I was looking for something in my email inbox the other day when I stumbled upon the questionnaire I’d filled out as part of the application process for the role of Editor in Chief of Cosmopolitan Philippines in 2016. (If you’ve been with me long enough to know about my publishing history, thank you thank you thank you.) The document was 12 pages long, single-spaced, with prompts ranging from writing my hypothetical welcome Editor’s Note to providing three issues’ worth of fresh article ideas and clever cover blurbs. Most of the answers I don’t remember putting down; for some reason the version of the story embedded in my memory was that I’d been handed the job and not invited to try out for it. As I pored over the file, my younger self leapt out at me, earnest and hopeful and so achingly excited. And why shouldn’t she be? She had her whole life ahead of her.
Now it is seven years later. (Does it feel longer or shorter after having survived a global pandemic?) Since print shuttered with a barely audible final gasp I’ve had two jobs, both of which were supposed to heavily leverage my writing and editing experience, but have somehow veered into other things I could apparently sort-of kind-of do: brand strategy, community management, content marketing consultancy, creative direction, design. I go through the days, taking in the highs and the lows, and the days turn into weeks and months and years. I don’t always think about time passing or about how much time has passed since I was the version of myself who filled out that 12-page application questionnaire for a job “a million girls would kill for.”
But here we are. The reality—a reality that I have never spoken out loud but I guess I always knew was sloshing around inside of me—is that being Editor in Chief of a popular magazine, especially during the halcyon days of print, is a huge fucking confidence boost, and one that is irreplicable. You walk into a room (the office, an event space, a restaurant where something shiny and exclusive is being launched to a privileged few) and you’re on top of the world. I didn’t know, or maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself, how hard I’d have to work to find and prove myself when it was all over.
(We were so lucky to be a part of it, my friends from publishing and I would say when we got together. But sometimes a small voice in my head counters, Was that it; was it just luck, just being in the right place at the right time? Meaning, could it have been anyone else?)
But here we are. When someone asks how I am career-wise I almost always say out of pure instinct that I’m good. But to myself I almost always say I’m not not doing well. It feels accurate and actually benign. The older I get, which is ironic because intuitively you understand that time is running out, the more I acknowledge that it isn’t the worst thing in the world to have a personal measure of accomplishment and fulfillment and success and not quite be there yet. To not know exactly what you should be spending your time and energy on. To be unsure of what comes next.
Here we are. These days I’ve been thinking about that top-of-the-world feeling and realizing, slowly but surely, that it wasn’t so much about the confidence boost. It wasn’t even about the job. It was about growing up knowing I loved words and going on to become someone who strung them together every single day. It was about being in such close proximity to something I absolutely, unabashedly loved.
Every time I see my friend Isa, who is also a writer, we end up asking each other what it is we really want to do. What would make us happy. Sometimes we have an answer. Sometimes we don’t. But most times in the course of the conversation we would bring up without meaning to something we absolutely, unabashedly loved: a book or a movie or a meal or a place or a person or a moment. We would discover, with delight, that we had the words for it. Often it would have nothing to do with our “career.” A sliver of a version of ourselves that is earnest and hopeful and achingly excited would surface. And it would feel, once again, like we have our whole life ahead of us.
Besides, what we do with our time and energy—does it matter as much as who we are while we’re doing it?
Here we are. And if you’ve been navigating these waters too, maybe it comes down to this: Maybe this season of our life is just one long grace period. We’ve been conditioned to believe we need to be patient with ourselves to figure it out, to persist and wait. But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe something is already waiting for us at the other end—waiting for us to burst through the door unannounced one day, wide-eyed and flushed and slightly out of breath, hand over our wild thumping heart, and find that we are where we’re meant to be.
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"It wasn’t even about the job. It was about growing up knowing I loved words and going on to become someone who strung them together every single day. It was about being in such close proximity to something I absolutely, unabashedly loved." So real 🫀 Thank you for this gorgeous piece 🤍