My Advice for Career Success
For starters, let's rethink the whole idea of how we choose our work and look a little closer to home...and the life experiences we may prefer to forget.
Hey!
I was a poster child for the Big Career. 26 years-old, running a magazine at a time when magazines mattered, and 26 year-olds were years away from such high aspirations. Of course, the world has changed. A 26 year-old running a company is no longer the exception, although not quite the rule either. And magazines? Well…we bow our head. That’s a sad part of the story. I hope a story that’s not done being told, yet. TBD, TBD.
Today, the idea of singlemindedly clawing your way to that Big Career feels a little cringey, doesn’t it? Every Sunday morning, I get together with a wonderful group of readers of this letter. We’ve been talking about this idea of The Career and how it’s sorta gone the way of the dinosaur. It really got me wondering if I was ever actually plotting out a big career. In retrospect, I think I followed a more authentic flow and rather than calling it a career, I would call it Life’s Work. Let’s explore the difference.
Here’s a mix-tape of different moments from my professional trajectory as a study.
Senior year in college, I was already interning in magazines. And girlllll…I loved it. But my interests, at that point, were really just beauty and fashion. That was my main jam. I was a fashionista.
I was also…a cutter.
I started cutting one day at work, the summer after senior year in high school. I was upset about something relating to a guy. You know how it is: Today, I don’t remember the situation…or even the guy. But back then, the details of the drama were everything. I went to my job at Carvel, wearing my version of the required uniform 😬: Skintight white Guess jeans with zippered bottoms and my uniform shirt tied above my belly-button. Despite my flashy get-up, I was really suffering. Just being in my body was a truly uncomfortable feeling - I had big emotions jammed up in my throat, my chest, my stomach. I pretended to go to the bathroom, but I really just needed a mental health break. I sat on the closed toilet with my head in my hands. I can still remember studying the grimy white tiles on the floor and realizing the five-minute respite in that tiny, dirty bathroom was not going to help me at all.
But then my eyes rested on a loose razorblade on the sink.
It must have belonged to the owner of the store (along with the calendar of busty girls in skimpy bikinis on the wall. He used to tell his friends who would come in, “She’s built like a brick shithouse” about me. Back then you could get away with that nonsense.) But something about that blade just spoke to me. It had a hypnotic quality. I knew just what to do with it. I dragged it along my inner arm, putting just enough pressure to break the skin but not too much to cause major damage. I saw the line fill up with blood. I don’t know, sister….I just felt better. It gave expression to my inner pain. A real pain to match the more amorphous energetic pain that I couldn’t get a handle on. It gave me something tangible to focus on. And just like that, I was ready to go back to work. It was my little secret. My little feel-better tool and I used it throughout college, moving my spots around so no one would be the wiser.
But fast forward, to senior year. Like any addictive behavior, it wasn’t quite as simple as the first time, for many different reasons. For starters, it was uncomfortable to keep it a secret from my closest friends: I didn’t want them to think I was a freak. Plus, it worked less and less well over time, so I had to make more or bigger cuts. And the most embarrassing development was that I had started to weaponize it. If my boyfriend, “J” and I were having a horrible fight, I would threaten to self-injure knowing that it totally freaked him out. I would go so far as to dramatically grab a blade in the middle of an argument. He would tackle me and so the focus would shift from whatever we were fighting about onto his taking care of me. I know…I’m swallowing my vomit. (And yes, in this moment, I wish this fucking newsletter was called Edited.)
One day, I was flipping through a random issue of Seventeen magazine that had found its way into my dorm room. Much to my complete and utter shock, there was an article about this: They called it “cutting.” I couldn’t believe it was a thing. Remember, back then there was no internet and I had never heard of anyone else doing this. My mind was blown. And as I kept reading, it listed different reasons people may self-injure and one of the causes listed was “incest.” Again, since you grew up with the internet – you just know so much more than I did when I was in college. Incest sounded familiar. It’s like I had heard the word before, but I literally had to go to a dictionary and look it up. And when I did, I just couldn’t believe what I was reading. Yes. That happened to me. There was a name for it. Again, I may sound like I just fell off the turnip truck, but I can only tell you my experience. So, thanks to Seventeen magazine, I finally had a name for this self-destructive coping mechanism I had strung together, and I had a name for why I needed this coping mechanism. It was such a revelation. I sometimes wonder if my destiny to one day run Seventeen was set in motion on that day. Listen, it took me awhile before I finally quit (I stopped cutting about a year after college when my ex-husband, then boyfriend, was just like, “No Ma’am” and I went cold turkey.) But damn, I was so grateful for that article…that magazine - the first light on the path of my healing journey. At the time, I couldn’t afford therapy (not even the $20 clinic my college health services recommended for me), but in time and once I started working and had insurance, of course that changed.
