Can you take the trash out again? Thanks.”
Garbagewoman wasn’t something I thought would be part of my job description at twenty-six years old. Then again, it wasn’t technically a job. It was an internship. After several years of working at various fashion and art magazines, I was restarting my career. I was ready to get serious, to take charge of my professional life. And yet here I was, four years out of college, a full-time, unpaid intern at a political blog. Taking out the trash.
Even so, I would not be discouraged. The stakes were high. I had quit my job for this unpaid position, and I was counting on it to lead me to success. If the trashcan was full, I would empty it. If the watercooler bottle needed to be switched out, I would replace it. (Well, me and two other women, because I was not strong enough to hoist the jug by myself, and none of the guys would lower themselves to the task.) No responsibility was too menial, no request too debasing. I was the Tracy Flick of over-the-hill interns, and I was throwing myself into the role at full force.
For once in my career, my hard work had a purpose. Until this point I had worked mostly as a low-level editor at glossy magazines, a position that had never quite clicked for me. After leaving my job at the fashion magazine, I worked for a while at an arts and culture monthly, where I spent much of my time trend hunting. My job was to find the bands you didn’t know you needed to listen to, or the actors you weren’t yet aware you were going to fall in love with. I wasn’t great at it, but I was good enough. When the magazine introduced a page dedicated to discovering New York’s arty “it” kids, my bosses made me its editor. I was encouraged to wander the streets of Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, to go to wild warehouse parties and tap into my young-person network to find up-and-coming artist types who were talented enough for our consideration.
At the magazine we all laughed about this outrageous new role I’d taken on. “You’re like Carrie Bradshaw,” my boss said to me one night as I was scanning clothing racks in the office, looking for something acceptable to wear on a scouting mission (i.e., a night at the bar). “Except…” We looked at each other. We both knew I was no Carrie Bradshaw. A fashion editor walked by and assessed my outfit critically. “You should probably wear a thong with that skirt.”
“Your life is so glamorous!” Tram said on the phone when I told her about this new part of my job.
“This is not what I envisioned when I pictured a career in journalism,” I said.
I should have been having fun with this new column, but instead it made me feel like I was falling behind schedule. I was jealous of the kids I was routinely “discovering,” and not just because one of the scouting prerequisites was that they be attractive enough to double as models. I envied them because, at twenty-one or twenty-two, they knew what they wanted to do with their lives. They had five-year plans they’d started executing at seventeen. I shared their ambition, but not their direction. I’d always had a difficult time pinning down my goals. As a kid, I wanted to try everything: every sport, every language, every instrument, every extracurricular activity, every candy bar. Who knew what I might miss out on if I didn’t sample it all? I wasn’t known for my natural grace, but perhaps ballet classes would reveal some hidden genius. I was quiet and hated public speaking, but surely I should give student government a go. What if there was some untapped potential, sitting latently in my fingertips, waiting for me to realize it? I was eternally indecisive, unable to choose a path, afraid that to do so might preclude me from unearthing some other, slightly more exciting talent.
This uncertainty stayed with me as I grew up. I changed majors four times in college. Months before graduation, my mom suggested I apply for fellowships or full-time office positions, but that felt like too big of a commitment, so I distracted myself by reading novels instead. Once I got to New York, I bounced between jobs for a while—first at the cheese puff shop and then at a number of basically random publishing gigs—because I needed to pay my rent. Plus, I figured, writing was writing. But I had no strategy. One job turned into another, and years went by before I even realized that I was adrift.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties, the nondecisions I’d made at twenty-one were calcifying around me in a terrifying way. I felt haunted by my aimlessness. It didn’t help that the publishing world was changing. The economy had crashed and magazines were folding left and right. I started to feel like I had inadvertently set myself down a long and winding path to unemployment. I knew it wasn’t too late to change direction, but I also knew that if I was going to do that, I had to do it with purpose. No more drifting, no more hoping that good opportunities would just present themselves to me. I needed a well-thought-out plan that could carry me through the rest of my life. No pressure!
Night after night, I’d go home to my apartment in Brooklyn and attempt to imagine my future over a big pot of soup. My mom had given me an immersion blender for Christmas the previous year, and it had led to all sorts of experimentation in the kitchen, not to mention protests from my roommates about the stray ham hocks I kept leaving in the fridge. As I zipped my little handheld blender soothingly over a Moroccan red lentil soup, or a Russian borscht, or a butternut squash purée, I dreamed of moving to Argentina to work at an English-language newspaper. I thought about going to Kenya and trying my hand as a foreign correspondent. I started filling out the application for a Fulbright to study politics in Venezuela. I came dangerously close to moving to Portland, Oregon, basically to do nothing. I would have gone almost anywhere to escape the stultifying frustration of my life. But one day, hunched over a cutting board, it struck me that all of these glamorous plans I’d dreamed up had one thing in common: in order to execute them, I would have to be a reporter.
