Word of the Day: Eviscerate

In the last year or two I've started to find myself enraged with increasing frequency. I took to describing it as my "irrational anger at the patriarchy". Then I realized something. I am not irrationally anger. I am the perfect amount of angry. I'm not becoming oversensitive, I'm growing as a woman and losing the naivete of my youth that led me to think the way men act is okay.

Guess what? It isn't.

When numerous guys in college refused to date me because I set boundaries for physical intimacy, it wasn't my fault. I wasn't a prude. I had the audacity to tell men upfront that I would not have sex with them until I was ready and they shamed me for it.

When my first boyfriend pressured me into having sex with him because I didn't completely know how to articulate "I like kissing you but I'm not ready to have sex with you" it wasn't okay.

When men played the "sex isn't as good with a condom on" and I didn't know I had the power to tell them to take a long walk off a short pier, it wasn't okay.

When a man named Jerry came up to me at work and began massaging my shoulders without any effort to ask if I was okay with his hands on my body, it was not okay. When I spent the next year with my back pressed against walls to avoid him touching me again, because he was older and my superior, IT WAS NOT OKAY.

One of the only regrets in my 27 years on this earth is that I did not stand up the first time he touched me and loudly ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.

All of those not-okay moments led to me not reporting a rape. They led to years of me questioning if I had any worth. They led to bad decisions in bad relationships because I thought it was my job to make men happy, even if it meant compromising my safety and comfort.

I wish I could have known these things earlier. I wish I had always had my voice and used it. I wish I didn't live in a world where I am worth-less and worthless in the eyes of men purely because they are men and I am a woman.

So yes, I am angry, and I plan on using that anger every single day of life I have left to fight for women who don't have their voice yet. I will use my voice, at every volume necessary to let men know that I have value.

I have many wonderful men in my life, but you can bet everything you own that the men of the world who are not so wonderful, will be hearing from me. From all of us. Because we are sick of it.

Funding Wanderlust

I am a millennial, but before you grab torches and pitchforks to run me back to my lazy treehouse, hear me out. Yes, many millennials are playing career leapfrog, but very rarely are any of us doing that for fun or because we aren’t capable of holding onto a traditional job. 

 

Millennials were raised as dreamers, and a bit differently than previous generations we grew up in a world where people were going out and proving the cliché to be true. We watched underdogs conquer the world and started thriving with a mantra of “I can do that too”. This beat of ambition became the backdrop for our every dream and we began to see that we didn’t need to settle for the first thing we found or the second best reality.

From a young age I proudly proclaimed that I wanted to be a teacher. I would double major in teaching English and History and become the most beloved teacher to grace the halls of Big Dreams High School. Spoiler alert: That did not happen.

Approximately one day into my college career I was introduced to a degree path in Event Management and, to the utter horror of my parents, I declared that major with pride. I would now be the greatest event planner the world had ever seen and I would either be hired as Taylor Swift’s Tour Coordinator, or manage the Oscars. You know, simple dreams.

So I did it. I resuscitated my parents, and graduated college with a degree in Event Management. I then tried for nine months to find a job before moving home and getting a job folding sweaters. Apparently the rest of the world had not gotten my memo about my big dreams, or Taylor Swift didn’t have my number.

Either way I kept up the hustle and become beloved in my retail job. I love people, so I kept up my job search while also cranking out dreams of becoming a store owner or getting hired as a model. Again, super grounded in reality. Thankfully no one was ever subjected to me attempting to become a model, and one of the 231 applications I submitted finally scored me an interview with a major hotel chain. 

I walked into the 72 story building on my first day with stars in my eyes. Yes, I could see it now. I would run this multi-billion dollar, international hotel empire. It might take five or six years to become CEO, but it would be worth it. Well, maybe not CEO, but I knew in my heart that I would love this job and I would work for this company until I retired gloriously at 65 (that retirement plan might actually be the craziest dream of all).

A year later I was turning in my letter of resignation. Poor interdepartmental communication, a boss who didn’t adore me, and some less than healthy work expectations led me to see that this was not my forever job, and it led me to see that event planning might not be the cake walk I had envisioned.

