i held out exactly 21 days of november before the holiday spirit crept in and i started to crave the tinny sounds of the charlie brown christmas cd. maybe it was the visit to the grove or west elm or any of the stores that have started to deck themselves out in holiday decorations. but, it really truly made me happy when i put it on.
it’s so funny how music has a way of transporting you back to another time. it’s like time travel without the machine! the charlie brown christmas CD was on REPEAT my senior year of college. i can taste the peppermint mochas from starbucks that i was drinking at the time while trying to cram for finals before christmas break. i can feel the guilt i felt about supporting starbucks because they were a big box corporation and i was a young, woke college student who swore off fast food and giant corporations after watching supersize me and reading the canadian magazine adbusters. funny enough, i just realized i bought that magazine from barnes and nobles. guess even the adbusters gotta make money.
i don’t know what changed that year, but i almost suddenly decided i wanted to work in advertising. did i happen to read “dry” that year, the augusten burroughs novel? it’s quite possible. i was obsessed with running with scissors and it only makes sense where my new love of advertising blossomed. and guess what. i manifested that for myself. indirectly, of course. but i set out to work in advertising and advertising i did. but oh how that college student, so young and hopeful and naive, could see me now.
it was fun at first, advertising. the parties, the glamour. the alcohol. the cute creatives. the trips to NY. weirdly, the most fun i had in my job was when i was making the least amount of money. does anyone else have that? or maybe it’s just a fun time, getting your first job right out of college and being in your 20s when all your friends get together and hang out and there’s so much hope and promise.
not that it’s not like that now. i mean, of course not right right now, pandemic and all. but somewhere in the last few years my tolerance for advertising has waned. the creatives demanding rather than cute. the parties tiresome. not excited by the projects. it’s hard to get it up for advertising these days.
so how do i get my groove back and form a love affair with my job? is it a career change? or is it making myself fall in love with advertising again, and remembering what that 21 year old adbusters reading, charlie brown christmas cd listening, peppermint mocha drinking girl thought she wanted?
i’m writing in hopes that i figure it out. that the answer is somewhere buried deep within me, under the layers of fear and shame and doubt and guilt. why guilt? guilt is always there, whether i want it or not. so here’s night 1 of the experimentation. the what do i want experiment. the help, i’ve fallen and i can’t get up experiment. the falling in love with life and finding joy again experiment.
let’s do this, subconscious.