And so, over a steaming bowl of mushroom soup, I decided I was going to learn how.
I had always thought of reporting as a respectable way to make a living. Unearthing important stories, speaking truth to power—a high-risk, high-reward enterprise for people who weren’t afraid of anything. And it was in my blood. My mom is an editor at a financial magazine, and my dad was a foreign policy journalist earlier in his career. My maternal grandparents met as reporters at the Kansas City Star. As children my siblings and I were taught to appreciate the profession: When my dad went on a reporting trip to Guatemala in the late ’80s, my brother and I crafted a scrapbook commemorating his adventure. I loved the glamorous photos my mom showed me of my grandparents’ early lives in the field: my young and beautiful grandmother, the first-ever woman to be a full-time reporter on the daily paper, calling in a story from an airplane hangar; my grandfather, tall and dapper, walking away from a crime scene, steno pad in hand, dead body in view. When I was little, I was obsessed with cheesy TV news heroines like Murphy Brown and Lois Lane. I wanted to be bold and fearless like they were. At twenty-six I wasn’t sure that was still possible, but I figured it didn’t really matter. Even if I didn’t break my generation’s Watergate scandal, I’d at least pick up a marketable skill.
It was a good plan. The problem was, no one would hire me. I applied for entry-level jobs at local newspapers all over the country, but I had no experience, and the editors—mostly crusty, salt-of-the-earth types—were not impressed by my fashion cred. For months I was in limbo, sending my résumé to newspapers in Newark and Phoenix and Dallas, never hearing back, becoming increasingly depressed about my prospects.
One day, after getting another e-mail rejection from a small-town newspaper I didn’t even remember applying to, I called Tram to vent on the walk home from work. I was upset, freaking out about my seemingly endless stream of career failures. I wanted advice; I wanted the person I trusted most in the world to help me figure out how to fix my life.
“No one is ever going to hire me,” I said. “I’m going to be an assistant editor forever.”
“Everything is going to work out, I promise,” Tram told me. “You’re such a good writer! Anyone who doesn’t want to hire you is crazy.”
I knew Tram was being supportive—what else could she say?—but her pep talk only made me feel worse. I no longer believed that my life was going to miraculously self-correct. Doubt had been creeping into my mind for months. What if I was too late to fix my mistakes—or worse, if I simply didn’t have any talent? I was becoming concerned that the last four years, maybe even my whole life to this point, had been a waste of time. In the face of so much rejection, I was second-guessing every choice I’d ever made. I had zero faith in myself, or my capabilities, or in the idea that everything was going to be okay just because I wanted it to.
“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe.”
Tram meant well, but her words rang hollow. It felt like she was just being polite, paying lip service to her annoyingly depressed friend. And that was fair. I was being a drag at a time when things were going really well for her. She was in love. She was making art she cared about, and she was starting to have success as a fashion designer. I was proud of her, I really was. But I was also a tiny bit jealous. I was eternally single and professionally flailing; she had this great new boyfriend, someone she could talk to anytime, day or night, about her career, her anxieties, her struggles. She had focus and drive; she knew what she wanted to do and she was going after it. She was just like the people I was putting in my little section of the magazine. In fact, if she had lived in New York, I would have featured her in it.
But Tram wasn’t going to move to New York—I was pretty sure of it. She hadn’t told me yet, but I could sense that she was laying the groundwork to let me down gently. For years we had talked about New York with the incessant enthusiasm of dippy teenagers; now on our phone calls she was vague when I raised the subject. She was even different when she talked about her work. It used to be that we would go on for hours about whatever projects we had going on, my writing and her art, down to the most minuscule details. But she didn’t seem interested in doing that now. When I asked what she was working on, she would gloss over the specifics or change the subject entirely. She had also started to make offhand comments about moving in with Romeo—which seemed odd to me if she was still planning to head back east. I hadn’t even met this guy; she’d been dating him for only a couple of months. But already she was choosing him over me, and our plans, and, if you asked me, her career, too.
The reality was starting to sink in. Tram was going to stay in Chicago to be with Romeo. They would have a grown-up apartment with, like, a KitchenAid mixer and an espresso machine and matching white plates—the gleaming trappings of settled adult life. Meanwhile, I’d be in New York, a washed-up spinster cat lady, pathetically chasing after young, beautiful, talented people who, unlike me, still had promise.
“Lucy, are you there?”
The line had gone quiet for a moment.
“Sorry, yeah. But I have to go. I just walked in the door and I have to feed the cat.”
