I’ve been in between work projects for about 2 weeks now, and I’ve taken that time to sort through and clean every closet and junk drawer in the house. Yes, OCD at its finest. I’m an expert purger, unforgiving when it comes to cleaning out the clutter from our house. Toys, clothes, books, knick knacks, games – anything that we haven’t used in a year gets boxed up and put out on the street. In New York, you can put things out on the curb and 98% of the time, everything will be gone in a matter of hours. But there are 2 things that I can never give up despite thinking that one day I might let them go: my old art supplies and boxes of old letters from various friends, some of which date back 20+ years. The most recent letters, aside from a few holiday and birthday cards are about 10 years old. I guess that was around the time my friends and I stopped writing letters and started emailing instead. The art supplies? Well, the thinking is that I would use them again. I look at the old calligraphy nibs from way back to sophomore year at Cooper and realize they were last used 24 years ago, but here they still are, in the art box, stored away with other relics. It’s funny that they’ve moved with me a few times across country.

I know why I get so zealous with the purging and organizing during down times; I’m not fooling myself. It’s both a distraction and a metaphor for what’s going through my mind when I’m not working, busy and occupied – a distraction from dangerous thoughts and a metaphor for decluttering the insecurities and doubts that inevitably work its way in.
 
The weekend was interesting. Little did I realize that when I wrote that “don’t give up” post on Friday, I’d be repeating it to myself over and over all weekend, but that’s exactly what I did. I questioned a lot of things. I questioned whether I was holding onto something that has worked for us in the past, but may not be working for us anymore. I questioned if my motivations for holding on were based on fear and selfishness, rather than the belief that this was the right thing to do. I questioned if the path that I had taken was the right path, now that I am here and looking back. I questioned whether or not I was living up to my potential; I already knew that I wasn’t living up to my expectations. I know I raise that bar high, maybe unrealistically so, but I questioned everything.
 
I’m struggling. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really know who I am anymore and that is a dark and scary place to be, but I emerged from the weekend determined to give myself the time and space to try and sort it out. This is the year. I came to the realization, finally, that one part of my life that I was holding onto was not going to play a part in my future much longer, despite both my efforts and denial. I am giving that up. So don’t give up, I wrote on Friday, unless you know that there is nothing left for you and it’s time to move on.
 
It’s time to move on now.

About a year ago, a friend of mine hurled some words at me during an exchange that weirdly escalated into an uncomfortable misunderstanding and it stuck with me like an annoying fly all these months later. I wanted to ignore it, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t even directly related to what we were arguing about and it was an offhanded remark, maybe even a cheap shot, but there was some truth to it. It made me examine some of the reasons why we blog and put ourselves out there in social media. Is blogging a creative release? Yes. Is it self promotional for the business? Sure. Is it a way to connect with people and form some sort of community? Yeah, I guess so. But is blogging also narcissistic? Probably, to some extent.

But here’s a tougher question, and the point that was being inferred by my friend’s remark: Am I relying too much on the blog and twitter for validation and approval from others (mostly strangers at that) rather than seeking acceptance from within? Is it to fill some sort of void, an emptiness, a loneliness, to declare that I am here so I don’t feel invisible otherwise? Um…ouch.
 
I think it goes without saying that it feels good when someone likes or retweets a post or leaves a comment. Let’s not mince words here; it’s an ego boost, however small (“somebody likes me!”). When it doesn’t happen or starts happening less, you start questioning yourself – your words, your work, your product. I’m not that self confident that I’m immune to this. Far from it in fact, and I hate that at this age I still struggle with some of the same insecurity around friendships, socialization and acceptance that I dealt with in middle school. I’m asking you, as a 42 43 year old woman, why does this bullshit still happen? Aren’t we past this? Or does all of this information saturation on social media make it too easy to fall into old traps of insecurity and comparisons?
 
Clearly, I have a lot of work to do on myself. At this age, again.
 
I was changing one of the lights in the bathroom the other day and the bulb slipped out of my hands and shattered to pieces in the sink. It immediately took me back to high school. Why? One of the more memorable and challenging assignments in junior year drawing class was drawing a light bulb. We had to put a light bulb in a padded bag, smash it, spill out the pieces onto a surface and draw exactly how it landed. You could choose your perspective from where you wanted to draw, but you couldn’t move the pieces. Sounds like some metaphor for life, doesn’t it? It’s funny, but I just stared at the broken light bulb for 5 minutes thinking back to a time when I used to have so much more focus to study and draw that intently for hours at a time, uninterrupted. Where has the focus gone? In those days, the world was smaller and I only sought validation and approval from my little circle, not from thousands of strangers. It feels a bit unsettling to realize this.
 
