3 Ways to Design Your Career

John Besmer confirms our meeting with “Word,” and signs off with, “Yup!” like he’s in the middle of a Jay-Z video. At the corner of corporate and hipster, I arrive to his office to discover him in a plaid button-down shirt, designer-rimmed glasses and a whole lot of Midwestern charm.

I first saw Besmer in a similar uniform on stage. Ten designers shared twenty inspiration slides for twenty seconds each, but Besmer’s stood out; he was the only person to play electric guitar, read from a book and live-tweet during his – he later told me – “horribly lashed-together” presentation.

Besmer, Principal and Creative Director of Planet Propaganda, is one of the creatives that has been paving the way for design to take a front-seat in how we approach everything, from education to careers to business. His client list includes long-standing relationships with big-timers like Jimmy John’s sandwiches and MTV to the young and hip Trek bikes and Red Wing shoes.

“Design is becoming more relevant because things are becoming more complicated” Besmer tells me. And with that, a relative army of people are now claiming the term designer of one sort or another.

Should you need a speedy determination as to whether you’re business or creative-minded, take my test. Ask yourself, what time do I rise and fall?  Scoring: Businessmen get up early. Creatives stay up late.

What links designers today “is their belief that everything today is ripe for reinvention and ‘smart recombination’” Warren Berger reports in Glimmer. And such foundational values are the backbone of innovation and business. Here’s how to take advantage:

1. Reframe your job, your tasks, your day-to-day. The concept of job titles are horribly outdated. Accept whatever title you’re given, but expand and burst the borders into far-away corners. Do as designers do and switch up “a familiar problem or challenge [like your job] in an unconventional way…. often the way a problem is framed will determine the solution,” Berger suggests.

Most successful people do this automatically. I know a young lawyer that was just recruited as partner at a prestigious law firm – this, at a time when lawyers are hurting badly – and it’s because he never saw himself as just a lawyer. He was always a leader first, the contracts and depositions came second.

So reframe your career in a new way. Ask stupid questions: Where should I really be living? Could I work from home? If I ate tuna for lunch every day, would that increase my productivity? What makes me happy?

2. Problem-solve to success. “I’m here to help my clients sell stuff,” Besmer tells me, but later admits that problem-solving is what really drives him. When you solve a problem, you get more responsibility, more challenge, new problems to solve. And that is what’s so exciting about successful careers. You solve lots of problems one after the other. It’s the difference between working hard and working smart, between an empty job and a fulfilling one.

Designers are extra good at this since it’s their explicit job description, but problem-solving is really the function of every job, of un-sticking yourself, of true creativity, regardless of the field you’re in – administrative to professional to creative.

3. Gain momentum by doing more and more. Berger reports this is the “’upward spiral’ of solving problems, wherein the more you do it, the more you can do it.” Solving problems, after all, is actually quite daunting and it can be paralyzing to jump in to such high pressure and stress. But once you’re guaranteed the win, it’s just as assuredly guaranteed that you’ll want another one.

“Through constant acts of creative [problem-solving], you also re-create yourself,” Berger continues. “You help propel your own growth spiral, feeding off the energy of creation. That’s not just a feeling, it’s a fact: Being in that state of “design flow’ raises the levels of neurotransmitters in you brain, such as endorphins and dopamine and that keeps you focused and energized.”

My friend Besmer is a testament to such endorphins and energy, and as we wrap up our conversation, he tells me the story of how he moved to a new house a few years ago. He relates that on each moving box, he would write what that box contained.  “I’d write ‘old photos, clothes,’ and whatever was actually in the box… then I’d add ‘glass eyes’ just to keep it interesting for the movers. I thought, why not make it interesting for those guys?”

Why not, indeed.

So, how do you make it interesting? Do you work only within the confines of your job title? Are you creative or business-minded?

Can you have any job you want?

Alexandra Levit has just published the book, New Job, New You: A Guide to Reinventing Yourself in a Bright New Career, which is a great resource if you’re looking for a job or trying to find more happiness in your career. And it got me thinking, one of the myths I see over and over is that job-seekers or those looking to switch careers don’t think they have the skills or experience they need.