I then had a promising career as a bank teller for less than three months. Then I went back to retail while I waited for “my next big adventure”. Well funny story retail is not doing well and I was laid off. After a month. So after crying and moving in with my fiancé since I could no longer pay rent, I became a dog walker. Yep. A college educated, worked for huge companies, big dreaming dog walker.

Now in my defense I was applying for sparkly, full time, 401K included jobs throughout this journey, but since you can’t walk up to hiring managers and say “I am wonderful, hard-working, and I will bring in yummy baked goods if you will please just hire me” those applications didn’t pan out.

But don’t worry folks! Just like Jar-Jar I kept bouncing back despite the fact that no one seemed to want me to. My next big dream? Graduate School. That was the key! More education on my resume and people would be beating down my door to beg me to work for them! Five minutes into grad school I decided I could always become a college professor if my big career plans fell through. Teaching college can’t be that hard, right?  

A year after starting my graduate career I was getting antsy. Walking dogs and studying was not using up all the creative energy I was buzzing with, so back to the job hunt full force. Did I mention I also planned to eventually get around to publishing several novels and becoming rich enough to just write for a living? Yeah it’s on my list right after laundry.  

Cue me getting a part time assistant job at a library. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, like many millennials I’m optimistic to a fault. Every small start is a stepping stone on the path to world domination. Working 20 hours a week answering phones quickly led to dreams of running the library. Like many jobs before, I was ready to pledge my heart, soul, and every working day of my life to the job. The fact that I devour books the way most people breathe didn’t hurt

Well after five months of “not like that” and “you’re not qualified for that promotion” I realized that my dream of dying at my desk after 40 or 60 years of passionate work and haunting the library was not how my life was going to go. That realization, and some less than stellar circumstances, led to me leaving to once again pursue “my next great adventure”. Again.

Leaving that job was hard. It hurt. I cried and ate ice cream and cursed the universe…for a day. Then, it was time to get back to dreaming and hustling because I had bills to pay and an unquenchable thirst for working hard at something.

So I finally bumped one of my less-realistic dreams to the foreground and decided that if I couldn’t find a job that fit me, I’d make one. I created my own company, my own logo, and I set out to become the Millennial Marketing Genius I boasted to be on my business cards.

Three weeks after quitting my job I had two clients and a job offer to join an international company and be their marketing go-to girl. Not too shabby if I do say so myself.

For those of you who aren’t counting, that was seven jobs in three years, plus two extra (pending) Master’s degrees. So yes, while I may seem like a job-hopping, hot mess millennial, I’m really a hustler with an aversion to giving up.

Will this new adventure be last “new job”? Will I end up working seven more jobs before all is said and done? No clue. What I do know is that I will always be working hard, searching for a way to spend my passion, and dreaming way bigger than anyone thinks I have any right to.

              

Rotten to the Aux Cord

Today I want to write about something a little different. I'd like to interweave one of my personal convenience crisis with a business observation I noticed because of it. If we're Facebook friends you know I've recently fallen into a trap set by Apple to get me to give them more of my money.

I begrudgingly upgraded my iPhone because after 5 years of tender love, the software was starting to get wonky because, well, Apple makes it do that so you have to buy a new phone. That's fine guys... So anyways, I upgraded my phone one generation through my carrier to avoid giving Apple any money and because I, like many millennials, can't afford a new $900 phone.

I got my new phone and was ready to move forward with my life, until I looked at the headphone jack. The craft MFers at Apple had "evolved" (*cough sabotaged cough*) the new generation of phone to have no headphone jack, but instead, to have the headphones plug into the charging port with a newly shaped insert.

For the not so tech savvy like me, this basically means all of the headphones I own do not work for my phone, and the new headphones for the new phone don't fit any of my other Apple products, namely my Mac.

I don't listen to music in my headphones very frequently. It's usually just when I'm studying or at work. But guess what folks, my laptop and my work computer use the old headphone jack that has existed since literally forever. My phone, where I keep all of my music, doesn't.