So, I don’t want to blog for the wrong reasons (wrong for me, that is). I want to blog because it’s still a creative outlet and it still helps promote our business. As for the rest – self confidence, self acceptance and validation – I’m just going to have to spend time with myself without some of the distractions and noise of social media to tackle that one, despite the fear of feeling disconnected or irrelevant.
 
Sometimes criticism hurts because the truth hurts. But sometimes criticism can make you face something that you didn’t want to see before.

This belt. I’ve worn it nearly every day for years. If I told you that my everyday belt was white studded leather, you might laugh and think it was tacky. Maybe it is, but it’s funny the things that we reach for, the things that we put on everyday like a security blanket. Maybe it’s like armour, something to hide behind. Or maybe it’s just a belt, or a studded leather bracelet (I do have a thing for studs, I must admit), or a pair of earrings. These small hoops were novel when I bought it 14 years ago because it was the first piece of gold jewelry that I’ve ever been compelled to buy and wear, but that color of gold was too inviting, like little nuggets of sunshine, and it made all my other silver jewelry look gray and cold. Now, 14 years later, they rarely leave my ears.

I’m up way too late these days, pushing bedtimes to 3am. But while I’m up, let me elaborate on that whole “being middle-aged is like being a teenager all over again” statement I made on the last post. Some of you seemed horrified at the prospect of living through that angst again – and maybe you won’t by the time you get here, but I actually found some relief when I connected that analogy. I feel like there might be a shift happening; I don’t know towards (or away?) from what, but sometimes you feel these things like faint butterflies deep inside your gut. But before there are answers, there’s this unsettled period where a lot doesn’t make sense anymore and you start to question everything including your identity. Insecurity follows; sometimes loneliness and isolation too. But it isn’t depression because that feeling, which isn’t at all tangible at this stage, is kissed with a hint of hope and optimism on the other side. I know this might not make any sense (this is what happens when you get to be my age, apparently – you start rambling nonsense and lord help me if this blog turns into some kind of self help journal for the middle aged), but it helps to sort out these complex feelings by writing them down and that’s when it hit me that I’ve felt this before, when I was a teenager headed into college. The years that followed were a wonderful, tangled mess of experimentation, letting go, making ugly mistakes and making huge leaps of faith, sometimes without a plan.
 
I’m feeling like there is some sort of next stage in life imminently approaching. The girls are growing up and aren’t so little anymore; their needs from me as a parent are changing. Despite the fact that it’s sometimes terrifying, I’m a role model to them now more than ever. As the industry I work in continually changes, my career as freelancer and designer might also be shifting (and to be perfectly honest, I can’t help but feel there is an expiring timeline at work here). I also feel like we need to step into the next phase of the business, whatever that route may be. We’re trying to figure it out, but I know we’ve played it safe in the past, partly because we need this business to be a solid rock in the way that it supports our family. Business aside, I’m yearning to do something different and big, whether just for myself or another business venture. Sometimes I think I’m crazy when I think this way – after all, I barely have enough time to even keep up with what’s on my plate now, but it’s a persistent nagging that I can’t ignore. I don’t even know what “IT” is, but I want to allow myself the time and freedom to mess around and figure it out. I know that in order to even begin thinking about this I have to shut down some of these outside noises that waste my time and not be so concerned with what everyone else is doing. This means spending less time on social media and not comparing myself to a thousand other people. But this also means spending more quality time talking with the people I care about.
 
A few months ago, I felt this sudden pull towards the coast. Sometimes we can’t explain what moves or pulls us, but I’ve been planning a trip around it this summer. I don’t know what I’m going to find there – maybe nothing – but I’m following my gut on what inspires me at the moment. This seems like a good path to follow. If I were to continue with that analogy of feeling like a teenager on some sort of precipice to the next stage in life, then I’m excited about what might follow – mess, mistakes and all. I know that I have to self motivate on the leaps of faith, something that comes easier when you’re 18 and don’t have the responsibilities of a family or a job, but I’m allowing little steps to count as progress. Maybe it’s taking some of the armour off and putting on a color you’ve never worn before. Maybe it’s taking a trip and changing your environment or taking a class and learning something new. I’m standing here now, but where do I go from here?

Retirement. I know…that word.

Doesn’t seem like this impossibly far away thing anymore and I woke up one day rather consumed by it as if a switch went off overnight, much like when I knew I wanted to have a baby.
 
