The year is 2016. You’re still green and eager. You feel a fire burning inside you but are unable to identify or understand it and are still years from wielding it as a power. The day feels long so it must be summer, just a few brief months into your career. Your dream job. If only 18 year-old you could see you now: A 23 year old proudly employed at an environmental non-profit that she walks to from her downtown apartment that is entirely her own. You’ve done it. You made your dream come true.
You’re in a conference room, having just wrapped up a client call. You’re sitting across the table from your manager, whom you felt instantly drawn to during your final interview. Her broad smile and devilish giggle is like kindling to the ambiguous flame within. She’s only a few years older than you: She’s a bold gemini to your soft cancer, a baddie with great hair, an artist with a dark, moody staple wardrobe, and her combat boots introduce an interesting contrast to the J.D. at the end of her name. She’s everything you want to be.
Looking back, you can’t place whether it was desperation to be perceived as “unique” or “interesting” versus a natural conversation progression; either way you tell her something you have never shared with anyone and don’t verbalize it again for at least two more years to your then-future-husband. You don’t know it at the moment but with those words you shift the course of your future. You set something in motion. You erect the foundation to an alternative reality.
The essence of the words go something like this, “I want to start a blog. Millennials get so much hate from elder generations for being “lazy” or “entitled” and culture loves to make fun of hippies for their hemp wearing, wheatgrass drinking bullshit. When you pair the two you conjure an image of someone that embodies a classically cringe cliche — someone who can’t afford to purchase a home because they superfluously spend too much money on avocado and free range egg to top on their whole wheat toast with a dash of himalayan pink sea salt. A trope so familiar. The easy butt of a joke. Culture loves to shit on young people and environmentalists. But they’re right about a lot of things and a lot of things that matter. They’re the embodiment of the future expressing concern for the future they are growing into. So I want my blog to be a place for those people; somewhere where they can feel seen and powerful and validated. We can share quick and easy sourdough recipes in the same space where we discuss Madam President’s climate initiatives (because obviously Hillary Clinton is going to win in November). Anyway, I want it to be called Millennial Hippie and the tagline will be: “Sometimes Two Wrongs Can Make a Right.”
You impatiently word-vomit a series of incohesive themes that are clunky and disjointed at best, however well intentioned they may have been. Your excitement and eagerness intermingles with youthful ignorance. You’re years away from any substantive degree of understanding related to self-awareness. You have yet to develop even a semi-concrete understanding of your value to the world. You have but a nascent comprehension of the vices and virtues that are often paired with privilege. You are largely still blissfully unaware of the evils, exploitation, colonization, and exhaustion that serve as the foundation to late stage capitalism. Deep in your gut you know this. Unworthiness settles inside you like a weighted sediment.
Your confidence wavers. You have so much work to do, so much to learn, so much knowledge to absorb in order to earn your worthiness to claim virtual space. Where will you find the time? You’ve already given yourself over to your career, you’re learning how to care for yourself independently – you are now obligated to do things like cook, feed yourself, grocery shop, clean the kitchen, train your dog and take her on walks. The overwhelming, all consuming mundanity of adulthood. At the end of the long day you long for disassociation, not more mental engagement. The idea of soaking buoyantly in fruitful knowledge seems responsible but exhausting. Deep in your gut you believe you won’t act, you won’t ‘do the work’. Shame sinks in at the realization that your vision will likely stay constrained to the confines of your mind.
“Anyways, maybe one day.”
The next few years professionally progress just as you decided they would. Your career becomes your purpose. You believe your value is defined by your professional wins. As you run past the finish line of one accomplishment, you take hardly a moment to celebrate and let yourself sit in the stillness of Now. You give yourself just enough time for a quick high five and a chug of water as you gear up for another sprint. You’re still itching to run. When you believe your value is rooted in your achievements and accomplishments, you never feel satisfied. You never feel as though you’re enough because there’s always more that you could do.
The program you and your manager worked on together was positioned at the intersection of recycling and packaging; the corner of where sustainability meets corporate America; the crossroads of form and function; intentionality and convenience; less and more; more and less; the polarity of community and corporate profit. We became familiar navigating the disjointed and nonsensical duality of environmentalism within capitalism.
As nascent as you may have been individually, together you made a deadly duo. Having successfully bamboozled her into claiming you as a friend, the pair of you steadily win level after level in the game of Successful Professional Women, Injecting Corporate America With Ideals and Vision For a Better Tomorrow. Together, you joked about embodying the purple devilish imp emoji– mischievously infiltrating corporate America with your wits and innocent appearing demeanor, then ever so subtly transmorphing into Arachne, silently yet dutifully spinning an intricate web woven to capture corporate prey. Together you saw change was possible; you saw a future where the system bends to the will of the People; where corporate America is subject to the customer and their demands for thoughtful, more intentional, more sustainable, more – dare I say it? – expensive packaging. She brought to the table a creativity, an artistry, a way of thinking that felt wholly new and groundbreaking and enlightening. She was the visionary. You bring the brute force. The voracious need to accomplish, complete, achieve. The messy, scrappy, power rooted in your need to prove yourself. Together, the two of you make history. Two women playing a man’s game – and winning at it – makes waves.
Perhaps you flew too close to the sun. Perhaps, like the tale of Arachne you confused confidence with hubris, or perhaps, as Kendrick Lamar made very clear in his [historical! poetic! masterpiece of a] halftime show, we live within a rigged game. Either way, when two women grow a program from infancy into one of the most successful and influential leaders in its industrial space, it should come as no surprise that this Game is soon to be Over.