What a cop-out.

Of course, any career has a set of knowledge specific to that field. As an architect you probably have some technical knowledge about the size of a door jamb as well as general education about your specialization, like hospitals. But now that you’re ready to move to a new field, you don’t feel you have the gutzpah (experience, skills, knowledge) to apply to that journalism position or get into business development.

Very few employers are actually looking for someone with high level of expertise in a topic, but rather someone who can gain results. This is especially true the higher up the ladder you get. Look at the CEO of Yahoo Carol Bartz who originally came from the AutoCAD industry (architecture and design software).

As an unintentional job-hopper, the next job never hired me because of my body of field knowledge, but my track record of results which is a skill-set suitcase that travels with me and increases (one day, I hope it’s bursting open) to any job.

Those transferable skills are what’s most useful to employers: problem-solving skills, project management, marketing skills, business development, staff management, training and development; communication skills, etc. – and those are what should show up on your resume, how you should talk about yourself when networking, and what to include when writing your cover letter.

New Job, New You goes into great detail on these issues so definitely check it out for a motivating way to start the New Year. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you:

Could you have any job you want? If not, what’s hindering you or holding you back? Do you have a skill-set suitcase? How do you define it?

Bloggers Are Not Writers

There are exceptions, okay. But very few bloggers can actually write. Bloggers pander to a crowd trying to satisfy the hive mind. Blogging is entertainment. Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially aggrandizing self-promotion, but not writing.

Crowdsourcing is a bloggers’ anthem. I remember my first blog. I deleted it. The posts didn’t get commented on and weren’t passed around. That wasn’t the point. But for bloggers, that is their mission; to create 500-word packages, bold-faced and headlined, read and digested in two minutes or less, bursting with lackadaisical opinion and junk epithets.

“Blogging is not writing,” the author of You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier agrees. “It’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.”

Blogging is in its essence, not about originality, but about the aggregation, recycling and digesting of ideas. It is the darling of the open culture ideology of the web, where mediocre collaborations have produced a destructive new social contract, reports the New York Times.

“The basic idea of this contract,” Lanier argues, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight.

Bloggers are not writers, nor are they press, or superior to old media. Where disintermediation in the media shines, where a cadre of reporters has eliminated the need for a specific background (say, a degree in journalism or the need to pay dues at the right newspapers), is not evidence of bloggers taking over the world, but rather that the term blogger is now so broad that its definition no longer suits the myriad stacks of people and posts underneath.

Take a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a novelist, a Mashable blogger and a Gen Yer typing about their quarter-life crisis. They are not the same, nor equal, and certainly not held to the same standards or expectations. They are, despite the fact that we’d like to give little credence to the notion, entirely different.

“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,”  Lanier writes. “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”

Blogging is entertainment. Maybe it didn’t use to be. Maybe when bloggers were first getting started, it was about thought and connection. But increasingly, it bows to the “appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise.”

Writing is something more. And it is in the reading of such writing that enduring ideas, observations and philosophies satiate what we spend hours a day trying to glean from skimming any number of blog posts.

There is nothing wrong with blogging. But let’s give credit where it’s due – to the true writers, journalists, novelists, reporters, columnists, and others who inspire us to boil their ideas down in an effort to hold onto them just a little longer.

Written Word.

One Guy, One Girl, Two Start-Ups and a Relationship

Quick, which is more difficult – work or life?

Up until a year ago, both competed for my attention, each piling weight onto the seesaw to rise towards the favored position. A year ago, however, I started working at Alice and Ryan and I started hitting our stride (both of which were not without challenges, however… many, many challenges).

While working for a start-up demands hours, it demands more in mental energy, and in spiky unpredictable lengths, where the only invariable is that you know work will be stop and go. This means it’s often difficult to separate work and life, especially in the statuesque pursuit of balance, but while I used to recognize and promote blur, I’m now mindful of the distinct delineation between the two.

