Confidence at Work and Lack Thereof

There was a long time after I graduated that I was not confident about anything in my life. I was an intern, I had no promise of continued employment nor the foggiest idea of what success, a career or feeling like I knew what I was doing, would even look like. It was an emotional albatross around my neck every morning as I walked a mile to the subway to go sit next to my co-workers, all of whom had full time real jobs that paid much more than $10 an hour and did not have a vague end date of Damocles hanging over their heads. 

Toward the end of the first 3 month segment of my job I had to do a presentation about a personal project I had chosen to investigate at work. The feedback I got from the Department Head later was that I had too little confidence to take a forward facing role. 

When he said that, I just felt like I had no reason to be confident. Everything I had ever been good at was no longer surrounding me. I had for the prior decade been good at school. School was a refuge. I could read books and I was told that I was smart because I could remember what I read in those books. But making the shocking transition to the real world took away all that structure. There was no more extra curricular leadership to affirm my abilities. There was just the everyday reminder that I had not been considered valuable enough to hire and that every day my relevance was in question. I felt there was no reason to be confident because I knew they barely believed in me so why believe in myself.

It was not the bad pay that hurt so much as the clear lowest position on the totem pole, "go buy me new headphones intern" status I had accrued in life. As college ended and I struggled to find a job I wanted to spend my life doing, all of my achievements started to wrap up and unravel all at once. On the one hand I was graduating from a great university and got honors on my thesis. On the other hand once I got to New York I was barely employed had no idea what I was doing with my life and one of my roommates was definitely pissing in bottles rather than going to the bathroom.

It took getting a job that I could actually succeed at to remember that I could believe in my own abilities. It took clearly succeeding in measurable ways to be sure that I wasn't going to just fail at life after college. The most terrifying part of it all was the idea that I might never land on my feet. That I could be someone who just floundered away their 20s. I felt plagued by my decision to work at a non-profit and to only work at a non-profit whose model I felt was valid. I felt like I had boxed myself in and might never climb out.

I don't think Bronx Housing Court is a place where a lot of people gain their confidence. But righteous anger is a powerful force in my life. Yelling at landlords and their attorneys in the hallway of Bronx Housing Court reminded me of my own abilities. I was reminded that I could bring words, logic and evidence down upon others like a cudgel, tearing through their condescension and poorly constructed arguments. I relearned the feeling of how through the rasp of my own voice and pointedness of my paperwork I could accomplish something. Helping my clients resolve their housing court cases or get enough additional time to avoid eviction put the taste of victory back in my mouth. Fighting for others allowed me to remember what winning felt like. What being in the right felt like. I try not to define myself by my job but it is hard to feel confidence when you are doing poorly (or nothing at all) between the hours of 9 and 5pm. 

These days I don't go to the Housing Court but I still have the confidence to fight with words in the proposals I write and I have gained back the audacity to argue (maybe a little too often) in the meetings I spend my days in. But gaining some sense of my own confidence back has allowed me to succeed where I was previously stuck standing still. It took finding something I could win at once again to remind me how I had ever done it in the first place. 

Why I never sent graduation thank you notes

The first and most sincere reason is that I am generally bad at thank you notes. There are a lot of ancillary excuses, like how I had bronchitis for the three weeks following graduation. Or that I subsequently drove 5,368 miles. Or that I then had to start a new job and move to a new city.

But I swear I had good intentions. I even bought a large number of postcards in Glacier National Park that I intended to send to all the kind people who nicely sent a card and gave me a bit of money when I graduated college. I appreciated that money a lot because it meant I was able to spend two weeks traveling after graduation and also not starve when I arrived in New York.

My grandmother has always had an innate reflex for thank you cards but I've never had her graces nor the organizational skills within my social life to send out cards as regularly. I understood graduation was a big deal, but I had just moved to New York and life was stressful and weird and the only furniture I owned was an air mattress, a wooden table I built in my high school shop class and a large cooler that I used as a chair, while I watched Netflix alone after work. The fact that my life was in chaos seemed like a good enough excuse at the time.

And then I hit on the idea that I would send the cards when I finally got my life together. When I wasn't an intern, and we didn't live with two forty year old men a mile from the train. When I felt like I was a real adult who had actually acquired the stable and prosperous life that I assumed college would guarantee me. So I told myself I could wait and send the cards when I had good news to bear, when everything had worked out and I'd found some level of conventional success.

