my wife every day to take her to work, and then go make deliveries in her car.
And I’m currently about to complete a month of daily GRATITUDE POSTS.
While all this was happening, I’d been studying Marcus Aurelius and got the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal” from The Meditations. I decided that instead of making my “gratitude journal” a personal affair, I should just start pouring my heart out on Facebook.
This decision, the decision to create a daily habit and stick to it, has truly changed my perspective.
Yes, I’m still making deliveries in my wife’s car. No, I haven’t suddenly become a successful writer. And it’s probably going to be a long while before I can afford new car payments.
Ah, but I’ve been writing. I’ve been thankful. I’ve been reflecting on all the good in my life.
Every day I’ve been getting up to draft my Gratitude Posts without fail. This has helped to dramatically shift my paradigm, and reinvigorate my passion for communication.
What’s more important… people have been reading my work. People have encouraged me to keep writing, and I’ve heard from more than one individual that my posts are “inspiring.”
I’m on this planet for a reason.
Hmmm. I want to inspire people. That’s what I want to do. I get it now: this is a personal challenge. If I can turn my life around, and encourage others to do the same, then that’s a really good reason to keep writing.
See, I realize now that I don’t give a fuck about SEO. I don’t care about your product, service, mission, value, vision horseshit. I want to help people.
I want to become an endless source of inspiration for the wretched of the Earth.
For all us weirdos, all the down-trodden, all the folks who are aiming at something they can barely perceive, but know in their heart of hearts that it’s fucking there, looming somewhere in the darkness of a future yet to be wrestled from and forged out of this godforsaken existential wasteland.
It’s there, merely a glint, but it’s there waiting to be freed. And it’s yours and it’s mine. And with these five fingers, we will grasp it.
I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to do it. I’m going to prove that someone like me can become a catalyst for the reality-altering change this planet needs.
Once I figure out how to do it, nothing will stop you from doing the same thing. That’s what I’m going to do with my life, that’s what I’m going to do with my writing.
That’s why Daily Musing #1 has been so long. There were a lot of things I needed to express. But now I’ve memorialized my failures, I have removed these blockages from myself, I have cast away this useless weight which no longer serves me.
Now you know my story.
As I’m completing this Musing, I know that I’ll be able to do it again, over and over. I think I can do this every day.
So, let’s see if I can.
Let’s see where we are in a month from now.
Maybe if I can pick up a good habit, stick to it, and develop mastery, you can do the same?
Maybe we can lead the victory parade.
— LL
Sunday, October 13th, 2019
6:29 PM CST
Austin, TX (The Social)