I was left with two choices. I could either carry two pairs of headphones with me at all times forever, or I could buy a pair of Airpods (wireless headphones from the aforementioned evil Apple). Well, being stubborn, broke, and forgetful, I went with option three. I downloaded Spotify.

Spotify is a big competitor for Apple. It is one of the few places you can listen to virtually any music you want, any time, for free. There are paid versions of Spotify, but their cost pales in comparison to paying $1.29 per song or even to Apple Music, which is Apple's way of competing with Spotify.

Since I have a deep hatred for Apple I happily downloaded Spotify onto all of my computers. For free. It took under a minute and I didn't have to go to a sterile Apple store where the preppy ripoff of the Geek Squad judged me for my older tech and aversion to giving them all of my money, a blood sacrifice, and my first born.

Apple's obsession with milking customers of every possible cent they have sent me running into the arms of their competition. Their "cool" and "state of the art" technology upgrades basically played Cyrano to my blooming love story with Spotify.

Needless to say Apple's strategy failed on me, an educated millennial with disposable income, AKA the kind of customer they'd sacrifice a goat to have.

Maybe it's just me and my old-fashioned business ideals, but I love watching a shady empire fail.

Damn Polar Bears

I'm not sure what happened during the four hours of sleep I got last night, but I'm pretty sure I somehow became cursed. Its Friday, I only have to work until 11:30, and the day is a fucking disaster.

It all started before I even opened my eyes. Somehow I slammed my elbow directly into my nightstand with so much force that my entire hand went numb.

Then a very perky spider decides the perfect moment to descend from the heavens of my bathroom ceiling would be whilst I'm peeing. Naked and afraid folks.

So I manage to trudge through the morning, make coffee, make breakfast, and get into my vehicle in one piece, with only a few homicidal thoughts.

The vehicle has no heat. Why? Dunno. But I live in Michigan, and heat is a somewhat important thing for a car to have. My car, however, seems to disagree. She's in some serious summer denial and is cranking out air that would make a freezer shiver.

Thankfully I'm a warm human, and I live a mile from work. I don't freeze to death, though I am almost permanently blinded by the morning sun, which I'm pretty sure is now brighter.

I'm blind. I'm cold. I'm tired. I make it to work. Yeah, folks, we are 30 minutes into my day at this point, and we haven't even gotten started.

I'm walking into work, ready to push past the morning trauma and get shit done, when I realize I left my breakfast in the car. This seems like a simple fix, but oh no no no. Not on "Let's Kill Liz" day.

I walk back to my car, unlock it, reach for my paper towel wrapped breakfast, and drench myself with frigid water from my Yeti. This is an especially remarkable feat considering the opening on my yeti lid is like 1/1,000,000 of an inch.

I'm now cold...well, colder, wet, and very done with the day. Perfect time to strut into the office. Thankfully all was well for like an entire 40 minutes. I'm still cold and I have a headache from the sun shining directly through my corneas, but I'm a trooper.

Well, we ain't done yet folks. I glance down to see an email from my bank. "Your -$247.39 balance is below your alert amount of $10". NO SHIT KAREN. I'm no genius, but I do know -247.39 is less than 10.

Turns out a shoe company charged me 6 times for an order that didn't even go through. So I shiver and massage my temples as I listen to the nauseating hold music, and I get it sorted. At this point, I was ready to pop up the block to the church on the corner and just do a shot of holy water.

After all that I needed comforting, and luckily, my coffee thermos stood proudly on my desk, ready to serve. I took a sip of my lifeline liquid and- it sucked. I was sipping watered down garbage.

This time the universe went too far. I was not happy. I had just spent a week getting a fancy, purple, reusable K-Cup, finding my favorite coffee in ground form, and even hacking the Keurig "this pod wasn't designed for this brewer" system.

I ADULTED. I was a good millennial and was trying to be green! I'm trying to save the polar bears man! Through research, I learned that for some diabolical reason, the reusable pods make much weaker coffee than regular ones. 