That was mid July 2014; I was convinced I'd have those cards in the mail by October. I was sure that by then I would get hired by the place I was interning. I felt confident that we'd at least be on our way to a new apartment because I would no longer be paid a salary that was barely on par with, if not lower than, the average barista's take home pay.

But things did not get easier at the speed I was hoping for. And I got demoted down the life-ladder from intern to stay at home boyfriend. I spent a winter writing cover letters at a folding table in a poorly insulated basement that was masquerading as my kitchen. I had a bad job and then no job. Needless to say, those cards remained on top of my dresser.

I came across those cards in my desk the other day when looking for stamps to send in our renewal lease at our current apartment, a place that features both an actual living room and no 40 year old roommates. It took over a year and a half to get here but finally I feel comfortable enough with where I am, to want to tell people that I actually have my life (sort of) together. As I sat in my apartment with Grace, I finally felt comfortable in this time and place in my life. I think the first year out of college was the hardest one I've faced yet in my life because for the first time there was no real prescribed next step I was supposed to take.

Sure, there were the stock options of consulting, law school, work at a startup, apply for a one year master degree in figuring out your life priorities, but none of those seemed like the right choice. And the choices I made in that first year weren't even the right ones either.

And in a new city, where every one of my friends no longer lived within five blocks of the same bar (RIP the Cove) the world got a lot lonelier. I got to look myself in the eyes a lot about what I really wanted to be doing with my time every day. Before in my life, every success had led to a clear next step: do well in school, get into good classes, do well in those classes, get into good college, do well in good college, graduate. And then, do whatever it is that people do.

Before I finished college I didn't really know what I was doing with my life; I spent a lot of the spring of 2014 telling people I intended on being homeless and/or a cat mentor. I spent a lot of 2015 avoiding telling people what I was doing at all.

But as I watched spring bloom in New York this year, I felt like I would finally have something positive to say in those thank you cards. That I could pay my bills, and where I lived would neither disappoint nor scare my parents, and that I actually was cooking regularly.

I think pop culture grooms us to imagine that figuring life out will not be all that challenging. But real life is hard and no matter how good a foot you get off on, those first few steps are wobbly. While those thank you cards are still sitting in my desk for now, I'm a bit more optimistic about Christmas cards this year.

Being a United Nations Delegate

This summer I found myself once again without a job in New York. This is not a particularly comfortable situation: rent is rough; everything is expensive; searching for jobs is the worst. But in a spate of info interviews someone offered me the opportunity to go intern/volunteer by monitoring and writing reports about meetings going on at the United Nations. The rational part of my brain told me not to spend any time doing anything that would not pay me money. But my inner Model UN delegate jumped at the chance to enter the halls of the United Nations and sit alongside diplomats from around the globe. I realized the hundreds of hours I spent doing Model United Nations in college might actually have some value in my life.

I knew that an opportunity to be at the United Nations and see international diplomacy firsthand amidst the discussions on the Sustainable Development Goals would be a valuable and exciting experience. Being a true international relations nerd I was unduly excited about these discussions because these Sustainable Development Goals are deeply intertwined with the global and national policy decisions that affect the kinds of grassroots development projects I had previously worked on. But I was still afraid this flight of fancy would get in the way of my job search and cause my own life to fall into financial disarray.

But, probably disregarding better judgment, I went for it.

I spent about a month monitoring and analyzing the High Level Political Forum and Intergovernmental Negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals, which culminated in a series of late night weekend meetings before a final document was approved. That resolution will be voted on at the General Assembly in September and hopefully have far reaching consequences for global poverty. I wore a suit more often than I ever had before in my life and I read a lot of Twitter while the Nigerian delegate delivered long soliloquies about how "reproductive rights don't exist."

For maybe the first time since college I actually felt I was doing thoughtful analysis and being forced to think strategically about big issues on a daily basis. It felt good to think, to ask questions and do research into complex issues again. So much of my other jobs had been administrative and organizational challenges that required not much more than basic computer skills and a detailed to-do list. But at the United Nations I felt myself drawing on everything I had studied in order to understand the opaque language of the debates going on in front of me. It felt good to listen, research, decipher and advise my boss about advocacy targets.

Now I have a real job and I don't wear a suit. I'm no longer making off with the free sandwiches provided by the Federal Republic of Germany and I've fallen behind on the twitterverse. But for a few weeks I got to play diplomat a little more realistically than I had at all those weekend Model UN conferences in college.