Smart people don’t balance two sides of the same coin – your work and life are, after all, inseparable from the backbone of your binding. You can’t push one to one side and one to the other and hope equilibrium presents itself because the entities are glued to each other and to you.

What I mean, for example, is that I cannot see Ryan and refrain from discussing at length our work. I have long agreed that behind every good man is a good woman, and likewise, the same holds true for Ryan and I on both sides. While he is the one that shows up to Brazen headquarters each day, my ideas fill his head. While I’m the one who walks into Alice each morning, Ryan’s sense and advice follows me.

More to the point, I guess, is that there is a mutual respect for what we choose to do with the majority of our day and into the night, and sometimes into our sleep and into dreams. Although when we do relate to each other our dreams from the night before, it’s not very likely to include the mention of a spreadsheet.

Right now, Ryan is across the street from me working. His offices are located diagonal from my condo, but I have yet to see him this week except for when he dropped me off from our weekend in Philly together on Sunday. I was working on a Wall Street Journal exclusive early this week, and he’s working on big plans for Brazen later this week. We also have friends, family, a basketball league, dance classes, books, blogs, grocery shopping, the gym, bill-paying and other magnitudes and minutiae of daily life competing for our attention.

Oh, and the new season of Chuck just started.

When I walk into work, much of that has to go away. I imagine this is natural for most people who enjoy their jobs, but particularly at start-ups you have to be ready to do whatever is put in front of you that day. Everything planned for the day will get eaten up by new priorities, larger plans and whether or not the toucan (our CEO) monopolizes all the time with the dolphin (our President and my direct boss). This can be best described as acting as a pivot, keeping your center, but spinning to each new person and project that appears.

One of the best parts of working at a start-up is that an idea spun in the morning has the potential to be fully realized by the afternoon. It can be that quick and magical and exhilarating. Also, the customers. When I worked for a non-profit in a trailer across from the food pantry that I was raising money for, I thought I wouldn’t again experience the rewards of being in such direct contact with the people I helped. But Alice has that.

One of the more challenging things is that blurring my work and my blog and my life to such an extent can make me very unhappy. Sometimes I feel like I’m always working which is frustrating, so I’ve tried to have clearer boundaries. I don’t really believe in work/life balance as an ideal, but no longer do I trust in work/life blur so much either.

As a generation, we’re always on. Is it okay to tweet during your workday? How often? What about talk to your significant other? Send personal emails? Do you work with your partner at night? Accept calls from the boss? Check your iPhone during a movie? Where is the line drawn and what is acceptable?

For Ryan and I, we have chosen to spend the majority of our day, not with each other, but with two different start-up companies. Our lives and relationship are more difficult and more enriched because of it. What about you? Work/life balance: truth or myth? Does it stand a chance?

The Miseducation of a Woman

Florida at Christmastime isn’t particularly warm, but it’s near tropical for Wisconsinites (of which I am finally one), so it is not the light breeze that causes my arms to hover close to my core while sitting at the pool. In fact, it is something that exists entirely in my head, and I have to consciously and decidedly lift my elbows and hands away from my hips and stomach towards the armrests so as to appear confident.

The right to be a woman, in the finest sense, relies on such confidence.

My two-piece bathing suit beguiles a certain flirtatious composure (it’s got polka dots), and at 5’8” (okay, 5’7” and a half) and 130 lbs, I wear it well. According to my original Illinois driver’s license, that identifying information hasn’t changed for ten years. I still weigh the same as I did in high school, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think I feel fat.

When I look at pictures of myself, I can see rationally that I am skinny, that I look skinny. That I am healthy, and I look healthy. That I am beautiful, and I look beautiful. Rationally, these are all facts that can be written and entered into evidence.

Quite irrationally, I can tell you that the daily struggle of being a woman is that my stomach expands when I eat, my thighs are big and my hips are large. I also worry about the backs of my arms, the portion of my leg directly underneath my butt, and the meeting place of my neck to the space underneath my chin.

