1.

“Hi Meg. I found your information through Medium and checked out your online portfolio. Good work! I’m writing to you because I’m looking to become a copywriter myself, but getting my foot in the door seems to be kind of a mystery. If you’d be so kind, I would love to pick your brain about copywriting and the secret to your success.”

It was an email of a curious nature. I’d heard about this kind of thing happening to other people. Everyone from young writers-by-night searching for ways to devote their days to their passion to disgruntled copywriters looking to go rogue as freelancers and even English majors hoping to find a place for themselves in an increasingly uncertain future. They were all looking for mentors and this time someone was looking at me to fill that post.

Every time I sat down to reply to the email, I quickly excused myself to seek accomplishment by cleaning the refrigerator or the stove. Other times I measured my self-worth by examining the successful results of a new face mask while perched on the edge of my bathroom sink, counting light crow’s feet and analyzing my pores.

I finally confided in my boyfriend with an exasperation better for relaying juicer gossip.

“You are successful. You make a living doing exactly what you want to do.”

He’s right. It is true insofar as people pay me to write copy. But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

2.

Sometimes believing in myself is not unlike believing in those first waking moments after having that dream where you’ve been given something you’ve always wanted. For a few precious seconds it’s actually there, underneath your pillow, or in the corner of your bedroom waiting just outside your periphery. It’s so wonderfully close, yet so very far away.

To put it another way, my mom always cautioned me to never leave the house without make-up. “You never know who’ll you meet,” she’d yell as I slammed the door.

I hated her when she’d say that. Yet, to this day I can’t help but give my lashes a swipe of mascara, at least; I carry a lipstick in my pocket, just in case.

3.

Nobody talked about life after graduation. There weren’t internships for poets, writers, libertines or existentialists. Law school was a last resort. Graduate school if all else fails. When it was over, we stuffed our caps and gowns back into the plastic sacks from which they came. We put our second-hand couches on the curb, but not before checking the cushions for loose change and tucking some of our best kept dreams into the deeper folds where they could rest forever just out of reach. We scattered across the country to start our new lives only to find ourselves in our old bedrooms with parents who’d been replaced with older more tired versions of themselves.

I didn’t become a copywriter until I was 25 having snagged an internship with the help of a friend who worked for a local advertising agency. By that time, I’d already been a nanny, a housekeeper, a retail associate, a concierge, a lab rat, a forgotten arts columnist for a defunct regional magazine targeted to middle-aged women of a certain income.

I had no idea what I was doing. Feeling nauseous and nervous, I nearly bailed on my first interview. I asked my soon-to-be boss to repeat almost every question she asked trying to deliver my answers with a dry tongue that had suddenly become too big for my mouth. And yet, later that day she emailed me with a start date. During those first weeks I asked what the terms “EOD” and “bandwidth” meant cringing at how impersonal they sounded and promising myself to never use either. I learned that I could get a good amount of work done if I brought an extra notebook to meetings. I was successfully starting the career I have today.

Seven years later, I still hate the word “bandwidth.”

4.

At 32 years old, I don’t feel like a millennial even though the media loves lumping me into the group, but that’s not to say that I don’t feel their growing pains.

You can’t swing a dead cat on the internet without finding an article about millennials in the workplace and how these meddling kids are just no good. 
 
 I don’t know what it is. Was it the recession? When suddenly, instead of passing torches people desperately clung to their positions neglecting to groom the ambitious greenhorns for fear they’d steal their jobs, that is if their jobs even existed in the next year? Was it because when there were no jobs for young people that those in upper level positions got used to not having them around? So much so that when the economy became healthy again they’d forgotten that bringing the young ones up was part of the gig?

Whatever the reason, the conversation is tiresome and it makes people sound old and if you work in a creative field, it makes you sound anything but creative. In fact, it makes you sound like a curmudgeon who slaps at the lazy whippersnappers with passive aggressive insults about their phone use, their text messages and their desire to define a workplace that works for them when you could be that wise, bad ass mentor who’s still killing it, still hungry, who still believes in change.

Kids that grew up in the 90's were told to stay active. We were taught that the sedentary life will kill you. We saw how the old way crushed our parents and the parents of our friends. We feel bad about it because our older colleagues remind us of our moms and dads and you have no idea how much it hurts, how scary it is to watch you grow old, to know that at some point you won’t be around whether we need your help or not.

5.

Neither of my parents quite understand what I do for a living. In their eyes, the internet is a self-generating space. Web copy just is and video scripts write themselves. That I spend a lot of time dwelling in the realm of ideas, let alone get paid for the time I spend there, seems somehow dishonest.

When I was fresh out of college and having trouble finding my way into a career they suggested I become a bank teller or “get into sales,” neither of which suit my personality. “You learn to like it,” they said. “You have to make sacrifices in life. Work two, three, four jobs at a time if you have to. Life isn’t fair.”

My mother works in the mail room at the IRS. My father continues his quest for the brass ring. Neither can retire because the money just isn’t there. No, life isn’t fair.

6.

I owed this young upstart a reply if only because I could remember what it was like to white knuckle it through life with a mediocre resume and portfolio housed in a zip file. I clicked through my website and read through old writing. I’ve come a long way.

And yet, it isn’t enough. It’s never enough.

I wanted to tell the kid that I haven’t come close to doing the working I’m capable of. That more often than not, I’m tired and I’m frustrated not because of the work itself, but because I can’t find the opportunity I want. That the freelancing I’m doing now is a means to an end without an end in sight. That I’d give anything to find a creative mentor too. That being a part of team is the best part of the gig. That life moves incredibly fast when you’re feeling the crunch of time. How I’m scared that I’ll never get the chance to be who I still believe I can become. How I’d like to leave Austin because I want to live one more new place while I’m still young. How I have no idea how I’ll get there because there are parts of life that remain a mystery to me too.

But instead I replied, “Hey, I’m glad you reached out. How can I help?”