The value of unemployment

On Monday I started a new and exciting job that I think is going to take me in the direction I want to go. I've finally gotten real work in international development where I can learn and grow in a field that I think will be rewarding and interesting. But getting to this point was not an easy affair. I spent the past two and half months unemployed after I left my last job at an NGO called One Acre Fund. While unemployment was in many ways a struggle, it was also a time to learn about myself and my city. 

In my last job I had been at best a glorified intern so I knew this was coming. I originally had a three month contract, then a two month extension, then a one month extension, then in mid-December there was no more extending and I stopped making my commute from the Q102 bus to the N train to the Z train that led me from Astoria, Queens to the heart of the Financial District. When you're so used to having a routine, waking up one day and not having any real pressing responsibilities is a bit of a shock. Because then finally there was no one but myself to tell me why my day matters.

Unemployment enables a lot of nice (but cold) daytime strolls through Central Park

I became my only supervisor and my only task was to acquire a new job. For weeks I sat at the folding table in my poorly heated kitchen. I could see the light come in around the edges of the back door because the foundation of the apartment building is sinking. I sat there staring at my laptop more than anything, while I looked for jobs online, emailed alumni, edited my resume countless times and became all too familiar with what is now my least favorite genre of writing, the cover letter. 

I don't like writing praises about myself so cover letters have never flowed naturally from my fingertips. I'd much rather write about rodeos, gun shows, libraries, Nigerian restaurants or Bolivian llama sheds. My self-deprecating humor and inability to exaggerate in a valuable way about myself (although I never seem to have a problem exaggerating frivolous stories about my childhood) made writing cover letters an arduous challenge to sell myself and generate excitement about each possible job even when I knew there was only a fraction of a chance I'd even get an interview. Every time I started a cover letter I just wanted to write

"I promise I'm smart. I promise I'll work hard. You can trust me, I'm an Eagle Scout."

But I was pretty sure that wouldn't get me that far. So I carried on writing, editing, checking jobs websites religiously and just kept applying because it was the only thing I could do. 

I considered a wide variety of opportunities

However, one can only write cover letters for so long every day. My general goal was to apply for at least five jobs a week but that still left me with a good deal of time on my hands. So after I put in a bunch of hours cleaning my apartment, convincing my girlfriend that a shoe organizer was necessary to bring order to our life, and loading up on groceries at Costco, I was left wondering how to spend my time. 

The first order of business was seeing as many museums as possible. While not free, a number of museums in New York are a "suggested donation" for entry, which is often a price of $15-22. However, if one lacks any semblance of shame and is very light on money, you can always just give a dollar, or sometimes even change.

So I went to the Cloisters, a beautiful reconstructed monastery maintained by the Met up in Washington Heights along the Hudson River; the Frick Collection, a beautiful home filled with great old masters and impressionist paintings that were the spoils of Charles Frick's steel empire; MoMA PS1, where I went twice so I could go on the free tour; El Museo del Barrio; Sculpture Center; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Grey Gallery at NYU; the Queens Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of the City of New York; the Bronx Museum; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I also went twice in one day because I went to the Museum Highlights tour in the morning and then wanted to return for the Contemporary art tour in the afternoon, all for the price of one dollar. 

Georgia O'Keefe's painting of the Brooklyn Bridge was one of my favorite finds

I museum-hopped, I cooked nice dinners for my girlfriend, I did all of our laundry and even washed the sheets on a semi-regular basis. I cleaned and bought groceries and wondered if this was how 1950s housewives felt. I lay in bed reading Junot Diaz all day and remembered why I loved reading so much before college turned it into a chore. I sat in my small bedroom and listened to old records of poets reciting their works over the hum the air conditioner continuing its vain war against the always-too-hot radiator. Most of all I thought. I spent time by myself and got to consider what I wanted out of my future. I wasn't jumping from one job to another. I wasn't locked into a career track. I had time to remember me, to remember the things that make me smile and to learn that I like reading on the subway so much that I should probably ride it regularly This was the first time, maybe since the summer after my first year of college, that I had time to myself - away from jobs and school and expectations. Even with the specter of my job search hanging over my head, I took the time to make myself good coffee and to cook a lot of butternut squash because those were things that made me happy. 

