My 2019 year end review
 |
Last year at this time, I delivered overpriced cookies for a living.
Weaving in and out of traffic at ungodly hours to deliver a small box of sweets to college students at ungodly hours. It's needless to say that after graduating three months prior and coming off of an internship with Cleveland Magazine, this isn't what I thought I'd be doing but I will say it anyway.
This is not what I thought I would be doing right out of college. I thought I would be working at the New York Times as a Politics Reporter or as a Columnist for the New Republic. Instead, I worked at Insomnia Cookies full time as a driver and a driver - I wasn't even allowed to clean the store.
Some nights I would work until three in the morning, coming home dead tired to a sleeping girlfriend resting to work in the morning - I would go days without seeing her, our only form of communication would be through text messages and phone calls.
On one especially awesome night driving in a snowstorm, a fallen trailer hitch popped up from the snow slush in the middle of the road and destroyed one of my tires. It was 3 a.m., it was below 20 degrees and I didn't have gloves as I tried to remove the tire to put the spare on. I had to ask one of my co-workers if she could call in a AAA truck to help out.
It felt like I couldn't move my hands right for a week afterward.
Still, I kept going.
On the side, I wrote articles on Medium about what was going on in Ohio. Through a lucky turn of events, I was featured three times on three of Medium's front pages.
That, in turn, landed me my first job interview with a news blog called Vozwire.com I would write articles for free about what was going on in the world in a weekly column I did called "Weekend Takeout." I thought I was Jon Stewart, speaking truth to power while also making fun of it (I still do and the columns will be coming back.)
In the summer, my hours at the cookie store were cut back drastically which left me in a tough situation - how was I going to pay bills?
I could afford to help out a little bit, but Vozwire couldn't pay me for my work, so I relied solely on what I could make from my delivery job. So, for the entire month of June, I pushed myself to find a job close to home as a journalist while I scraped together anything I could just to stay afloat. I was literally digging through the cushions of my couches just to find pennies to store away to buy groceries for the week.
It took me three weeks, scared shitless and confident I was going to fade away into obscurity as a no-hit wonder until I landed a job interview at a newspaper in Cleveland. Three days later I was hired as a fulltime staff writer covering three cities on the east side of Cleveland.
Despite the uncertainty and crushing weight of financial debt I was facing, I kept moving forward. The smoke cloud from the road map I had previously laid out looked like a speck of dust in the rearview mirror as I traveled on the new map as I went.
It's a scary thought, moving forward into the unknown, the plan you thought you carefully laid out for yourself thrown out the window and shot at by a bazooka, but you have to. Otherwise, you're never going to discover who you really are, or at the very least - get anything done.
Comments
Post a Comment