About ten days after I got fired, my friend Kat messaged on me Facebook asking me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding.
Her wedding?!
This came as a total shocker because just a year ago, she was the one nudging me to come to London. Together with Annie, we were plotting world domination. We had dreamed of the adventures we would take together, the flat we would share, the afternoon teas we would drink, the dashing European gentlemen suitors we would conquer. If it wasn't for her, I'm not sure I would ever have thought of coming to London. She never applied for a London visa because right after I got mine, she went back to China for Chinese New Year, and at the family dinner, she met this cool, suave guy from LA. They clicked. Long-distanced for a while, and apparently, he just proposed.
Which is a happy thing really, which is just about the happiest thing your friend/confidant could be saying when she's not saying "I'm coming to London with you!" I felt envy. Jealous even. A little let down. They are not here to share in my distress. To share the rent. To share the triumphs and trials of trying to make it in the big city. I'm sad that out of the three girls, I'm the only one who even came to London. Annie stayed in Vancouver with her stable job. Kat went off to L.A., and got hitched. I am the only one who had taken a risk. And it doesn't look like it's paying off at all.
Am I the only idiot who actually went through with all this?
When contemplating my future in Bali, one of my biggest fears of choosing this writing career was that I would be left behind. All my friends would be moving up the ladder, into the corner office, and I would be left behind in my parents' basement, bussing tables to make ends meet.
Or, it may have already happened.
I look around my apartment, with my three housemates, consisting of an American HR professional, an Italian farmer, and a starving Polish actor who literally looked like he was starving because all he ate were beansprouts. Raw. He was only 30 but his hair was nearly half grey. When I first moved in, he welcomed me by suggesting this house is haunted. I have steered clear of him ever since. The only thing that haunts our house is its intermittent access to hot water. On some days, I took cold showers.
Why do I have to make life so difficult? Where would all this lead?
I remind myself not to compare myself to other people. Especially not against other people's glossy outsides to my messy insides. What is security anyway? Having a rich husband? A stable job? At one point I did have a stable job, but I felt empty. At another point I also had a stable boyfriend, yet still I felt insecure.
I remember at the FCWR Canadian edition show, a lot of contestants have serious jobs like actuaries, doctors, investment bankers, big data analysts. I could just see myself opening a brochure in high school, my teenage eyes gleaning off the careers with the listed salaries. What do I want to be when I grow up? No problem. I want to be the person with the job that makes the most money. Coming from immigrant families, my sentiment is not uncommon among my peers on FCWR. Our primary concern in a new country is to squeeze into the ranks of the mainstream middle class. No matter what the cost. Little consideration was given to whether I'll actually like the job.
While that certainly had been my pursuit in my late teens and early twenties, and I pursued it wholeheartedly, with my business school friends in tow. But by the time I was 26 years old, it no longer felt right anymore. It never felt right to begin with. It took me three years into the job to finally do something about it.
I realize not everyone goes through this. Not everyone feels the need to gut their lives to make way for a new pursuit. Driven naively by "I want to live my purpose", "I want to love my job" and all that new age wannabe twaddle. And I probably took the long way, as I usually do. But for me, until I did something about this yearning of mine, I would always be lost. I just didn't realize being true to one's self sometimes means losing connection with one's community.
The conversations I have with Kat now are different. The conversations we have now, they don't quite scratch the itch. Like two characters in a Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood," we each took a different road to travel by. And that has made all the difference. What remains between us is a shared history and a mutual preference for oaky Chardonnay. As my friend Louie puts it, "You just connect on different levels now." Which breaks my heart because I crave a deep connection with my friends. With someone. Most especially when I'm doing something as scary as changing my life.
Finding your way in a big city like London is tough. It took me a few weeks to realize part of the challenge of surviving in London is learning to navigate its mind-numbing maze of recruitment agencies, job boards, friends-of-friends contacts. On the surface, they look like an abundance of opportunity, but when pursued, few actually yield fruit for your labors. If you're not careful, you can easily waste a lot of time chasing the wrong leads.