I especially appreciated coffee shops that feature cat puns

While it was a struggle to continue to churn out those cover letters, writing so much about myself gave me time to consider who I wanted to say I was. Writing "what I wanted to do with my life" so many times, like a mantra of self-assertion, eventually generated some actual introspection. After going to the final round interview for four different jobs in international development and not getting an offer I began to question if I had chosen the right path for myself. But in the end, after walking for hours through Central Park and calling my grandparents as much as I should have been all along, I knew that the path of least resistance was not the road I wanted to be on. Now, after a season of art museums, an opportunity presents itself and I must rise to the challenge. 

Moving to New York Meant Leaving Chicago

The past summer I moved to Astoria, Queens from Chicago when I graduated college. I changed my New Yorker magazine subscription to a real New York address, started doing things that I found in its Goings on About Town section, ate Venezuelan food for the first time, had my tires slashed and learned what all the fuss over Williamsburg, Brooklyn was about.

My girlfriend and I moved into a shitty apartment in Astoria, so close to the East River that when I look for restaurants nearby on my cell phone it often gives me recommendations for things, far outside my price range or interest, on Manhattan's aristocratic Upper East Side. It's a 15 minute walk to the nearest train station but we have a washer and drier in the apartment and rent is cheap so I can't really complain.

Upper East Side, So Close Yet So Far

Upon arriving in New York I found myself increasingly identifying with Chicago. I listened to Kanye and Chance the Rapper endlessly, maybe mostly to hear all their references to the city I had just left behind. I needed to hear Chance say "Went to Kenwood? Me too" and know what Kenwood Academy at 51st and Lake Park looked like. I needed to feel that I understood a place and all of its cultural references. That when Kanye rapped about Lake Shore Drive, I knew every exit from 57th northward. For me those lines were more than words, they were signifiers of a place I called home and local knowledge I'd accrued. I had belonged somewhere.

Chance the Rapper, Circa 2013

Then arriving in New York I felt like I knew nothing.  In Chicago, I felt like I really knew the place I lived, the restaurants, the museums, dive bars, parks and bookstores. But New York was new and overwhelming (does that mean Chicago was whelming? unclear).

My feet, and all of my stuff for that matter, were in New York but my mind was still on Chicago. Almost weekly I brought up Harold's Chicken Shack with my co-workers who had gone to Northwestern, even though they repeatedly made it clear they had no idea what I was talking about.  I would quote to people the exact price of a half-dark special at Harold's ($3.18 with student discount) as I reminisced about delicious, barbecue sauce soaked fried chicken.

At Harold's, Hands Covered in Mild Sauce, Sucking down a Mystic, Mid 2012

So I tried to experience as much of New York as I could. I left work each day with a mission and took each weekend as an opportunity. I ate at a Cypriot restaurant and learned that Ouzo is not a very responsible beverage to pair with dinner. I went to a brewery in the farthest northwest corner of Queens where you could see Riker's Island. I went to book talks in bars and art shows in warehouses. I sat atop roofs in Williamsburg and took the ferry to Governors Island for a poetry festival. I went to almost every single museum in the city that had free hours. I marched across the Brooklyn bridge with thousands of protestors. I found Ivorian restaurants and the best arepas Jackson Heights had to offer. I got stranded waiting for what seemed like eternities at subway stops trying to making the late night exodus back to Queens.

Moonrise in Chelsea

Eventually, when a friend from back home visited I began telling him about this great place to get fried chicken called Pies and Thighs. I was almost salivating as I talked about their chicken biscuit. And later thinking back to that conversation, I realized I'd finally found a new chicken place.

Uyuni Salt Flats and ensuing adventures

Because I felt like I had done enough work on my BA I decided to get out of La Paz and go see the Salar de Uyuni on a three day trek through the wilderness of southwestern Bolivia. Some years ago when I started talking about studying Bolivia a friend of mine forcibly made me look at pictures from the salt flats and ever since I knew I needed to go. So I packed up my things and boarded a 10 hour-ish overnight bus from La Paz to Uyuni.

After getting very little sleep on the bumpy bus ride I showed up in Uyuni and got on a tour leaving that day. Basically you get put in a Toyota 4Runner with 5 other tourists and a driver who drives you for the following three days. So the first order of business was going to the Salt Flats or Salar de Uyuni (above). In this part there's a small layer of watering covering the ground, which allows it to reflect the sky. 

For a little perspective (or lack thereof) there I am in a drier part of the Salar. The sky was amazingly large throughout the entire trip, which felt wonderful after being cooped up in a city for so many months. The people in my car were great and we had a great time chatting throughout the whole adventure.

