My Lean-out Moment.

I don't want to be a girlboss. I want to lie down.

My astrology app just sent me a push notification that individualism is a lie. They also sent this same push notification to their thousands of subscribers, so, point taken. Wait don’t go! I promise this is not a post about astrology. I’m not like other girls. I’m different from them I promise. Except for my cousin, Rachel Ordan. I have a cousin with the same name as me so I’m not different from her. One day we’re gonna make a feature film and parent trap ourselves and I’m going to become orthodox. Rachel if you’re reading this, I’m sorry I took all the good gmail domains in 2010. 

The thing of it is, we’re all trying to fit the mold. Individualism is indeed a lie because there are templates that we follow and there is safety in unity. In the path forward. In checking boxes. Graduations, turning in theses, getting promotions, getting Emmy’s, getting ahead. We’re not that different from video game characters, we have awards and checkpoints and setbacks and good music to set the tone. And in this country, an astonishing ability to acquire and fire an assault weapon at any given time.

I already talked about my quest to be unique so I won’t plagiarize myself today. But I think I’m running out of thoughts. Out of ideas. Out of revelations. I am 23 years old and I have seen it all. So what do I do to keep my blog posts unique? Groundbreaking? When I’m at a loss, I like to turn to the platform that champions having nothing to say but speaking anyway. LinkedIn.

I am completely humbled and grateful to announce this business-forward edition of Pillow Town. If any of you have spent any time on LinkedIn, this phrasing will sound familiar to you. It’s the same thing as repeating the question when answering the question so you can stall when you’re nervous. It’s the speech equivalent of making your periods 14 point font to get to your word count faster. Now you’re thinking to yourself, Rach, aren’t you filling up space right now by typing and typing and beating this point to death? I want to remind you that this is my blog and I can break whatever rules I want to and say whatever I want. Tomato paste.

I’m coming at you live from The Spiral. From the rabbit hole. Down the well. On my way to work this morning I doomscrolled on LinkedIn. This is a cry for help, as I am not looking for a new job. I look at LinkedIn to see what everyone is up to. And by everyone, I mean people from my high school and my business fraternity and nobody else. What cryptocurrency do I know nothing about? Which guy from my high school is a rocket scientist? Who is disturbingly fond of Elon Musk? Who thinks I can get them a job at Amazon because they aren’t close enough with me to know that I actually have more pull in the grain bowl industry? 

I am conflicted. I used to want to be in this world. I wanted an Ann Taylor suit and a consulting job. I wanted to think that at 21, fresh out of Ann Arbor, I could solve FedEx’s global tracking problems. I used to be in a business fraternity. We called ourselves the most prestigious business fraternity on campus. I rushed because I wanted to prove to myself that I could be smart and professional and taken seriously. I never felt like I fit in because people talked about the stock market and cryptocurrency and I’ve only ever been cared about those videos where dogs are reunited with their dads from War™ and crispy french fries. I think they let me into their fancy club because I’m gorgeous. And they needed to fill their non-Business major quota. Someone unique like me, one of the only female philosophy majors of my graduating class, and I can say the alphabet backwards fast.

Let me pause and say that if you are in finance or consulting, I don’t blame you. If you are genuinely thrilled by those industries, then you found your calling. I just think that most people in business school aren’t given a fair chance to explore what makes them tick, and not tick. When you’re shoved onto the conveyor built to Murray Hill, it’s hard to jump off. And it feels safe, and I don’t blame you for wanting job security right out of school. I know that high paying jobs help with student debt and I don’t want to belittle that. I just wish that you could take English classes without being asked “what are you going to do with that.” I wish capitalism and debt and industry didn’t force young, impressionable people to narrow their minds.

What always made me so sad in my business fraternity was the amount of younger pledges who wanted to ask me about writing, about comedy, about the food industry, and they seemed so interested or impressed by the fact that I wasn’t following a traditional business path after college. Their eyes would light up at the idea of veering away from finance or consulting but at the end of the day they didn’t let themselves explore what they actually care about. I always asked them what they wanted to do, and they responded finance, consulting, maybe venture capital if I’m lucky. If you are a 19 year old freshman in college and you tell me you’re passionate about solving human capital consulting issues at a big 3 firm, I will simply not believe you. Because we aren’t born caring about that. We’re born with all these interests and questions and ideas and every day, every year, we slowly shoo them away in pursuit of something that makes more sense. Fuck sensibility. I want to be confused and concerned and emboldened and afraid and curious. I got fired once and guess what, I did not die. It opened doors for me that I was too afraid to open myself and I’m here, and I’m alive. 

It’s very scary to start asking questions you don’t know the answers to. Which is why I do that every day because I love to be afraid. About a year ago when I was fired I decided to push myself into the industry that has thrilled me and scared me for my whole life. I’m going to a table read on Tuesday for a show that I used to watch slouched in my bed in Michigan on lonely nights, and now I’m part of their production team. I’m not passionate about accounting. Even my boss knows this and he loaned me his Sopranos scripts to read in my free time and made me promise that when I become a Showrunner I’ll put him on my team. I will as soon as I find out what a Showrunner does. I don’t know, maybe I’ll get that coveted writing job and hate it and discover that I want to be a landscape painter. I don’t know what I want but I want to spend every minute getting closer and closer to figuring that out. Because nothing is certain except death and TurboTax.