So why start this blog, anyway?
I will admit: sometimes these things are written to mollify the self. As much as anyone likes to act differently, human beings are inherently self-oriented beings. It’s why you don’t let a homeless person take your car keys just because “he really needs to go see his mother.” It might be totally true, yes, but do you do it? No. This is different from being selfish, though—sometimes helping yourself really is what lets you best help others. This blog is partially a way for me to process the world as I've lived it over the past 30 years. A way to do the psychological heavy lifting and filtering of my own experiences. It's a means of distilling and packaging those experiences in a way that can benefit other people.
Life is in many ways a culmination of John F. Kennedy's famous address in that we do many things not because they're easy, but precisely because they're hard. Overcoming discomfort and outright pain is an essential survival skill, both as a coping mechanism and a way to steel yourself against future pain. But sometimes we can't endure it. Sometimes our strength fails us before we reach the finish line. Sometimes we just can't go all the way on our own for whatever reason, be it personal ability, experience or insight. Sometimes you need a little oomph to get back out there.
I am not necessarily a people person; I am without fail polite, but my conduct mostly stems from the belief that everyone deserves respect until they prove they do not. People themselves don't really ilicit much of a spark for me one way or another, but negativity must be combatted with positivity, no matter how sisyphean the task. I was raised to believe that men solve problems when they arise, so that's what I'm here to do. I can't help it. I see something fixable and feel an inherent desire to get to work on it. That's what gets me going.
I write these things specifically because I'm not the only person struggling; because somewhere out there in the world, there's another aspiring young professional facing their fiftieth rejection letter. There’s another recent grad out there who’s run all over the state on interviews that end up leading nowhere.There's some poor kid out there away from their family and their pets and all the things that made them comfortable, and they are just not taking it well at all. And there’s someone else out there right now working a dead-end job thinking, “I took all the right steps…my life should have been more than this.”
Many people out there are suffering right now in their professional and personal lives, despite the claims of some that we are experiencing a "record-breaking economy." Some are so insulated from that suffering that they genuinely believe we're living in "the best of all possible worlds", a la Pangloss from Candide, and genuinely don't see or understand what others are up against. There's someone who needs a hand on their shoulder and a firm nudge to tell them, "you haven't failed. Keep going on!"
I needed to hear that voice and feel that gentle admonition telling me that the only failure I committed was to not keep believing in myself. But I seldom did. And as the waves of rejection letters and phone runarounds and two-faced HR department antics battered the walls of my own self-worth, so did I begin to sink under the weight of my own perceived inadequacies. But I won't let that happen to anybody else.
If you have nothing left to give and you feel yourself sinking beneath those waves of rejections, I'll throw you my life-saver. I'll lend you some of my strength. And I will uplift you from dejection to success. That's what has allowed us to survive on a harsh and hostile planet, even when we were once at the very brink of extinction. Not networking, not power meetings, not upvotes. It’s teamwork. Never forget that you’re at your strongest when you pool your strengths cumulatively with others. It’s a lesson that took me way too long to learn, but hopefully you’ll be a quick study.