Necessary qualifiers: I have an active lifestyle, I love to cook, I love to eat, I don’t read so-called women’s magazines and I usually love my biggest “flaws” – my thin lips, pale skin, imperfect nose and uneven eyebrows, thin fingernails, fine hair, big feet, small breasts, large rear. I’ve been known to run errands without make-up.

But I am looking in the mirror more often lately. Ryan says this to me, over Christmas vacation, while we sit in a high-rise condo that has a mirror on every wall and round every corner. There are a lot of mirrors here, I reply, but I know what he is talking about. He is worried about me, he says.

I don’t wonder at air-brushed models but the pre-teen girl walking down the street in West Palm Beach, dressed with too many inches exposed on her sapling thighs. Or the girls at the Philly wedding whose legs are the size of my arms and whose arms are the size of my wrists. Is this sickness? Disease? Good genes?

A couple mornings later, I spend too much time getting dressed considering I work for a start-up with a casual dress code. I dress up because I like to. I try not to stand out too much from my colleagues who wear jeans and sweatshirts by wearing a cotton t-shirt fabric scarf, or nice boots over leggings. I wear a lot of casual dresses with tights. I try to match the VPs (all men), but since there are no women executives, it’s difficult to know if I’ve got it right.

I could go on.

And then, on any given day, I read about why there are fewer women CEOs, that women are better CEOs, that women are less promising as candidates for promotion, that surgeons can now relocate fat from your thigh to your chest, that kids see housework as a women’s domain, just 4% of venture capital goes to women, wives earn more than their husbands, and just being a woman is a pre-existing condition in healthcare.

I find the truth somewhere, not in the piling up of research, like clothes discarded on my floor, but in accounts from real-life women, between the lines in their interviews, bluntly stated in their ethos, and shared and protected among friends.

“The truth is,” Joanne Lipman says, a former deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal and founding editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, “women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.”

3 Ways to Upgrade College

Yesterday’s post on how colleges are failing Generation Y explored the collapse of our education system. There were so many good comments from that post, I incorporated several into today’s post which explores some ideas on how to re-build:

1. Get rid of most tenured full-time professors.

This is already the reality. The New York Times reports that in 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, a mere 27 percent are.

Talented faculty employed purely on a per-course or yearly contract basis don’t receive any benefits, earn a third or less of their tenured colleagues, and are “treated as second-class citizens on most campuses,” the Times aruges. So, we need to create a system that rewards – and grants tenure – to those instructors who aren’t working full-time.

Why? Consider that “professoring part-time is already a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences that full-time academics haven’t had.” Professors who solely exist in the academic vacuum will never contribute to an educational system that keeps up with today’s frenetic pace.

Instructors could divide their time between 20% research, 30% teaching and 50% real-world experience. Those same instructors would be awarded tenure to garner the respect, input and weight as a resident professor does today. What a luxurious and significant appointment that would be!

2. Create cross-curricular programs focused on foundational skills, not breadth of topic.

Carol Phillips teaches marketing at the University of Notre Dame and noted, “I work very hard to make the class relevant, but reality is that what I teach is likely to be old hat by the time my students graduate… Five years ago I was talking about BMW Films, now it’s Twitter. Five years from now it will be something else. It doesn’t really matter, the principles endure. Relevance is overrated.”

It’s quite possible that the field you work in today won’t exist in five years, or will be unrecognizable in its current form. Today’s jobs aren’t representative of a factory line, but instead require employees to make connections between fields and ideas, and be responsive and flexible to change.

No longer is your career a set of skills applicable to a single position. Colleges need to concentrate less on checking on the latest trends in their syllabi and more on foundational skill sets that will transfer from job to job, and moreover how to apply those skills in a myriad of areas.

3. Build continuing education, not grad school.

“I’m supposed to learn everything I need to know for the rest of my life in 4 years between the ages of 18 and 22? Give me a break,” says Sam Davidson.

When education fails, so too do the businesses and innovations built upon its foundation. Graduates move into real-world jobs that leave them confined to cubicles, engaging in little professional development, and otherwise left to reading books, and in some cases, writing blogs for further intellectual development.