I wasn’t taught as a kid about money and saving, though I wish I had been. I don’t blame my parents; it wasn’t in their culture or upbringing to know about things like retirement accounts or even savings accounts for that matter – not when you come from a poor, wartime childhood. I also think in traditional Asian cultures, children are expected to take care of the elderly so retirement planning isn’t quite what it’s like here, though that may be changing. My mom used to stubbornly tell me that we wouldn’t be left with the burden of taking care of her in retirement and that she wouldn’t want to live with us if that time ever came. Well, that remains to be seen, but it certainly signals a shift in her part from generations before her.
 
I’ll also divulge this, which is (or maybe was?) another cultural thing that I would later realize was not necessarily a given among my peers: it was always assumed that college would be paid for by my parents so I didn’t come out of school with student loan debt. Going to a scholarship based school certainly helped (though because of mounting financial deficits, Cooper Union is controversially considering charging students tuition for the first time, which would challenge its defining philosophy of free education when it was founded in the 1850s). My parents paid for everything. Maybe this sounds incredibly privileged, but I didn’t know any differently. All of this, however, made me fairly naive about money until I got my first job. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the value of money and I suppose I was fiscally responsible enough to never go into credit card debt, but I didn’t learn the importance of saving until I was 30 and at that age I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do.
 
That said, I don’t know if it would have been possible for me to start saving for retirement before I started at 30. I spent much of the 90s in school, stretching out my undergraduate studies to 6 years when I switched majors and schools, and then going to grad school which I did take out loans for – a whopping 60k debt which I was determined – and did – pay off within 8 years. But when I read articles of how compound interest works, it makes me wish that I had started saving earlier, that someone had pulled me aside and showed me a picture of the future and how saving even a little bit every month could change what we could be sitting on today. As it turned out, my long time accountant who retired last year, was the first adult in my life who urged me to open an IRA at 30 and for that I will be forever grateful.
 
I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about how our generation is screwed mostly because of the timing of the housing and market crashes, not to mention the whole social security debacle. It’s likely that many of us will never accumulate the wealth that the baby boomers have been able to build (though interestingly enough, this article suggest that the picture for 20-somethings might actually be better than those in their 30s). If you ever want to give yourself anxiety, just read any article on retirement. Guaranteed to make you depressed instantly! Despite the fact that I don’t feel prepared for retirement with what we have saved so far (and I recognize that everyone’s comfort level is relative and personal) I also know that we’re doing better than a good percentage of Americans. Sometimes it takes a real scare to put things into motion and as counterproductive as it sounds, I’ve been reading these articles to scare myself into being more proactive about retirement planning and learning all I can about investing. I’ve not much of a big consumer, though I certainly like to buy things and do prioritize our spending, but no material purchase will ever feel greater than being able to sock away that money instead. So starting this year I have new goals: max out retirement, but continue to save for family vacations even if that means buying less stuff. That ugly ceiling light in our room that I’ve been dying to replace can wait a little longer, I guess. “Buy experiences and not things” is still a philosophy that is really holding true for me.
 
Ironically, I don’t have a clear vision of what the future holds for us in 2, 5 or 10 years, but I can visualize a 20 year plan now that has strangely calmed my nerves. In between now and then, however, remains a big question mark. Job stability and career longevity seem like a thing of the past and we have college to deal with in only 9 years. If private colleges are already costing 40k in tuition a year, what will it be in 9 years? All of this is scary stuff.
 
I keep coming full circle to the fact that it’s really important to teach our kids about saving money and the value of compound interest. Who knows what the world will be when they become adults? The education about money has to start at home. I don’t know if I can give my girls the gift of debt-free undergraduate education like my parents gave me, but what I can give them that my parents weren’t able to is an earlier start by teaching them about money while they’re still young. I also plan to open a Roth IRA for each of the girls as soon as they graduate from college to get their start in retirement early. I do believe it’s one of the most valuable gifts you can give your kids.

Did anyone read this NY Times article “A World Without Work”? You could come away with a few different impressions, but I thought the conversation in comments that followed was very thought provoking. The theory that we could draw parallels between current employment trends to a 19th Century Utopian vision where people worked less has its obvious flaws (and the line about the rich working longer hours and the unemployed patching together various means to scrape by speaks more about income inequality than who gets to enjoy more leisure hours), but what was most interesting was this notion that this future of no work is “a basic reality of 21st-century American life”.

Unemployment stats aside, the decline of jobs from automation and outsourcing, and the fact that many Americans are being squeezed into more productivity often to compensate for a downsized workforce, lead me to think that some kind of post-employment era isn’t that far off base. It’s a pretty big statement, no? And then when I try to imagine what the world is going to be like when my kids grow to be adults…well, it makes me wonder (worry) all kinds of things about the future. The world is changing – it has been changing all along – but the recession and the technology-driven evolution of certain industries certainly has made us more aware of it.
 
