What I never expected might happen—that I might be free from graduate admissions, from the shackles of my administrative job, an inefficient cabaret with incompetent cast, overstaffed and constantly underperforming—happened. I got a new job.
Yes, finally may I say it: I am, more than ever, ideologically opposed to an expensive education in the arts at for-profit institutions. Not anti-grad-school, but very anti-paying-for-grad-school. On many occasions I called admissions a bureaucratic purgatory—by which I meant a liminal space between financial security and personal disappointment, a walk down a road in which I knew there was only more road and a temperamental Keurig.
At long last, I quit my job in graduate admissions, which took 19 months. If you’re wondering how I got there in the first place it’s because I returned to New York for a boy I thought I would marry, signed an unaffordable lease, had to get a new job to afford it, and then a month later had to break up with him. The consequence—besides what much of orzo bimbo has been about: heartbreak, mediation, inner hell—was a career plateau, a flush of disappointment at each party when saying I was working in graduate admissions—without a graduate degree, at that—knowing for myself it was the most random and perhaps least interesting place I could have landed. And I would think, because I still cringe so hard at the concept of saying I’m spending any time “writing” or being a “writer,” this is what they think I do. Went to all that educational and financial trouble to end up working in admissions. This person I just met, they are departing my eye contact thinking: She works in admissions and I wonder if she knows her hair looks like that.
For my vanity, this was hell. To everyone else: this was the most normal and inoffensive job, and to some even: lucky! Sounds cool! My roommate goes to Pratt and loves it! And it was normal and inoffensive, lucky in that I was able to continue living in New York, which led me to all the good things that have happened since I moved back. Those took a very long time to come around, of course, but they came around.
At my new job, when they ask Where did you come from? And I say admissions…at Pratt, they say “oh!” with a breeze of confusion. They came from Business Insider, The Strategist, a Columbia master’s program.
I know what you’re thinking, which is: have I ever witnessed someone being so dramatic and hateful about the most regular thing in the world—working a completely regular job like everyone else is?
Let me help you: no, you have not.
To be clear: I do not find the concept of admissions to be an embarrassing job. If someone told me they worked in admissions, I would say: lucky! Sounds cool! I know someone who goes there and loves it! The failure of it, for me, as I’ve written before, is that I’m pathologically obsessed with creating my life as It’s Supposed To Be, which means, to me: artistic, invigorating, hard, purposeful. Graduate admissions never fell even close to that category. I also pathologically cannot stand working a job that isn’t deadlined, fast-paced, challenging, somewhat glamorous, something with longevity. The thought of creating anything that doesn’t translate in some sense into the material world depresses me. Craft without a modicum of craft. I also fear, maybe more than anything, living beneath my potential.
I wish people could talk more accurately and less romantically about your mid-twenties, which is mostly making leaps toward what you think is the right decision but is more or less making the only decision available to you considering your circumstances. Your twenties (by which I mean my twenties, and perhaps yours) are propelled mostly by desire for reciprocal, supportive, & local friendships (so much harder to come by than anyone ever warned), wealth, doing what other people are doing while also being desperate to be perceived as exceptional.
I have for a while felt pretty sickened by the female-targeted lit that sits on McNally’s front tables, which always belabors the emotional crises of wealthy and well-educated women in their 20’s living in Manhattan, underperforming at their publishing jobs and having unprotected sex with older men. Trying ketamine, being the Bad Guy, fucking up.
For those who pay their own rent, this is not life here, need we a reminder. I often did. Instead of being the nubile, nepo baby of bestsellers, my twenties have been the poorest, loneliest years of my life. I’ve felt massively unprotected, at bay, untrusting, disappointed in myself—deceived, slighted—for thinking I deserved more than what I ended up having, which was a series of intense and depressing relationships, no savings, sinister and performative friendships, often built upon competition and imitation. This, I found out, is extremely standard for your twenties. What I had expected was years of onward and upward: a job that made sense for me, swimming, uncomplicated relationships with women, beach vacations with a well-intentioned boyfriend and his wino parents, apartment parties, smoking weed once a year to remember I wasn’t any good at it, clubbing with leisure, having money, liking martinis, wearing slingbacks.
Anyway, I outgrew that embarrassing delusion while working in admissions. I learned to trust my own gut less. I came to better understand the rate at which people spend their money, work less than 20 hours/week, try to sleep with your boyfriend (more than expected), as well as the rate at which they make money and have sex (less than expected).
During my most mediocre period ever, however—which is how I’ll recall this time—I met Kate and Iz and my bridesmaid party was easier than ever to line up in my head. I got this beautiful apartment and stabilized somewhat emotionally and started writing properly and built out a project that had been sitting in the back of my head in some sense for a long time—an idea, by the way, built out of loneliness and disappointment in my reality, and that worked out too. And then I fell in love again, somehow, and then I got a job writing at Architectural Digest. All that normal stuff, as it turns out, was completely essential so that I might not feel like I swallowed rocks. The flatline, as it were, made for easy walking.
I hoped more than suspected the wave might finally break, and learned meanwhile the humility of financing life through the opposite of your ideals—pantomiming, in obligation, a worse version of yourself.
If anything, working the least glamorous and most Completely Fine job set me exactly straight: my main character delusions plateaued with my career aspirations, my faith in something after. I settled into a humbling reality. I recall sitting next to Jackson on the grass in Fort Greene park a few months ago and him saying: It’s funny, I thought you’d have been the one to make it, out of everyone.
And I said: No, this had to happen. Can you imagine how awful I’d be? If that shit had landed for me?
Unfortunately for everyone, it somehow did last week, but before you hate me too much, please know that my first article ever for Architectural Digest was on Wayfair’s “Way Day” sale, which is their Amazon Prime day, and I wrote things like, “Your life would suck without this [Kelly Clarkson Home] art deco inspired media console.”
Regardless, I have two pairs of slingbacks on the next tab, in my cart, and 19 months of career despondence behind me. Onward, upward.
Can relate so hard to your comments on your 20s, thanks for voicing them. I do think each year I get a little bit closer to knowing myself though, so there's hope
write a book, they chant quietly from the comments