When Sharing Isn't Caring

If you're friends with me on Facebook you know that I'm a pretty active user of the site. Not to the point where I feel the need to update everyone on what I'm eating for lunch, but I definitely post pictures and links or update my status a few times a week.

I always feel pretty strongly about the things that I post. For example, on Friday I shared a link to this amazing video of some baby pandas going down a slide. YOU'RE WELCOME.



Or just yesterday I decided to ask everyone's opinion on the sizing of Ugg boots because I'm in the market for a new pair and I don't remember what size my old ones were.

Look, I never said this shit was important. I just said I felt strongly about it.

In any case, as time goes on and Facebook more and more becomes the medium for sharing EVERYTHING, I find that I post more and more frequently. When I first got my smartphone I used to post a mobile upload maybe every few weeks. Now I'm constantly taking pictures of random things on the street and blasting them out for my friends (and "friends," as people on Facebook so often are) to see.

At some point during my year of Joy Juice journaling, there was a prompt that asked you to imagine what it would be like to do something without feeling the constant need to share with everyone. To create something, enjoy something, or partake in something just for you. Not to get likes or comments or laughs. This idea really resonated with me because at this point, anytime something good or bad or funny happens, I immediately begin thinking about how I can bring other people into the moment with me. Which sounds like a friendly gesture in theory, but I think in actuality it dulls the experience.

As an example: I have a very strong stance on spending a minimal amount of time at concerts taking photos or videos. Because I always find that when I'm concentrating on taking a picture, I'm NOT concentrating on the music. And you know what sucks? Realizing that you were so obsessed with capturing a band singing your favorite part of your favorite song that you weren't actually paying attention to your favorite part of your favorite song. So I don't do it anymore.

Similarly, I'm starting to wonder if I've ever been so obsessed with trying to catch the Kodak moments in my life that they start to become ONLY Kodak moments and not actual great life moments. Am I leading a life so consumed with sharing that I'm no longer experiencing? I don't think it's that extreme, but I want to test out the theory.

So I've decided that for one week, from December 23rd through December 29th, I'm not going to share anything. No Facebook posts, no tweets, no nothing. I may allow myself to write blog posts, but only if they're not specific to that week of my life. Furthermore, I'm not allowed to save up material during that week to post later. No taking camera pictures and posting them as soon as December 30th hits. For one week, I'm just going to live my life and take it all in and not blast real-time updates to 500+ people who really don't need to know. Of course, I can talk about my week in any way that I normally would - while out to drinks with a friend, while on the phone with my parents, etc. But no social media.

I'm interested to see if I start feeling more involved in my own life once I stop feeling the need to show everyone else what good a time I'm having. I wonder if I'll do things differently or make different selections if I know that I won't be sharing what I'm doing with the masses.

I'm really excited for this. Because it's Christmas week and I don't celebrate, I'll have some free time on my hands to start new projects and do more things for ME. And not for my Facebook friends.

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.

Breaking the Rules

Fashion is sort of an interesting thing. Everyone has to be at least somewhat invested in it because, well, you have to put on clothes. But there are varying degrees of how much you can care about it.

You can buy clothes that are on trend, or not.

You can subscribe to the rules, like not wearing white after Labor Day, or not.

You can legitimately believe that putting on a nice outfit improves your mood, or not.

One of the few fashion truisms that I always subscribed to was that everyone is either a stripes person or a polka dots person. Maybe you can be neither, but certainly never both. Which was perfectly fine with me, because I always hated stripes. Yuck. Ugly.

Mostly, the reason I hated stripes was because I'm not supposed to wear them. You know, because I'm not a size zero.

This is, quite literally, the first thing that anyone whose opinion you ask and anyone whose opinion you DON'T ask will tell you about how to dress when you wear a 2-digit size. "Horizontal stripes make you look wide."

Alright, fine. Like every woman with soul-crippling body image issues (which I'm pretty sure is most women, thanks, society!), I would like to not look wider than I am.

Despite my love of polka dots, in 2006 I bought a striped shirt that was 2 different shades of green. I really liked it, and it was a weird fluke of fashion-sense-nature that I liked it because I was still totally a polka dots person.

See? Here I am in my polka dots, standing on a skeeball machine because I wanted to take a picture of my awesome score but I didn't get a chance to before the machine reset, and now I have no proof that I seriously got like, 5 balls in the 100 pocket. Would I have been able to accomplish this in stripes? "Probably not!" most women's magazines might say.

