As an elder millennial, my professional life began in instability. It was only a few years after 9/11 and America was ramping up the war effort. Harry Potter, iPods, velvet tracksuits, MySpace and Eminem winning an Oscar were in the zeitgeist. Brad and Jen were still the Hollywood power couple, Lady Gaga had yet to debut with “The Fame” and the financial crisis closed out the decade on an all-time low.
At 17, I’d already put all my eggs in one basket, failed at getting that basket (getting into the one school I applied for), and was reeling.
I ended up as an unemployed statistic before I was even legally an adult.
From there I went for a year in high school, before dropping out in the final weeks of the first year — I walked into a physics exam, read through the exam questions, realised I knew the answers to none of them, and walked out of the room never to come back.
I’d spent that year putting in a half-hearted effort in at school. I skipped as many classes as I could without getting kicked out. My Spanish teacher hated me. She couldn’t comprehend how I could show up for the bare minimum and only show up to ace the exams. She kept trying to tell me to imagine how far I could go if I only applied myself.
But I wasn’t that interested. My future at that time had very little to do with Spanish, and the rudimentary Spanish I’d picked up from living in Spain as a kid and through two language exchange students who lived with us for a year each got me through what I needed, i.e. the exams.
The thing about my teacher repeatedly pulling me aside for the, “If you only showed up and did the work, you could be amazing” was that I’d had a version of that conversation many times before. I think my first one in school was in the 3rd grade when we started studying our first foreign language: English.
But my single mum, who was educated as a midwife and nurse, and who was working as a nursing teacher, had early on decided that any child of hers would not struggle to read English textbooks the way she had, so she’d systematically taught me the language she never mastered since I was old enough to sit in front of a TV.
I grew up watching Sally & Sam, Sesame Street, Cartoon Network and old Hollywood movies, all the while absorbing the language. By the time I got to 3rd grade, I was already fluent and practically trilingual (being bilingual by birth). Out of frustration, I butted heads with my teacher whose command of the English language was textbook and teaching-school-kids proficient.
I was full of hubris because I’d absorbed the language in the way people used it, not in the way the books said you should use it.
I was a little shit, I’ll admit it, but the story of my life here was the fact that my pattern recognition is very strong. And all throughout school I quickly picked up on the patterns and got frustrated with the endless repetitions.
It was that pattern recognition that made me walk out on that physics exam. I understood that my grasp on the topic was too flimsy to have any significant impact on my final result, and that I should go find something more worth my time to pursue.
The only school I ever enjoyed was vocational school, where the expectations of each course was laid out at the start, you were asked to evaluate yourself according to that criteria throughout the year, and at the end of it both you and your teachers sat down for a discussion about their evaluation vs your evaluation of your performance. It was democratic, I felt heard and seen, I was given a lot of responsibility for my own performance.
But that education was everything real life isn’t.
People don’t know what they want, people don’t see (or care to look for) the patterns, and — my biggest pet peeve — people don’t want to willingly make bad choices. Let me explain.
If I have a choice between making a choice blind, not knowing the contents or consequences of my choice, or making a choice with knowledge, understanding what the choice contains or what the consequences are, I’ll always choose to make the choice with knowledge. Now, after a lot of work on me, considering second and third level consequences is like second nature, so it’s normal for me to have a thought process that goes, “If I do this then what happens? And if that happens, what can come of that?”
I spent a long time making blind choices, in life, in relationships, in school. All it ever got me was misery.
I made choices that got me into bad situations, abusive relationships and situations that were traumatising. I became angry at how the world was so fucked up, but more than that, I was angry at myself (not that I knew it at the time). But once I started addressing that frustration with myself and my own choices, things started looking up.
Getting to a place in life where most of the choices I make are with open eyes, understanding the contents and consequences, has taken a lot of work. I used to neglect my own mental health and blindly make choices that made it worse. I routinely ignored my gut feeling. I lived to please others.
For instance, learning how to sit with my own emotions and figure out how I feel, what kind of support I need and where to look for that support was a difficult thing to learn, because my modus operandi was self-sabotage. I used to mostly trauma dump, because I didn’t know how to sit with or process my own emotions to a point where I was ready share my feelings and experiences without bulldozing the person I was seeking support from.
And this frustrated me. Because I felt like no relationship ever worked out the way I’d hoped. They were shallow and I always ended up feeling (and being) used. This was mostly rooted in having a narcissist for a parent. Once I embraced that frustration and started learning how to productively manage my emotions, I started gaining more knowledge and understanding myself better.
Ever since then, I’ve always striven to make better choices, ask better questions, know myself better. But most people don’t want to do the work. Why? I couldn’t say. Because it’s uncomfortable? It’s supposed to be. Because you have to face those sides of yourself that don’t look so good? Because you have to accept ultimate responsibility for yourself?
I’m not saying it’s easy, but going back to doing things the blind way is unimaginable.
I like my life now. I used to feel trapped by it, now I feel enabled by it and grateful to have what I do.
The way my early professional life started was so unstable. The state of the world was shifting in big ways and the advice of the previous generations turned out to be complete BS. There was no more school-to-forever-job pipeline and easy life with a picket fence. There was a fragmented job market, where branding yourself became a basic requirement as you tried to stand out in a crowded market.
I have this baseline anxiety that I’ve discovered other Millennials also feel. You can’t trust the 9-to-5 because you can get fired at the drop of a hat. At my last job, I personally survived 5 separate lay-offs in just 4 years (!!!). I’ve spent my professional life cobbling together a living by sewing together a quilt of skills, experience and jobs. I’ve worked a lot of part-time jobs to make ends meet. I’ve hustled.
It’s not really surprising that I have this internalised anxiety that always runs like a background program that keeps the system working. I’ve been married for 17 years and we went into this partnership with our eyes open, and have done a lot of work on ourselves besides, that this isn’t going to end anytime soon. But that doesn’t keep my brain from constantly coming up with strategies like, “What would bedtime routine with the kid look like if I was a single mum?” — and my husband has those same thoughts.
We both grew up with single parents in unstable situations, though (his worse than mine), so maybe that “What if?” thinking isn’t that surprising. We’ve worked hard to make sure we are not our parents, but that lived experience is still there. We share that and being elder Millennials, and we’ve both got that baseline anxiety. And somehow, admitting that it’s there, makes it a little easier to live with.
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