They say New Yorkers are aggressive, not because they are rude self-centered egomaniacs (some are!), but because they must be loud and pushy to get noticed in a big city like that. It's their survival tactic. Making it in London is much the same. Everyone is shoving for access, often making employers' applications inbox a poorly managed disaster. When I first came to London, I went through recruitment agencies thinking they'll lessen the burden by connecting me with the right employers. Boy was I wrong. It took me a month or two to realize they are completely useless. For me, at least. I don't have prior experience in the field I'm trying to get into, why would recruiters risk looking like a fool by putting me in front of a client? It will seem like they haven't done their job.
So I asked everyone I knew in Canada if they had any friends in London. And I'm happy to report that I have been gifted with a substantial list of British contacts. Among the people who nominated folks for my Potential New British Friends List, was my good friend Josephine. But it wasn't any friend-of-friend contact in London who helped me the most, it was Josephine herself.
Shortly after I lost my job at the PR firm, Josephine and I began to Skype regularly. In these hour-long, cross-Atlantic Skype calls, Josephine confides in me the troubles she has with breaking into a new field, the loneliness of losing her old community. The fact she is no longer an-up-and-coming brand manager at an important company left her with more than a few cold shoulders which were warm just months before.
To exit a career leaves a person alone and "behind" in ways that are almost impossible for her to fully grasp beforehand. The all-important career for an ambitious twenty-something is merely everything. It's her source of strength, financial security, health care, community, social status, reward for education, and her bargaining chip for attracting an equally accomplished marriage prospect. The career is so vital that many prefer to spend more time in their offices than at home with their families. So you don't leave it. (Unless, of course, you realize you're in the wrong career.) When this trajectory works, it produces happy Yuppies well on their way to personal fulfillment and professional success. But when it doesn't work? As with my friend Josephine? The in-betweeners are cast in social and emotional limbo. Her choice was either to stay in her prestigious brand management safety net with a job that kept making her feel empty, or to find meaningful work elsewhere and leave, which left her with nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. She did take with her a wealth of marketing know-how, her work ethic, her goodness, her endearing personality. Despite being a rock star in school and on the job, the doors to environmental sustainability remained closed to her. Sustainability is very different from food marketing after all. In the unusual case of a career change, the firms automatically ask Josephine for a degree in environmental science. To get a foot in the door, Josephine did everything. I mean – everything. She juggled four internships, went to every conference, every forum, accosted speakers on their way to the airport, built her own website, wrote weekly blogs, read books, then wrote about the books she read in her blog, volunteered at beach garbage cleanups, took on work that paid less than her part-time job in college. Amid all these external cues that makes one doubt one's worth – the rejections, the brush offs, the radio silence – is the growing sense of separation from one's old community.
Hearing her say this, I'm awash with relief. The feelings she experiences are all too familiar for me. Because at first I thought it was me. I was the one doing something wrong.
We talk about our job hunt, our setbacks. We compare notes about the loneliness of losing genuine connection with our old community. We critique each other's websites, swap networking tips, brainstorm ways to forge new friendships such as Sisters in Sustainability potlucks, and keep one another accountable to our goals through weekly chats titled "Change Our Lives!". We celebrate our mini victories through this period of no man's land, where you are no longer a part of your old community, and not yet welcomed into your new community, going through things only people in a midst of a career change would understand. Like gymnasts swinging on uneven bars, we haul ourselves closer and closer to our unknown destinies with our biggest effort yet, and in this brave exertion we are tossed in midair. We may or may not catch the next bar. But while we are here, at least, we have each other.
A smaller wardrobe, less than warm showers and other lifestyle inconveniences all seem manageable, petty even, in comparison to finding your posse. A posse that shares your purpose. Maybe that's what I instinctively knew when I decided I must come to London, to be surrounded by a big literary community, even at the expense of taking a menial day-job to pay for it.
Chinese writer Lu Xun wrote, "Wallow in security and you won't have freedom. To have freedom, you will inevitably face some danger. These are the only two paths."
I have fallen so "dangerously" off the grid, with my old life so far behind me now that it ceases being an option. It also ceases being a hotbed for doubt, from where I can question the smartness of my choice. I've swam so far into the ocean and so far away from shore, that I cannot swim back anymore. Which is a relief, because the only way left, is forward.
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