Conferences aren’t built for learning, but networking. Grad school isn’t much better. You could turn to your alma mater’s continuing education program, but the classes offered are based more on a person’s hobbies than scholarly achievement. Like, I love taking the adult dance classes, but I really wish UW offered some history classes. Maybe philosophy. The exact courses many colleges are cutting, let alone offering as a continuation after your graduate.

An educational system that views learning as continual and ongoing would go a long way towards alleviating the fears students have of picking a major, picking a career, a life path, and trying to squeeze all of their erudition into four to six years. It’s a tragic disappointment that we look at education as something to be finished. It takes the fun and curiosity out of learning, and it’s why a great number of students don’t enjoy school or are just plain bored.

Students will always have a choice of how hard to push themselves. A university’s job is to serve up the challenges when you do. This list is only the beginning; I’d love to hear your thoughts.

What do you think? Are these realistic? What are your ideas to improve education? Do you expect change to happen any time soon?

No “A for Effort:” How Colleges Fail Generation Y

Originally wait-listed for acceptance at UW-Madison, I remember very clearly the night I finally received my large envelope from the school, with the Badger-red “Yes!” emboldened on the back flap. I was in.

And while the University of Wisconsin may have had doubts about letting a neighboring born-and-bred Illinois resident into their borders, I quickly forgave their hesitation, becoming a dedicated student to the school and its culture. I garnered a 4.0 GPA or darn-near close to it every semester, religiously “studied” at the Terrace, partied at State Street bars, and worked as the school’s top student fundraiser at the UW Foundation. Plus, I actually graduated in four years.

Little did I know, I was an anomaly.

A couple years later, the Lt. Governor of Wisconsin invited me to be part of a special retreat pondering the question, “What really matters in college?” with a specific focus on liberal arts programs.

Nearing the end of the retreat, we set goals and plans for the future. As the token Gen Yer, I was obviously eager, but our next meeting didn’t convene until a full seven months after the original weekend, and the following meeting was scheduled for four months after, and was subsequently postponed. Indefinitely.

“I’ve gone, I’ve done it, and I have serious concerns about my actual level of preparedness to contribute anything meaningful to my fellow humans,” one young blogger writes about her educational experiences.

And it’s no wonder. Education is failing a startling rate. Universities have declining assets, growing liabilities. An Ohio State economics professor reports that “students study, attend class and write papers fewer than 30 hours a week, for only about 30 weeks a year. While the typical American employee works 1,800 hours a year, the typical college student works half that amount on academics.”

Only 33 percent of University of Massachusetts freshmen graduate within six years (not even four), which economist Mark Schneider refers to as a ‘failure factory,’ and those colleges are the norm.

Only half of teenagers who enroll in college end up with a Bachelor’s degree. This is such a failure to society’s economic potential that we could easily list public universities alongside the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that have irreparably damaged the American economy. But we don’t. Somehow, the failure of education is not as worthy of our ire.

Colleges, in the meantime, are scrambling to stay on top of the pace of innovation and the ever-changing job-market by eliminating majors like philosophy (University of Louisiana) and American studies and classics (Michigan State) after declining enrollments in those areas.

But even as colleges and universities rush to prove their relevance, everyone agrees (colleges and employers alike) that students are specializing too early. “There’s this linear notion that what you major in equals your career,” reports Katherine Brooks, director of the liberal arts career center at the University of Texas. “I’m sure it works for some majors. The truth is students think too much about majors. The major isn’t nearly as important as the toolbox of skills you come out with and the experiences you have.”

If majors aren’t all that important anymore, then why are colleges and universities still set up that way? Why aren’t students prepared for the real world? And why are educational institutions scrambling to protect traditional hierarchies and predict the next big thing instead of restructuring the educational system to run in parallel with innovation?

“There isn’t anything wrong with the teacher/student relationship. It’s only been around for two or three millennia,” says Dean Edward Snyder of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. A comment so arrogant that we have to assume Dean Snyder isn’t intentionally asinine, but rather simply doesn’t want to abdicate his throne of being “in the “last [and] best position to influence [student’s] overall academic, ethical, and professional development.”

