Wurster

i hear a lot that i make it look really easy

I’ve been struggling a lot with work lately, which is something I don’t talk a lot about on here or ever. My friend J will point out when we talk for two hours and I have my entire brain rearranged (more on that later), that my public vibe is very much lol I have a trust fund. I want to clarify here: I do not have a trust fund. I have been supporting myself since I was twenty years old and graduated from college without a job or a plan (I didn’t realize why everyone was like, wearing suits and going to the city our senior spring semester), and sold cookies at a Rhinebeck bakery while hoping something big was on its way. Sometimes it felt a little demoralizing being a Princeton graduate getting yelled at for how bad I was at putting lemon bars into a box, but mostly I just had this absolute faith that things would work out. And they did!

I moved to New York and got an internship at a publishing house and worked as a research assistant for an author writing a book about the World Trade Center, and he introduced me to some editors at magazines, and slowly I started cobbling together a living. I’d work all day for $7.50 an hour at the publishing house and then go to an architecture event and then write an article that I might get paid like $350 for. People were still paying $1/word in those days, can you even imagine! I was constantly writing or reporting or editing or photocopying or calling a messenger and going to a book reading or a building launch or, later, once I started getting a few more bylines, an architect lunch or a press trip or whatever. 

Once, a few years ago, my then-husband’s best friend said to something like, and I paraphrase, “you are lucky that ___ married you because no one else would ever want to,” and I said something like, “oh, fascinating, tell me more,” and he said, “yes, you work too much.” 

He might have been right. My first husband and I never went on a honeymoon. I did take him with me on a trip to a luxury hotel in Mexico, but I was there to try to get the architect to become my PR client. It had all been set up through a photographer friend so I had a low rate but kind of had to perform, a little bit. I guess I was doing business development and thought my then-husband could come and it would be a honeymoon, but it has occurred to me recently that ideal honeymoons don’t have one spouse agonizing the entire time about how to close a sale. 

Anyway, so I worked and wrote, and was doing pretty well generally keeping myself alive and feeding myself, paying around $900/month for rooms here and there, living with people who had more money or sometimes less money. I got into a lot of credit card debt but then I eventually got out. I had huge windfalls, like selling my first design book for five thousand dollars, which felt astonishing to me. I didn’t really realize that a lot of my college friends by this point were getting married and buying homes and settling down and not constantly shuffling credit cards, but I really felt like I’d made it. I could do whatever I wanted, which wasn’t much !!! 

Then the 2008 crash happened and there was just no more magazine work. I’d gotten hired to start an architecture blog and then I got laid off three months later, and it just didn’t seem feasible to stay in NYC, so I moved to Portland, where I did restaurant criticism and launched Eater Portland. I worked all the time and pitched pieces and also wrote my second book, for which I’d been paid $7500, a princely sum!!!! Then I applied to grad school because I had secretly always wanted to get a PhD and then I got in, and then that was eight years of stability, courtesy student loans. I’m two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in debt. 

Yesterday, my friend J gave me a free coaching session. I’m usually the type of person who is like, “free coaching session,” no thank you, please see yourself out, but I’ve known J for many years and I trust her absolutely, and I thought she might encourage me to quit all my jobs and take care of myself. That is not what happened! Goddamn! What happened was even better! 

I have had a dysregulated relationship to work and money for my entire life and I have never really been able to figure it out. My friend Allison once said that I’m very secretive and shady about work and it’s a weird area of my life that I should figure out how to talk about. My spiritual guide said that she wishes people knew how hard I work because I really pretend not to. I hear a lot that I make it look really easy. J suggested yesterday that I actually just one day say how hard I work. So. I work really fucking hard. I work all the time. For a while, while I was finishing my PhD and writing my memoir, I was also growing a consulting business that had three employees in three states (what’s up, Illinois Department of Employment Security), that required getting incredibly up to speed on labor law and taxes, and I was also teaching, and being as good a colleague as possible to my friends, and being on campus all the time, and feeling alive. 

I feel pretty discombobulated with work now, and I think it’s because I really miss grad school. I feel like it happened and I wanted to get out and then it was over, but what I realized yesterday is something that my friend G said to me, right after I publicly reported having been harassed since my first week in grad school. She said, it is okay to grieve that you didn’t get the graduate school experience that you deserved. I was so into working my way through this, into doing what was right and what I thought was important and necessary, because it really did seem that if I didn’t say something, no one would, and so I just thought I had to, but there is a way in which I didn’t get to just go to grad school, which I’d always wanted to do. And now of course I want to go back except I already have a PhD.

I miss the structure and the rhythm of academia, and I miss the intellectual pressures. I don’t really respond to financial pressures, not really, because I’ve always been fine and I can lower my standard of living on a dime and because I know that I always have a safety net, but I respond very well to believing that I need to prove myself. Sometimes I think about grad school and how quickly it went by and how much I was fighting while I was there: first my harasser, then my body which decided to try to kill me for a few years, then the institution. Yesterday, talking to J, we realized that I just want to throw a tantrum. Thankfully, I know how to do that. 

Today, I’m applying for a job, the first job I’ve ever really applied for, and then I’m finishing the manuscript that’s due out from Princeton University Press next fall, and then I’m working on business strategy for P’s company, and then I’m editing a writer’s manuscript, and then I’m editing another writer’s manuscript. It feels like death to tell you this. I want you to think that I just float around and never do anything, that everything comes easily to me, that I am not tormented or driven, that I have a very easy breezy relationship to all this, that I am surprised by where I am and the degrees I have. When J asked me about why I do this, I knew that of course it is because it feels safer to hide in plain sight.

My name is Eva and the reason you might think I never work is because I work so fucking much that I can’t stand it.