I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hire me. So I not only didn’t apply for promising jobs senior year of college; I didn’t apply to any jobs. Not one.
While my fellow seniors were trotting off to the career center for this or that interview, I trudged back to my dorm room, as if I’d always live there, as if it weren’t a tiny ledge I was about to leap from.
I knew I wanted to be a writer, and that in many ways I already was. But getting hired to go do a thing at a company, where they had the pick of anyone at all? Well, that seemed too far flung a prospect. I had all As, was graduating with honors and even a few awards, and yet even I couldn’t imagine the world needed another writer.
Man, I wish someone had set me straight, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook hard, said, You’re a student. Everyone knows you don’t have experience yet. That’s the point. This is where you start. But I was in denial, in a panic, veering toward the edge of all I knew—school—and refusing to peek over the edge.
In fact, I have a mind to go back and do it myself. I want to go back in time and catch myself on the quad. I want scream, “Why are you working so hard in school if you’re not going to make it count out there? What is the point of any of this?” I’m a ghost waving frantically in my own young face, but 21-year-old me can’t bear to see what’s next, fearing there’s nothing there at all, and pushes past me, headlong, toward the dining hall.
So what did I do after the unthinkable happened and I was on the other side of graduation? I busied myself with rehearsals for a show with a two-week run. Took on gimmicky, short-term jobs—like wearing a squirrel on my head and passing out tiny boxes of Clusters cereal at the Boylston Street T stop. Slung shots of Captain Morgan at a bar by the pier. Took a temp job at a real estate firm, then at a hospital, where I fielded calls from scores of women dying to see this specialist, a gynecologist-slash-psychiatrist who smoked in the building. I sat there all day, counting down the hours, spending my time on a computer with no internet (it was 1996), writing short stories that I didn’t know how to end. I called into my voice mail a few times a day (no messages, no messages). Cried on my way to the train.
I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve pumped the brakes, doubted and hesitated and did nothing at all. How many times I’ve stood at the threshold and peered over, wondered if I was capable of another step. But we never know until we know, right? And then we know it all.
I think we spend a lot of our adulthood trying to unlearn what we were so sure of. What a relief, to find out you were wrong, that there’s plenty of room, that there are other things to do besides drink tepid hospital coffee and wonder when your life will begin.
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