Here's where I am, today, in the Now.
I've been floundering. It hasn't been clear to me what it is I need to do about work, and that lack of clarity has been confusing and dis-heartening.
For a while I thought the answer was to start a business that I could do on the side when more consulting came around, and Cheeky Quilts was born. I took my avocation of making contemporary baby quilts and scaled it up, and everyone who saw one, wanted one. It was satisfying and it kept me occupied sewing, but making quilts for a living is never going to generate the kind of income I'm looking for, even after down-sizing.
Then there was a broken pipe in the wall between the living room and bathroom of my house. It took months to get the repairs made correctly and I couldn't work while the house was full of sawdust and drywall dust. I had to move out of the house for what was supposed to be three or four days that turned into three weeks, and as soon as we got back in we found more damage that the contractors had missed and needed to move out again. It was a trial. I ended up selling the house and renting a house nearby, but I'd lost half a year in the turmoil.
Then came Cheeky Furs. The baby quilts I made were all backed with faux fur which has gotten quite wonderful in the last few years. Instead of focusing on quilts with a limited audience, I started making full-size throws and fake fur scarves. They are unique and huggable. I built a website for myself (cheekyfurs.com) and booked some holiday craft show events. The throws and scarves were a big hit, but I was netting less than minimum wage and working like a dog. My ego was satisfied and the artist in me was happy, but that wasn't a long-term solution either. I had to go into production and sell to some stores, or find something else. The holiday season was over, a new year was starting, and I still couldn't figure out what to do.
In January I got an email from UCLA Extension saying that the winter quarter was about to start. One thing that had become perfectly clear in the previous year of disruption was that my marketing skills weren't as up to date as they needed to be. Finding a job looked less and less likely, and it also became clear that I was going to have to invent work for myself. My opportunities in the current market are just not that good, and I wasn't even getting phone interviews from resumes I was sending. Maybe I should take a class.
I dropped out of college my senior year and never finished my degree. I've never felt that it held me back because I was always able to find work through people I knew, who knew my work. I did well, I progressed, I worked hard and I advanced. But this world is not that world. There are hundreds of younger, qualified applicants competing for the same jobs I am, and I'd lost my edge. I had to try something new, what I was doing wasn't working.
So I enrolled in Advertising in the Digital Age and a whole new world opened up, something more fascinating than I could ever have imagined. I've spent the last twenty years doing marketing for technology companies, so I'm comfortable with learning new things. But on-line marketing seemed to me to be new fancy tools to do the same things. Oh, how wrong could one person be.
I was the oldest one in my class by at least a decade and I felt like I stuck out like an old, gray thumb. But it didn't take me long to see that all the experience I have still applies, it just needs to be applied differently. The final project was a marketing plan for a band I'd never heard of: Neon Trees. How many marketing plans have I done in my life, maybe a thousand? And how many new products had I researched and embraced? Hundreds for sure. Still, I was overwhelmed by what I didn't know. Don't know their music, don't know much about what's left of the music business, blah blah blah, the committee in my head had lots of cold water to throw on me.
The marketing plan was good; when I presented it to the "client" there was one part they called genius! My well of confidence that had become so empty was filling up again. I rediscovered something I was good at, and I realized how much I missed doing marketing. I have enough space between me and the bad endings I'd had the last few years to feel optimistic again. I have something to say again for the first time in what feels like a century. It is a wonderful feeling.
Social media for marketing seemed so advanced and so foreign that I wasn't sure I could keep up, or that I would be interested enough to try. It has been a delight to find myself passionately engaged in tackling something big that seemed beyond me. I shouldn't have worried -- this is marketing, not calculus. I can soak it up and retain it and synthesize it without angst. I'm having a blast, and I'm seeing where I can fit into this new world with what I've learned in the old world.
At least now it seems possible.
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