The heck man. I'm just trying to live my life, be politically conscious, become educated, be environmentally conscious, save up for a house, get two masters degrees, plan for a family, improve my community, and save the polar bears. I'm simple like that.

Now you're telling me I have to CHOOSE between coffee and polar bears? Well I thought it over and I came to the definitive decision that after all of this work...my kids don't need polar bears. Sorry guys. Mama needs coffee, as you can clearly see.

My Rape Was Not My Fault

I was wearing an oversized men's buttondown and leggings. My hair was unwashed, in a mess of a bun, and I wore no makeup. I hadn't been drinking. I wasn't walking home alone. I wasn't at a party with "bad" people. I was sober, covered from head to toe, and with a friend that I had known for five years.

Despite not fulfilling the popular stereotype a shamable victim, I was sexually assaulted.

First, he pinned me to his bed and began trying to kiss me. When my demands for him to stop made kissing too difficult he began moving his mouth to my neck while trying to open my shirt and expose my breasts.

I'm not sure how, but I did manage to escape from underneath him. I made it six steps before he caught me and continued his assault.

He threw me against the wall and used the weight of his body to pin me there. He continued to kiss my screaming mouth, my neck, and my breasts and chest after tearing my shirt open.

I said NO. I said STOP. I begged him to let me go. I fought as hard as I could against him, and as I realized he was too strong for me to fight, my begging became frantic.

He didn't care. He didn't stop. He pinned me to the wall by wrapping his hand around my throat. He shoved his other hand into my leggings, into my underwear, and began to roughly shove his fingers into my vagina.

Somehow, between my crying and bagging, and his raping of my vagina, I was able to pry his hand off my throat. I ran. I crashed out the front door, stumbled across the lawn, and clawed my way to my car.

I told three people about my rape. The first response? "Well, you shouldn't have been alone with a guy who isn't your boyfriend".

I'm not sure if it was worse that I was slut-shamed while my body still ached from being raped, or that because of that I shamed and blamed myself for months.

I spat hateful accusations at the mirror. I feared my boyfriend would leave me when I told him. I lived with utter disgust for myself. I was told I was "lucky" it wasn't worse.

My rape was not my fault. I am not careless. I am not a whore. I am a victim. I am the victim of a man who believed his desire to violate me mattered more than I did. I am a victim of a society that blames women instead of punishing men.

We need to stop shaming victims. We must raise men and women who value consent and hold themselves responsible for their actions.

We all have the power to prevent sexual assault and to help victims heal. I beg you all, as a rape victim, as a woman, and as a human being, to help me protect and heal anyone who has ever been violated because it is not their fault, but it is ours if we do not help them.

I'm a Bitch But I'm Sorry

Living with anxiety and depression, or any mental illness really, is difficult, to say the least. The tiniest tasks or most routine regularities can be mountainous challenges. Trying to manage your emotions, mood swings, and stress while maintaining a facade of professionalism and normalcy are hard and exhausting.

What a lot of people don't realize though, is that dealing with all of that within a relationship can actually be even more complicated. Yes, an emotional support system is so important, but it can also make it hard to indulge in your anxiety releasing behavior.

We all have the ways we cope with our extra, overwhelming, or negative emotions. I like to watch a sad movie so I can pretend I'm crying about something other than the fact that I think my new friends are actually annoyed by me and secretly hate me (anxiety loves to paint these irrational portraits in my mind). Or I would take a scalding hot shower and sing at the top of my lungs. Or I would maybe win imaginary arguments dramatically in my kitchen.

Basically, when I lived alone I could come home, close out the world, and unleash the swamp monster of emotion. I was confined by four walls, and the world was safe from my irrational anger and irritability. Unfortunately for my husband, this is no longer the case.

We live together like most married people do, so when swamp monster comes out, there is a civilian in danger. Now I would like to give my husband a lot of credit. He is always very supportive of me and does what he can to help me. On more than one occasion he's been awoken from blissful sleep to me sobbing and shaking for no conceivable reason and he rubs my back while I go through the hell of a panic attack.