Nevertheless, the gross inadequacies of the current educational system should excite you. They should excite you as a changemaker, entrepreneur, parent or future parent, capitalist or socialist, as an optimist, and as a person who wants to learn and succeed.

The educational system is committing travesties against Gen Y. Ready to throw the book at ‘em?

Roll Call.

What are your experiences with education? Did college prepare you for the real world? Your profession? What do you think?

(PS – Tune in tomorrow (Thu) for Part 2 of this post, in which I’ll offer some ideas for solutions.)

Share feedback on Modite, and enter to win an HP laptop!

With the New Year comes a renewed commitment to this blog, which has introduced me to Ryan and Alice, and has allowed me to succeed in ways I never thought possible. Much of that is due to the goodwill of all of you, my dear readers.  And so it is with great pleasure that I kick off the first week of 2010 with an exciting giveaway!

HP was kind enough to agree with me that I have some of the best readers on the planet, and are giving away an HP Pavilion dm3 Notebook PC to one lucky winner.

This thin and light notebook is perfect for on-the-go lifestyles and will easily travel with you to coffee shops, vlogging sessions, airplanes, photography outings, conferences, yoga class or whatever else your career and life desires.

Cool features:

- Less than 1″ thin to easily slip in your bag
- Only 4.2 lbs so you barely notice carrying it around
- Sleek, modern design for the style-conscious
- Windows 7 is installed with new features like snap, pin, shake, and peak
- Great for music and video with BrightView LED display, SRS Premium Sound and Altec Lansing speakers
- 10 hours of battery life – no more searching for a plug!

Obviously, I’m stoked. All you have to do is give me some feedback on Modite, and you will automatically be entered to win the HP Pavilion dm3.

Click on this link to answer the quick five-question survey.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been reading all along or if you just discovered Modite today. I want to hear what you think! Plus, once you’re finished with sharing your feedback, I’ll share with you how to get additional entries into the contest. Winner will be chosen using a random number generator.

Thanks in advance for participating and good luck! Also, it would make HP happy if you followed them on Twitter, @hp_pc, and while you’re at it, go ahead and spread the word on Twitter about the contest. Here’s a suggested tweet (but feel free to be creative):

Give @modite some feedback, and enter to win an HP computer for the New Year! – http://bit.ly/76i0JP

RULES
Winner will be awarded an HP Pavilion dm3. Giveaway entries will be accepted until Wednesday, January 6th  at 12:00 pm CT (Noon). Winner will be chosen using a random number generator. Winning entry must provide a valid email address (Modite.com will never sell or rent your e-mail to third parties). We will notify the winner by email on Thursday, January 7th.  The winner will have 48 hours to respond to us with their name and valid U.S. mailing address.  If this information is not received within 48 hours, a new winner will be chosen.  Odds of winning depend on number of entries received.

The Corruption of Authenticity

The derision and drama on blogs, news and broadcast nowadays is entertaining, like a domino of tabloids back-to-back. And while we instinctively know that insistent self-actualization is an incredibly banal form of entertainment, it remains so vast in its infectiousness, and so strong in its self-referential feeding, that navel-gazing is now suffocating in its empire.

Let’s poke some holes for air.

You are not genuine because you told me of your heartbreak, or your success or your disease or your strengths or your weaknesses or miscarriage or move or relationship or promotion or demotion or disability or conflict or how your cat peed outside of its litter box.

Gross over-sharing is not encouraging or revolutionary or innovative. You are not absolved because you made what was once private now public.

Enough of the cultish drippy-rainbowed sentences: “What’s holding you back? Yourself;” “Motivation is first about taking that first step;” “Do whatever you want, your intuition will guide you;” “Force yourself to look inward;” “Start telling yourself positive things instead of negative things.”

