[ TLDR: After seeing a number of people posting #desperate messages on LinkedIn; I wrote this for anyone out there feeling desperate, humiliated and hungry; with this suggestion; don’t fight that feeling deep inside you. Instead,lean into that burning anxious energy and let it transform and reinvent you. You might surprise the world and yourself by what you become.
I hear you, I know what it's like. I offer the following journal anecdote from my early 20's as well as the genuine empathy as someone who survived a devastating stroke 2.5 years ago that left me destitute at the time].
In 1997, I had just landed my first gig working in a blueprint printing shop called Ford Graphics in Tacoma WA. It was crushingly hard, physically demanding work. I often came home to my studio apartment from work with hands covered in paper cuts from handling the oversized emulsion paper used in the old school architectural blue prints. I earned a whopping $5.50 an hour for my sorrows.
Like an analog precursor of modern GPS, the ammonia gas used to develop the blueprints made me visible via odor a hundred feet away without any wind or line of sight. It also stained my hands a comical blue color and burned like hell in the paper cuts.
“On Saturday I embarked on a profoundly naive adventure that would forever change my lowly career prospects. My Blueberry stained hands throbbed as I furiously typed up a resume on a borrowed PC laptop and designed a spec portfolio of “ads” using MS Paint. It was a comically crude body of work, like trying to be an architect using crayon colored popsicle sticks and Elmers glue. ”
One Friday night after a brutal week of printing & jogging the bid-sets that would eventually fuel the explosive architectural mediocrity that now largely defines the Tacoma-Seattle area, I walked home past the glass facade of a little boutique branding firm in downtown Tacoma. A neatly stacked set of Communication Arts magazines sat on a beautiful rouge velvet couch in the display. Curious what kind a magazine might warrant such a reverent display, I popped in and politely asked the receptionist if I could have an old copy or two.
She was amused by the scrubby 20 something with a strangely unpleasant odor, asking so politely for something of apparently zero practical value. I walked home with a stack of 5 years of creative genius gripped in my grubby blue hands, I felt like I had just robbed the public library of Madison Avenue blind!
That Friday night I burned through them in wonder and awe - It was like peering into some seditious alternate reality where all the ideas in my head might actually be worth something.
On Saturday I embarked on a profoundly naive adventure that would forever change my lowly career prospects. My Blueberry stained hands throbbed as I furiously typed up a resume on a borrowed PC laptop and designed a spec portfolio of "ads" using MS Paint. It was a comically crude body of work, like trying to be an architect using crayon colored popsicle sticks and Elmers glue.
But the ideas were unmissable; Staring out from the pages of my Kinkos sponsored Portfolio like newborn creative goblin's lying in wait to assault the mind of any hapless schmuck who blundered into my creative ambush by professional obedience or morbid curiosity.
I fired off my “portfolio” to every design shop and ad agency I could find in the yellow pages like an epicurean soldier in a foxhole who's position is being overrun with the terror of a future that involved a strange affinity for laundry scented with Ammonia gas.
I don't know how. but BINGO-Bango. I got offered a design job after a brief phone interview at a small company that did promo work for a local waterpark called Wild Waves. The only hitch? I would need a car to to facilitate my work. Triumphantly, I marched down to the local bank and applied for a car loan, who then triumphantly offered me a loan to get a vehicle… provided I could find a co-signer on the loan.
Still vibing triumphant, I promptly called up my father to inform him of my ascendant nature and imminent success in the high flying design world. And to ask him for help.
Unlike myself, my father is often painfully succinct, bluntly informing me that he would NOT co-sign on my loan and uttered the sentence that changed my life forever: "Son, Hunger is the great motivator." and then he hung up the phone. The loan manager was a kind older man who sat patiently nearby and overheard the conversation. He appeared truly humiliated on my behalf and asked plaintively "maybe not your real dad, huh?".
Utterly crushed. I walked home shattered and struggled not to let strangers see me cry as I walked past restaurants filled with happy, successful members of the professional class. That night I drowned my sorrows in the only booze I could afford; an old can of black beans fermented well beyond their sell by date.
The next day I woke up focused by a strange new energy; I was desperate. I was angry. And I was very hungry. Hungry to be a part of what I saw in Communication Arts. Hungry to validate what I knew was a boiling cauldron of creative drive looking for some creative briefs to stew. Hungry to be a part of my own creative future.
I borrowed (stole) my then girlfriends car and took the job, determined to just “fake it until I could make it”. I made it all of two weeks before it became painfully clear I did not have the skill to execute waterpark brochures in Corel Draw. I was let go despite an obvious talent for using the office juicer to make brilliant smoothies.
Tail between my legs, I begged my old manager for my old job back with the promise that I would work every waking hour of work he could give me (knowing that if I worked enough, I would get time and a half - almost $9 an hour - Hot damn!). Obliging my perverse work ethic, I became the default night shift, sometimes working 90 hour weeks… paper-cuts be damned. Eventually I was given an opportunity to learn the new digital printing tech that was to be the death of blue printing. As my fate would have it, I became a .com native at the very birth of the internet, and would leverage those organic skills learned in the quiet early morning hours of a print shop. Eventually I did break into the ad industry, even having my creative work featured in the pages of Communication Arts on occasion.
The car I purchased by myself with a hefty down payment? Turned out to be a heap and would not outlive the payment book. A lot like most college degrees that don’t translate meaningful value into the lives of their respective owners.
