Kelly Gets Fired Again, Beats Her Prehistoric Social Anxiety Monster and Has a New Revelation

It is official: I am solidly in my late twenties.

These days, it seems like all the Facebook announcements of my fellow late-twenty-something millennial peers look like this:

I turned 28 years old today, and judging by all conventional measures of what success in one’s late twenties looks like, it is safe to say that I am not a very conventionally successful person.

I just left/got fired from my job two weeks ago because I got into an ideological disagreement with the non-profit organization I worked for. Yes, it is the second time in one year this has happened (as my mom helpfully reminded me when I called to tell her).

I do not have a partner, either, let alone a fiancée or a Life Partner. The number of people I am currently seeing is zero. I don’t even have entertaining stories of flirtatious/disastrous encounters in the club anymore, because I’m 28 and the club is not the glorious watering hole of unbridled sexual possibility it used to be.

I also do not have very many funds, an understandable effect of working in non-profits for six years and getting fired from them on a habitual basis. If funds were rocks, I would have a fairly small pile of rocks. A pile of small rocks slowly tumbling down a river and being carried away by the current of Fred Leeds Properties management, State Farm Insurance and Trader Joe’s.

There is a little anxiety-fueled prehistoric person in my mind that periodically likes to scream at me about the situation I am in.

This little social anxiety monster, fueled by its hunter-gatherer fear of not fitting in to the tribe of society and therefore starving and dying alone, likes to compare my life to those of my friends’ and acquaintances’ and tell me how much more successful everyone else is than me.

Adulthood is a strange thing. We like to pretend that we know what we’re doing. We like to show everyone how successful and happy and sexy we are by posting photos of ourselves on Instagram engaging in Enviable Activities like Brunch and Travel, and we like to measure our happiness by how many likes we accumulate on said photos. We’re in control. We have it figured out. Everything is great. 

It’s kind of what society in general enjoys saying. Our financial and political systems are working fine! Trust the free market to work it out. Or robots. 

But do we actually know what we’re doing? We’re living in a very weird time. Some of us have condos with a $1.5 million Pagani Zonda race car as a wall divider (I didn’t even know what a Pagani Zonda was until I googled “late state capitalism examples”) and some of us are starving on the street. We’re simultaneously putting thousands of kids in cages and committing genocide in Yemen while telling our Alexa virtual assistants to deliver almond milk to our front door because we’re too lazy to Uber to the grocery store. Exponentially accelerating advances in corporate technology have us increasingly fused to our smartphones and increasingly separated from nature. And then there’s the whole awkward situation with ecological destruction and how we might end up destroying ourselves and the planet pretty soon.

So I don’t think anyone actually knows what the fuck they’re doing, individually and societally. I think life is just one big free-for-all where everyone is stumbling around in the dark and hitting things with sticks and hoping candy/happiness will come out.

And the good news about all this is that in the bigger scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter that I’m not successful by the standards of a society which clearly doesn’t really know all that much about success after all. 

So then how do I define success and happiness? Despite the attempts of my little prehistoric pal to drag me into conformity, I’ve known for a while now that lots of money and impressive titles won’t make me happy (they might make other people happy, and that’s great by the way). Through trial and error and lots of experimenting, I’ve figured out that I don’t really need much to be fulfilled. All I really want out of life is a strong and loving community, a healthy and interdependent relationship with nature, and to be able to develop and express my unique gifts to serve the world in the best way I can.

Of course, all of that is fairly challenging to achieve in a society based on competition, isolation, scarcity and exploitation.

I’ve learned a lot through my six years of working in political non-profits, surrounded by people who are trying to make the world a better place through policy change and elections and organizing for power. I’ve learned how impactful good policies and good people in office can be. But I’ve also learned that political change is always a result of cultural change.

I’ve realized that in order to create the beautiful world we want to live in, a massive shift of values, of ideology, of ways of being with each other and being with ourselves and with our planet is needed. Cultural change: from a culture of fear and judgment and anger to love and joy. From individualism and ego and distraction to consciousness. From mindless consumption to intentional creation.

I want to be a part of catalyzing this shift. I’m going to be a bit dramatic and go ahead and say that this might even be my purpose in life. That’s why, though I haven’t accumulated many fancy titles or possessions over these last six years, I’ve intentionally been trying to transform myself out of habits of separation into practices of collectivity and joy and presence. That’s why I took the peace economy organizer job in January, and that’s also why I left as quickly as I did – because while the initiative I managed was great, the organization as a whole didn’t see the need to transform its own culture, and we both knew we ultimately weren’t the best fit. But I’m grateful for the experience, and I learned so much from it.

So now what? How do I actually fulfill my purpose as a culture-shifter / consciousness-evolver, and how do I also make enough money to buy groceries and not get kicked out of my apartment?

I don’t know, to be honest. All I have is my intuition, and my intuition is telling me that 1) it’s time to step out of the full-time non-profit employee role for now, 2) I want to create something of my own, and 3) I want to engage my artistic expression.

Cultural change is essentially what artists do. The painters, the writers, the musicians: they hold up a mirror to society – this is who we are – and then turn it into a portal – this is who we could be. People will only go somewhere they have first traveled to in their minds. That’s why to create the world we want to live in, we must engage our imagination. And artists help us imagine what’s possible.

From the time I was a little kid making up pretend characters and stories on the floor of my bedroom, I’ve known I’ve wanted to be an artist of some kind. At first it was a visual artist, then it was a singer, then a writer. But as I got older, the scope of my imagination shrank. Fear and ideas of what was feasible and practical took over. Rationality took over. Realism.

I got really good at crushing the little artistic voice inside of me as I applied to colleges and then  to jobs. As I became immersed in the civic engagement world and sent out coalition emails and managed spreadsheets and ran phone banks, I told myself I was strictly a political organizer. That was my identity. I would try to appease the little voice by journaling my creative thoughts and observations down in a little notebook in my free time, then throwing it into a dark corner of my closet. I thought the urge would go away eventually.

But after all these years, it has never gone away. It’s still there, strong as ever, and now it’s also apparently rebelling and getting me fired. So I’ve decided it’s finally time to listen.

I’m challenging the paralyzing fear that has told me for so many years that I’m not talented enough to pursue a creative path. The thoughts that tell me I have no formal education, I have no experience, I’ll never make money at it, I’ll never touch people with it. 

I’m rewriting that story in my head. And I’m writing a new one in its place.

I’m going to get a job (or maybe several) that pays the bills and lets me do things like eat so I don’t die, and I’m going to create.

I will start with writing. For the first time in my life, I’m going to dedicate myself to writing every day. I’m going to take classes and get better and better at it, and I’m going to finally tell all of the stories and ideas and thoughts buried in my journals and my mind that are burning to be told. I’m going to put everything I have into it, and it might not work out. But that’s okay, because I finally feel like I’m doing something I’m supposed to be doing. I finally feel like I’m doing something from a place of inspiration and joy and aliveness instead of fear.

Today, I’m 28 years old and I don’t have a job, a partner, a house, or any concrete understanding of what my life will look like in five years or even in six months. But I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come in figuring out who I am and who I want to be. I have a guiding vision of the world I want to help create. And I’m walking my own unique path one step at a time.