Enough crowdsourcing your life’s misdeeds, your life’s lessons, your life’s minutiae. Enough with bogus empowerment, dramatics, and inflated realities in the name of support, transparency, attention, acceptance. That is not authenticity. That is allegiance to a culture of nineties motivational speeches.

“For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public space and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy,” philosopher Jacques Derrida maintains. “If a right to a secret is not maintained then we are in a totalitarian space.”

“Which is to say,” author Zadie Smith argues in Changing My Mind, “enough of human dissection, of entering the brains of characters, cracking them open, rooting every secret out!”

Authenticity is not about revealing it all, nor complete transparency, nor opening the door and shining a very bright light on every raised goosebump. Authenticity is not about blurring public with private. Authenticity is not about the flailing and flapping of our entire hearts and minds to an audience of mirrored hosts.

We have a right to our private lives. Dear God, we have a right to keep the corners of our lives to ourselves. And it is delicious to do so.

Gulp of Air.

Understanding the Anxious Mind

For the past eight or nine months, I’ve created a bubble around me of people I trust, making sweeping efforts to withdraw from drama. Through this process, I learned; the bubble always pops.

Here’s what that’s like for me: Imagine, you’re a crumb and you fall onto the sidewalk and an ant discovers you. His tiny ant friends are soon alerted and before you know it, you’re swarmed! A disgusting black blanket moves furtively and anxiously to completely and methodically chew through your every last morsel. The very thought makes me sick.

And more than anything, this is what it’s like when things are outside my locus of control. And I love control, especially in all of its anxiety-ridden devastation.

“Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you, a real and objective danger,” reports the New York Times. “It is instead a kind of fear gone wild, a generalized sense of dread about something out there that seems menacing — but that in truth is not menacing, and may not even be out there. If you’re anxious, you find it difficult to talk yourself out of this foreboding; you become trapped in an endless loop of what-ifs.”

For me, the what-ifs appear with even the simplest of situations. Ryan will inquire, for instance, if I would like to attend a concert last-minute, and my chest will immediately be gripped with all of the possible unknowns, and how all of these unknowns make it impossible for me to go.

Where is it? What time does it start? Are we going to get there late? Do we have to pay a cover? Will I have to walk in heels? I don’t have a cute outfit without heels. It’s going to be cold outside. Will I have to stand at the concert and carry my coat? Will it be hot? Will there be a lot of people? Are the people going be younger than me? Will they be boring? Will the band be good? Who’s going with? Are we going to get drinks after? Will the restrooms be clean? I can’t stand public restrooms.

No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go. Rationality urges me to do my make-up and try on clothes while anxiety grips my heart so tightly that I’m dripping with angst. By the time Ryan arrives, I’m paralyzed into doing everything I can not to burst into tears.

I distinctly remember my first such outburst in a sixth-grade hallway. After an elementary school of calm, I peeled back the doors on middle school to discover inequalities, insecurities and the bulging wart of worry – a reoccurring blemish in my otherwise untarnished path towards happiness.

Taken together, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, post-traumatic stress and generalized anxiety disorder, make anxiety the most common mental illness in America, affecting an estimated 40 million adults, reports the Times. That’s not even counting the garden-variety worriers like mothers who fret when their daughter doesn’t call, or husbands that believe a phone call in the middle of the night signals a terrible occurrence.

My coping mechanism is to nest as methodically as anxiety chews. Withdrawing further perpetuates the vicious cycle of shrinking into comfort, into habits, into a place that is safe and away from criticism or mistakes or hurt or anger. I crave the days that are built around everything going according to plan.

Research shows that I’m good for the human race. Without those who are hyperviligant, we wouldn’t be able to leap into action so quickly. High-reactive kids are “less likely to experiment with drugs, to get pregnant or to drive recklessly.”

The Times also reports we’re “generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.”

But for me, the mental anguish of wearing myself ragged “with a brain that’s always on high alert” is suffocating. I long to be laidback. To be the kind of person who doesn’t wring their hands under the table. The kind of person who “gives up any notion of being guarded or protected” in order to be intimately known. A person that can arrive effortlessly to a concert.