I think a lot about how people make big life decisions. How do you leave a job? How do you decide which college to apply for? What person you want to move in with or maybe marry? Where you want to travel? We are a series of our decisions. We are stories.
I spent high school feeling alone and strange. Given my current status as an incredibly queer and weird adult, this all makes sense, now. I didn’t think I was smart enough to go to college but my mother, at 38, went to college after spending a large part of her adulthood feeling not worthy of it, too.
With some cajoling I applied and was accepted to IUPUI, my mother’s university—a satellite campus of both Indiana University and Purdue University in Indianapolis. It was the only school I applied to.
My mom and I carpooled and she recommended courses and professors she’d taken. While it was nice having her guidance, the narrative didn’t fit what I wanted for myself. My sister-in-law was at Purdue’s main campus and after visiting a few times, I was both intrigued and terrified by its enormity. I didn’t feel confident I’d get in, but I tried anyway.
One of the highlights of my life was coming home to my mom running down the driveway with a large envelop in her hand. I tore it open and saw Congratulations written in the first sentence. We both jumped up and down, hugging and cheering.
My Purdue academic advisor signed me up for three lab classes my first semester and I settled into a dorm room I shared with my hippie roommate. Part of the reason I applied to Purdue was because I’d fallen in love with a cute ginger haired boy studying poetry there. He lived in a fraternity. We met on MySpace the year before and had been chatting casually since. This all added up to a second semester on academic probation. I felt like I wasn’t meant to be there—the courses were tough and I had to work a 20 hour a week job to afford supplemental things like supplies. The ginger slowly broke my heart as young college boy tend to do.
Much of my college career after was spent writing an endless string of poems and short stories inspired by a depth of despair and unworthiness I felt for having not been chosen by him. My heartbreak wasn’t about the boy per se, it was about aching for something.
But that’s what took me to Purdue where I learned to love the campus and all the classes that exposed me to the human condition. Among my favorite courses was interpersonal communication about the ways we love, befriend, and even lie. Even more shocking was my revelation that despite learning everything I could about being human, I still couldn’t predict a damn thing. We’re all out here winging it every day.
Graduating during the financial crisis of 2008 meant being thrust into a job market with no doors open for me. I was an English Major with a Communications minor— I really doubled down on my unemployability as a result and worked for two years making $800 a month, living with friends for $330 in rent and subsisting on dollar beer nights and stealing leftover paninis from my job at Panera Bread.
Yet, those years gifted me with my lifelong friends—people in the queer community. I learned that love really was sustaining—while I was miserably broke, I still adored the nights we all spent dancing in our living rooms.
But I eventually wanted more than Indiana. I’d been rejected from a publishing company I’d applied to and started to feel restless and defeated. I’d long romanticized the west coast. I kept writing poem after poem and hungering to study the art of writing more. California State University, Fresno gave me a full ride to their MFA program so I could make myself even more unemployable—“joking”
A terrible public speaker, my intention wasn’t to teach, so I focused more on the desire to write for a living or work for a publication, peppering my grad school experience with work on our in-house lit mag and poetry book prize.
The last year, my fellow grad student friends finally convinced me to try and teach. I was terrified, but did it, anyway. I grew to love the students and exciting them about ideas.
When I left Fresno, I wanted more romance, bigger romance, a wild ride. Some friends in LA convinced me to move there with $300 to my name and no job. I sold my stuff online and applied to jobs, being hired right away at a university to teach part time and a coveted nonprofit internship position. I’d never felt so enamored with a place. The city, itself, being the mecca of the entertainment industry, the greatest narrator of all.
I lost 20 pounds immediately on a diet of homemade avocado toast and little else. But I drove to Griffith Observatory in my beat up ’99 Subaru Impreza sport regularly, looking out over the city and thinking “how the hell did I get here?” I was teaching academic writing and soon, creative writing. Students followed me after class to keep talking about the subjects we were discussing, showing up to my office hours, hungry for more conversation. Some even came out of the closet to me.