Here you can get a better sense of just how reflective it was, as Fabian goes to get out of the car. 

I took this picture from atop this isolated mountain in the middle of the Salar just to get an idea of how expansive it all was. The "road" you can see is actually just a track in the sand created by cars driving there. 

We spent the night in a salt hotel, which was a structure built completely out of blocks of salt. The floor is also just loose salt. While a novel concept for a building, it was not the most enjoyable place to stay. The table and stools are also notably blocks of salt. The tour company organized all of our meals over the days and that night we had this delicious chicken that had ham stuffed inside of it. A wonderful way to end a very long day that had begun on a bus careening down a bumpy dirt road in the middle of the night. 

The next day our first stop was this super fun set of rock formations that sat in between great views of some dormant volcanoes. I had a great time climbing around with the two british girls in my group who it turned out had met in a climbing club during college. 

Then we stopped at a lagoon and saw flamingos!

What was really crazy is that the green mountains that followed the salt flats gave way to this sandy desert. We stopped at a series of rock formation where I climbed up to get a good view of this radically new biome. That night we stopped at another small hostel (this time not made out of salt). This place was way deep out in the middle of nowhere so that night I went out and the clear night sky was full of more stars than I had ever seen. It was absolutely wonderful and I just spent a good deal of time staring up and smiling before heading into bed because we were waking up at 5 a.m. the next morning. 

The first stop of the day were these awesome geysers that you could just walk right up to (no fences like national parks in the US). It was loud, sulfurous, and beautiful.

Then we drove to a hot springs where everyone hopped in for a dip to get clean since the hostel the night before lacked a shower. It felt great to soak in the nice warm water. Just next to the hot spring there was a herd of llamas wandering out into the lagoon. 

Our last stop of the trip was this city of rocks, which made for great climbing. After messing around there for a while we began the long drive back to the frontier town of Uyuni. From Uyuni I boarded yet another 10 hour long night bus ride. Not particularly enjoyable transit but it got me back to La Paz where I need to be to catch my flight. 

It's the little things

The little things are what define your experience in a city. It's not so much the fact of where you are as it is the twenty different street vendors I pass in the first block as I walk south along Avenida Montes from my hostel. It's the men yelling out of the open doors of minibuses and people talking into what look like landline payphones at newspaper stands. These are the things that define the everyday in La Paz.

La Paz is a place of many marches, many protests, and many traditionally dressed indigenous women. I have not the slightest clue what this march was about but traffic was blocked off so they could amble down the main avenue. 

After three or four passes by I'm pretty sure this is a feminist collective/radio station/cafe. Whatever it is, it's quite the building. It says "virgin of the desires" on the side so make of that what you will. This is on the way to Sopocachi, which is the bougie-er neighborhood where the NGO offices I've visited for my research are located. 

I also found this fellow on a wall as I walking around Sopocachi awkwardly killing time so I didn't show up to early for an appointment. I still showed up early but it was ok because a nice lady gave me two coffees and a newspaper in the intervening time. 

I quite like this lovely Bolivian hybrid truck/motorcycle that I saw roaming the streets. Things aren't often the same "correct" way you might find them in the United Stats but people find a way to get done what needs to be done. Commerce finds a way, whether it be this motorcycle-truck or the woman selling bread out of baskets on the corner. 

There were a lot of colors in this flower market and it reminded me a lot of the flower markets in London. This is also a great example of an indigenous woman wearing the classic bowler hat. They don't actually pin these on (from what I'm told) they just balance them on their heads. 

I don't like to post pictures of food. I think it's annoying. But the Bolivian exchange rate did a kind thing for me and allowed me to enjoy the kind of fine dining I would never be able to afford in the states. This restaurant Gustu, was opened by one of the chef's from Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen that some list or ranking says is number two in the world. The restaurant only uses Bolivian ingredients and I had an amazing (albeit lonely) meal. The thing on the left was rabbit, the middle had sorbet from this fruit called tumbo, and then a cucumber and rose foam sangani (bolivian alcohol of some type) cocktail. It was awesome. 

Then Bolivia always meets you with some hilarious moemnts. Like the Jackie Chan Chinese restaurant or Micro Market Shalom. There's strange new things around every corner and I've really enjoyed spending a few hours every day just walking around and becoming acquainted with the city.