However, being in a relationship and having a mental illness can be emotionally complicated. One of the biggest issues I had to work through in therapy was accepting that the people around me were not going to abandon me or stop loving me because of my mental illness. Accepting this meant learning to let go of my irrational guilt over my anxious behaviors and my down days.

Here's where it really gets complicated though, because my anxiety often manifests in extreme irritability and anger, I did have to learn to apologize when those behaviors took aim at my husband. I had to find the delicate balance between not feeling guilty for having a mental illness, but being accountable for my actions while dealing with it.

To clarify, when I'm having a bad day or an anxious, irritable day, I don't just lash out at my husband freely, verbally abusing him only to return the next day with a flippant "Sorry babe!" I also had to learn to cope with my anxiety and depression and find new, healthier outlets that allowed me to work through my feelings without going Godzilla and flattening a city.

This was not easy and because of how fatally stubborn I am it was not fun to relearn behaviors I had deemed appropriate. But it was worth it. I do still lose my cool. I'm not perfect. I still get sassy (fine, bitchy) with my husband, but it is less frequent. And when swamp monster does come out and destroy the city, I make a peace offering, and I apologize, and when I apologize I always make a point of saying "I'm sorry for how I treated you. I need to be better about not taking my anxiety out on you" because I want it to be clear that I'm not irrationally sorry for having a 3 a.m. panic attack. I'm sorry for acting like he was murdering puppies and innocent children when in reality he was just existing in proximity to my irritability.

There is a balance out there between apologizing for every quirk out of fear of abandonment and owning up to the moments where we don't handle our shit as well as we could. It's hard, and less than fun, but we can all find that balance and show the world that anxiety, depression, and everything on the spectrum of mental illness doesn't preclude us from functioning.

We are strong. We are messy. We're hot messes, but we're sorry.

Slay. Sparkle. Repeat.

Every morning all the employees at my work gather for a quick meeting. Today the work topics were in short supply, so things quickly drifted to chit chat. The boss thanked a colleague for an outfit she had purchased for the boss' granddaughter, and the woman responded graciously, noting she had followed all the rules the boss had laid out about infant attire. "No sparkles, and no tutus; she's going to be a strong woman."

If you've ever met me you know I basically took that as hate speech. Another female coworker and I simultaneously piped in, stating, "You can be sparkly and strong," while gesturing the pink, bejeweled headband I was hardcore rocking. There was no response.

I am all about raising strong women. I already daydream about instilling confidence in my daughter with constant compliments, and endless encouragement to dream big, while doing everything in my power to support her as she takes the world by storm. However, you can bet your ass that girl will be covered in glitter head to toe from the moment she starts crowning.

I am very well aware that women are still fighting daily to be taken seriously in the professional world, and to be given the respect they deserve. Hell, we have to fight to be taken seriously in general. I can't tell you how many times I've had to "prove myself" to some cocky, misogynistic male entity who thought he could outsmart, outwit, or out-anything me.

Sometimes it feels like every day is a battle to be deemed worthy and earn our place in the room, and if you're telling me I can't prove my worthiness unless I ditch my sparkles and obnoxiously bright wardrobe, I'm jumping off the roof right now.

Pardon my French, but what the hell kind of bullshit is this? The number of sparkly items on my person is in no way connected to my competence as a professional, or a human being. I am a hustler. I get shit done. I do my job, and given the opportunity to go above and beyond, I take it every time, and I can tell you from experience that glitter has never been an obstacle. Ignorance, however, sure has.

We women have enough hurdles and glass ceilings to overcome without feeling pressured to "tone it down" and keep as quiet in our wardrobe choices as they'd like us to be in the office. We are strong, smart, and utterly badass in every way. We are hustlers, hard workers, and we sure as hell have what it takes to get the job done, while looking utterly fabulous.

So ladies, while you're ignoring the haters and misogynists, ignore the glitter naysayers too. They may not like your crown of jewels, but they're going to be coming to you for help sooner or later, so tell them to kiss your sparkle, and KILL IT!