I helped develop two major literary festivals from the ground up, building their websites and running their volunteer program. It was exciting work—I was meeting famous authors and running slide shows in tech booths and filming programming for our archives. Occasionally, I was able to write blogs and interview writers for the online publications of the literary organizations I was a part of. I’d finally made it.
However, after a few years of working 2-4 dream jobs at once, I began to suffer daily panic attacks, tried several SSRIs and other medications. My work, though I loved it, was not paying me enough. I was really underwater mentally, emotionally, and financially.
In 2017, I’d begun visiting a friend living in Germany on a job with the US Army. I met a German man on the stairs of a summer festival and he took me on rides through Mainz and Weisbaden, introducing me to friends who had international relationships, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and never looked at their phones in public.
After six years in LA, I moved to Freiburg Germany in 2019, learned German at a language school and applied to jobs teaching English until the pandemic grew and I had to leave the country without the ability to work and study when the schools shut down. It was truly devastating. I loved Germany and my new friends and the culture there.
My best friend recently moved to Vegas and offered to put me up until I figured out what was next. I worked at an Amazon warehouse until discovering an old friend, Keri Bias, lived here, too. She recommended me for a role in another department. I had no experience in corporate America, in e-commerce, in operations—nada. I read Tony’s book Delivering Happiness and The Power of WOW both in preparation for the interview.
I loved what Zappos stood for. It had heart. It had a story.
I didn’t get the first job I applied for but Alvina must have liked me because she offered me a different role a few days later. I was over the moon. I jumped up and down in my apartment like I had when I received my Purdue letter all those years ago. After what I’d read about Zappos, it was like a prestigious university—difficult to get into. I felt so lucky.
The job was hard. I had to build an entire imagery program from scratch and collaborate with partners who were wary and not welcoming of the program. I’d also never worked a full-time desk job, in fact, I’d never worked a full time job in my adult life. My career was all multiple part-time jobs cobbled together up to that point.
After a year, and meeting more and more people in the company from Women Empowered and in marketing, I started to feel pulled toward the place where the stories are told. However, I’d never worked in a marketing department or as a project manager, but that was the open role, the opportunity in front of me. Keri asked me if I was interested and my first response was no.
The learning curve was so steep during my first role at Zappos. I had to learn acronyms and businessese—I laughed when people said things like “surface” and “let’s offline” and “synergy”—I jokingly asked folks if there was a text book I could learn all this lingo from. It all seemed so weird. Because I was so new, I built an Acronym Confluence page because I figured there might be more people like me out there who wanted to know what the hell all those acronyms mean.
But stories in the Zapposverse told me that so many of us were given our jobs not because we had 1:1 skills but because we had the culture in our way of living.
I didn’t really know completely what a project manager did. After a lot of internet research, I discovered that the job I was doing was already a kind of project management. This actually did not make me feel better. But a leader offhandedly said at one of our happy hours when I was sharing my thoughts on whether or not to apply, “why not? doing something that challenges you, helps you grow.”
I thought about all the brave acts I’d done before: driving across the country to California at 25 when I’d never been further West than St. Louis, purging everything I owned to go to a country where I didn’t know the language and living in rented rooms with people I didn’t know with my little cat, and above all— not giving up even when I could barely get out of bed in Koreatown.
So I applied for the job and I got the job.
Zappos to me has been a place where people take risks and throw out big ideas and see what happens. It’s a place where I’ve found a sense of community I’ve never had in a job. Through many tears and sleepless nights trying to learn what it means to help a department market, what it means to tell the story of this place, I feel I made the right decision.
I still teach at UNLV as a side-hustle and write poems with a bunch of queer nerds I met through UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. Romance has brought me to the places I’ve gone. Now, I understand everything it takes to make a place like Zappos what it is. I’m still challenged regularly, but I’ve learned to enjoy it.
I’ve gotten here because I had people in my life who cared and who cheered me on. Because I’ve always loved a good defying of the odds story.