I thought this article about the Brooklyn band, Grizzly Bear, in NY Magazine, was a good read on the music industry today and what it means to be an indie band in 2013. We all know that the industry has changed and musicians don’t make money selling records anymore. Their earnings come primarily from touring and licensing music (why do you think that every band that has ever existed and is still living is back on tour?). So is a successful indie band from 2013 making the same living as one from 1992? It seems not. As I was walking down Broadway the other day, I thought about the stores that I used to go to when I was a kid, Tower Records being one of them. Do you remember how big a deal it was to go to your favorite record store to pick up that new album from your favorite band? (record/Cassette/CD – you name your era. I’m old enough to have lived through all 3). I don’t know if kids who could just download music instantly today would even understand that experience. It took a lot more work to listen to music back then (ok, maybe just a subway token and a ride), but the experience of going to a store to browse through bins and bins of records and CDs and walking away with a physical package of the music in your hands is all but gone. It was such a huge part of our adolescence, but we just don’t buy music like that anymore. Is publishing not that far behind?
 

I don’t believe that creativity or ideas will be outsourced and replaced, but the means to execute these ideas might and some tasks won’t need humans at all anymore. It’s already happened and I even see it in my industry as design budgets get smaller and I have to hustle for more projects a year just to compensate. I’m also realizing that what I’ve been doing the last few years to a certain extent, is trying to position ourselves so that we could become a bit more adaptable in our respective industries. I think in this economy, you have to be in order to survive. I’m not completely confident that what I do for a living now in this particular capacity is how I’ll be making a living 10 years from now. It may not be by choice. So what does the future hold when we no longer need manual labor and these jobs continue to disappear? When the pool of qualified applicants outnumber the jobs that are available? But isn’t that future now? We definitely live in interesting times…

My friend Lisa wrote a post recently about moving from the city she’s lived in for over 20 years and recalling how she felt that first night she moved there. Euphoric was the word she used. It totally brought me back because I know that feeling. It’s exactly how I felt when I moved out of my parent’s house and into Manhattan when I was 18. I’ve written about those years before, but have I written about that specific night? (am I starting to repeat myself now?) The night when I stayed up till dawn philosophizing about art and life with some junior-year art students from my school at someone’s apartment, which was really a painting studio with a mattress. There are memories in your life that are vivid, not just because you can remember the details of what the floor looked like (paint splatters and cigarette ashes), but because you can conjure up exactly what you were feeling. Euphoric is a great word to describe that memory, but I don’t think I had ever thought to associate it with that morning, walking home from my night with friends. I just remember the sun beaming down Lafayette Street as it rose from that horizon at the end of the street early that morning. It was a Saturday or Sunday morning, I can’t remember which, but the streets were empty as the city hadn’t woken up yet. And I remember feeling euphoric as I walked home into those blinding sun rays, thinking of how my life was just beginning and how I was free, finally, after a tumultuous summer after high school.

I experienced this same feeling a second time the day I left NY to move to Washington the day after New Year’s in 1992. As some of you know, it was both an escape from my old life and an adventure, landing in a place where I had never been before and where I knew no one. Life was starting over, once again.
 
I’m not sure I have experienced that exact feeling since. There have been other life changing events of course, like moving back to New York, the birth of the kids, the start of the business, but nothing that felt so big and free like those two very specific days. It’s hard to describe, but maybe you know the feeling too? I’m thinking about all of this now because I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever feel this way again and I wonder if it’s something that’s specifically associated with youth. I know that we can experience these emotions at any age – that mixture of excitement, anticipation and fear (the giddy kind of fear), but I think the difference now is that we don’t have the naivete of youth. Back then, we moved through things unjaded. When we looked into the future, we didn’t really see anything yet and that’s what made it exciting. That’s the feeling. I know we can’t predict our future, but as adults we spend a portion of our lives trying to guide and secure it so that we can visualize a future. At some point as we get older, do we fear the unknown rather than have our minds get blown by embracing it?
 
Maybe some people do get this feeling later in life, perhaps through a career change, retirement, or a new relationship. Maybe some people feel it again vicariously through their kids who do get to open their eyes to new things in the truest sense. Maybe some people never experience it at all. I’m glad to have experienced it twice. I just wonder if it can ever happen again…and what would make it happen?
 
ps. I’ve been in a contemplative mood lately and might dump some of it here. You can just call it old lady ramble.