Around a year ago, I bought this sweater from Old Navy. I'm obsessed with it. If you could see the whole thing you might argue that it's not really striped so much as CHEVRON, but, you know. It's striped.

In the last 6 or so years, I have accumulated a fairly ridiculous number of polka dot dresses. And then this summer, this happened:

I bought a striped dress! A striped maxi dress, no less. It's pretty great. But despite that tweet, I still felt a little weird about it. Like, when I walk down the street are people going to whisper, "That girl is way too big to be wearing *GASP* stripes!"

In the last week, I've done a lot of shopping. It was supposed to be so I could get new clothes to wear to my NEW JOB, but some casual things may or may not have made their way home with me as well.

And you know what? A lot of what I bought has polka dots on it. But a lot of what I bought has stripes on it, too. ALL of the striped things are striped horizontally.

I say this unapologetically, despite the fact that every time a heavy girl wears stripes, a Marie Claire intern gets fired. I say this unapologetically because how many times do I have to feel guilty about putting a fucking shirt on before I realize that I CAN WEAR WHATEVER I WANT TO. And not in the sense that I have the right to wear something that I like even if it looks terrible on me (which I do), but in that I have the right to look good in something that I'm not "supposed" to look good in. Because really, who made these rules? Aren't we supposed to shy away from making sweeping generalizations? There are people who are my size who look completely different in their clothes than I would. There are people who weigh far less than I do who would look terrible in outfits that look great on me.

So I'm done with these rules. I'm declaring my love of both polka dots AND stripes. And you can't stop me.

 

**This is my new series called Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5 months of my Stratejoy journey here.   

Employment, at long last

I got a job today.

It was December 1, 2011 when I found out I was losing my last job, and my last day in the office was about 4 weeks later. If you had told me then that I would still be looking for a new job in November 2012, I would have thought you were nuts. I would have said that 11 months was "sooooo far away" and that unemployment was a thing that happened to OTHER people, but never me. Never someone who is young, with 2 degrees and a pretty good head on her shoulders.

But here I am. It's November 14th, and it was only today, after applying to almost 300 jobs, that someone out there finally decided that whatever it is I have to offer is good enough.

Unemployment is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) dehumanizing. Meeting new people and having to tell them that I don't have a job always made me feel inferior. Because "I'm unemployed" does not come off as "I graduated cum laude from a really good school and then got my MBA from another really good school and I also had some great jobs along the way and I'm pretty smart and responsible and overall capable as a human being."

It reads as, "I'm lazy and I like to sleep in a lot."

If you have any measure of fun during your period of unemployment, which I absolutely did, people will look at you with envy and comment about your extended vacay and "how nice it must be." It doesn't matter that it's easier to go out to that dinner and worry about the expense later than it is to say no to those things and experience the vicious depressing cycle that is feeling shitty about yourself because you don't have a job, knowing that you'd feel better about yourself if you could only go out and enjoy some time with your friends, but not really being able to because you can't afford it, thus making you feel even worse. So you manage to afford it. Or at least, your credit card does.

From a financial standpoint, I should have moved home to New Jersey as soon as I lost my job. But even my parents agreed that there was no point in making my life even more miserable than it was by depriving myself of my social life, which, as I've mentioned, was really one of the last things I had to hold onto.

So I spent the last year trying to have as much of a social life as I could on as little money as possible. I said "yes" to lots of things and I said "no" to lots of others and overall I managed to stay busy. But I never lost that feeling in the back of my mind that maybe I would NEVER find a job. That maybe my weird mix of professional experiences would qualify me to do absolutely nothing, and that in this shitty economy that is rife with qualified job seekers, I would oftentimes be a great candidate but never truly the BEST one.

When I got off the phone today, after having been offered a great job at a great organization where I would have a great blogger friend as my coworker (!!!!!! YAY), I didn't know what to do first.

I called my mom.
I called my dad.
I called my grandma.
I called my brother.
I posted on Twitter.
I posted on Facebook.
I set up a celebratory happy hour for Friday.
I composed a Facebook invitation for aforementioned happy hour, complete with a few stats on how many interviews I've had this year.
I deleted the events in my Google calendar that existed solely to remind me to apply for jobs.

And then I cried.

I sat in my room with my head in my hands and I ugly cried like the worst thing had just happened. Only it wasn't the worst thing, it was the best thing.

So I'm excited to start on this new part of my life, and leave this year of feeling worthless behind me. After 11 months of more or less sitting idly by, I'm ready.