Okay, let’s fast forward this mixtape once again: 5 years later, I am a Senior Fashion Editor at Cosmopolitan Magazine.
I’m in Milan with the then-Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan, Bonnie Fuller. We are talking to Tom Ford on the runway after one of his iconic Gucci shows. At the time, Gucci is everything. Tom Ford is everything. Bonnie Fuller is the hottest Editor-in-Chief. I am in Milan. I’m wearing whatever fucking awesome thing I’m wearing. I mean on one hand there is absolutely nothing deep about the moment. On the other hand, everything is deep about the moment. Now that you know the soundtrack of my childhood – to suddenly find myself fully present in the middle of this glamorous and exciting life – it was just such an out of body experience for the girl who was sitting in that filthy bathroom cutting herself with a dirty razor blade.
So, when a few months later, the President of Hearst wanted to pick my brain and subsequently asked me to create a prototype for a teen magazine, that was the well I drew from. I’m sure she didn’t think I’d nail it. Back then such a young Editor-in-Chief just wasn’t typical. Especially at a big company like Hearst. And despite my background, I didn’t pitch a fashion-y idea. I wanted to write a love letter to the girl that I was. The girl who had a tough childhood but got out and made her dreams come true. “I did it, you can do it too,” I wanted to say to my beloved readers. I remembered what that one article in Seventeen did for me. I wanted to do a whole magazine of that.
And that’s where this story becomes spiritual.
The night before I started working on the project, I had a dream about my dad. (He died when I was 16.) But then I realized my eyes were open. He was just sitting at the foot of my bed. I closed and opened my eyes. He was still there. I closed and opened my eyes again. Still there. I closed and opened my eyes a third time. He was gone. That next day all the concepts of CosmoGIRL! were just whispered in my ear. It was as though I’d been dreaming about making a teen magazine all my life. When I pitched the magazine to the President of the company 48 hours later (apparently an unheard of turn around), she said, “It looks like we have ourselves a magazine.” I became the youngest Editor-in-Chief in Hearst’s over 100-year history. But it felt like the space where divine intervention meets true-life inspiration. That is my zone.
Fast forward again: Today.
For the past year and change, like many of you, I’ve been cocooning and marinating as a human being as opposed to human doing. I will risk sounding really fucking “out there” but my spirituality is perhaps the most foundational part of me, so I don’t want to edit it out for fear of judgement. So here goes: Instead of plotting my “comeback,” I’ve been sitting and walking with my ancestors…with my spirit guides…with God…the Universe. I have asked to be shown my path again: My life’s work. I have asked to have creativity flow through me again, like it did when I was working. Like it did when I knew I had to stop working and do the other type of (more personal) work.
And it, did. My sister, it did.
As I think of what I hope to co-create with you in the future, I see a safe place where we can be our authentic selves. A place where shame can’t hang its hat. A place for deep conversations about our lives. Unedited is merely our reintroduction: Where I show you (and myself) that no one detonates if they share what they’ve spent a lifetime hiding. Where I can stand on a stage alone and be vulnerable knowing that, in time, others will slowly join me…That we can stand on stage together…At first quietly holding hands…In time, shouting our song of freedom. Fully able to experience joy because we were able to fully express and experience grief.
And that, my friend, is my life’s work. And perhaps somewhere in this story lies the antidote to all the pressure we put on ourselves to “lean-in” toward some Big Career we have picked out of a hat (or because it works for someone out there that we admire). You don’t have to be woo-woo, like me, to do your life’s work. You just follow the flow of your unique life. Your unique path. As the poet John O’Donohue said “We are so busy managing our lives, we forget this great mystery we are involved in.” Please don’t forget the mystery of your life…and thank you for joining me on this exploration of mine. I feel so excited about the journey. Please keep sharing yours with me. I really like this two-way street. You know where I am, 24/7. as always, at atoosa@atoosa.com.
xo, atoosa
The soundtrack of my 🤍🖤❤️ :