We hung up, and I looked out over the glittering black expanse of the East River. I was halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge. I loved New York, even though the relationship lately was feeling one-sided. The city was beautiful and thrilling, impossible and inspiring, packed to capacity with millions of interesting and talented people. But right now I felt alone.
Tram and I still talked regularly over the next few months, but our conversations made me anxious. I was dreading the inevitable—her announcing her decision to stay in Chicago. In an effort to be less of a downer, I was also trying not to talk so relentlessly about my catalogue of boring problems, but I was consumed by them, so I didn’t have much else to say. When she asked how the job hunt was going, I’d rattle off some vague platitudes in an effort to stay positive, but the reality was that I still worked at the arts magazine, I was still unhappy, and I was no closer to executing my escape plan.
Then one night in the dead of winter, while I was attempting to dull my misery at a bar in the East Village, a friend told me about a blog she knew of that was hiring interns. It was a small but reputable political site, she said, and they often promoted underlings because the company didn’t have the money to employ people with actual qualifications. It seemed perfect. I’d put in a few months of unpaid labor to learn the basics, I would dazzle the editors with my talent, and at the end of the run they would have no choice but to hire me as a reporter. I went home in a whiskey haze, optimistic for the first time in what felt like a year, and started crafting my cover letter over a gooey late-night grilled cheese.
For once, things went as planned. I applied for the internship and I got it. A few weeks later, I put in my two weeks’ at the magazine. I was about to start my new career. Better late than never.
I had never been an intern before, and those first few days were strange and unsettling. For one thing, there were as many interns as there were actual paid reporters—which seemed to me like a lot of free labor. And as interns we were a wildly overqualified bunch. Among us were PhD candidates, recent J school grads, and even a full-blown journalist in his forties, trying to break into the national scene.
At first, it appeared that this reporting internship did not include much in the way of instruction on how to be a reporter—which, obviously, was what I was there to learn. For the most part, we were expected to find and crop photographs for the staffers to use to accompany their pieces. The company used Skype for all its communications, and as a result the office was eerily silent. We sat in rows at long, white, cafeteria-style tables, silent but for the clacking of keyboards, speaking only via instant messenger. There was a very kind and talented editor whose job, among many other things, was to wrangle us, but he was obscenely overworked, so his attentions were divided. And recognition, of course, was what we were angling for.
All of the interns had something at stake. Several of us had quit our jobs for this opportunity. I had sacrificed my income, my job security, my dignity—all for a shot at getting hired when the three-month program ended. I had taken on a handful of outside freelance projects to supplement my salary of zero, and at night I’d go home and try to scrape together the energy to write celebrity profiles, or do market research, or transcribe other people’s interviews—whatever would bring in a couple hundred bucks.
But I refused to get discouraged. Instead, I applied every ounce of my diligence to becoming indispensable at the office. I tethered myself to my computer and did everything in my power to stand out among my peers. I had never been the smartest person in the room, or the most charming, or the most fashionable, but I have a competitive streak that is difficult to counter. I was in my element here. I woke up early to comb through the Internet, scrolling through thousands of local news items and wire stories hoping that something might spark a story idea in my mind. I bought a 1,000-page political almanac and studied the name of every senator, every congressperson, every committee. I learned Photoshop with the intensity of Serena Williams on the losing end of a match. I asked my editor out to coffee, and I began to pitch and write stories. All this, plus the trash.
It was a strange but exciting time. I was stressed to the point of mania, and I felt as outraged about my exploitation as I was thrilled by the challenge of the work itself. In spite of it all, I was learning something. The extreme circumstances of my situation—a dwindling savings account, an uncertain future—propelled me into survival mode. I had to succeed, so I made certain that I did.
When I started the internship, I had no idea how things were going to turn out. I thought there was a strong possibility that I’d end up moving back home with my mom—a failed late-in-life intern who lived in the basement of her childhood home. I would be the creepy recluse that neighborhood children were afraid of. I would wear my hair in a long braid down my back and train Dizzy, my cat, to give me foot massages.
But after a few weeks, I was starting to gain confidence. I had written a few features, and I was proud of how they had turned out. The editors were responding well to my work, too. I could almost remember what success felt like. I was still scared and alone, but I no longer felt like I was falling through the sky without a parachute.
Anyway, I was working too hard to feel lonely. I would come home from the office with long, unfinished to-do lists, interviews that needed to be transcribed, stories that I had to write up for the next morning. The prospect of a night of homework was exhausting, but the kitchen calmed me down. I’d pack myself a grown-up lunch for the following day, a gourmet sandwich and one of my dad’s trademark chocolate chip orange juice cookies—the same ones I remembered him baking fresh in the mornings and slipping into my lunch bag right before I left for school—and then I’d make some soup.