I’m Special (9 page)

Not all coworkers are bad. In fact, sometimes you'll like a coworker so much you will want to fuck them six ways from Sunday. Don't feel guilty about these urges. You're spending more time with this person than your friends and family, so it's only natural that you'd start to be like, “Wait—are you hot? Um, who cares; let's drop this spreadsheet we've been working on and go do forbidden things to each other's bodies.” Still, that doesn't mean you should act on it. When you fuck a coworker, you're only fucking yourself, because when things go sour—and they will!—you'll find yourself in a hell of your own making. The only way I would ever advocate coworker sex is if you're convinced that this person is your soul mate, and if that's the case, one of you will have to quit your job in order for the relationship to work. Although it might seem like a major sacrifice, think of it this way: your job isn't going to clean up your vomit when you're sick with the flu or give you an orgasm right when you wake up in the morning.

Thought Catalog
was my first big-boy job, and it changed my life overnight. I was immediately ushered into the bizarre world of blogging without an instruction manual. Most of the time I felt like I didn't even work for my boss; I worked for the Internet, which is like the big asshole boss of us all now. The first time I was published online, it was like taking a hit of a powerful drug. The second you post something, you click refresh over and over until you see that someone has left a comment. A wave of adrenaline then washes over you as you keep clicking refresh and watch the responses pile up. The comments run the gamut from “GO KILL YOURSELF” to “This article saved my life!” Then, when the chaos dies down and the chatter begins to dwindle, you come off the high and eventually crash. You start to feel slightly depressed because people have moved on from your article and latched on to something else. At the end of the day, all of the hard work you poured into your piece only ended up amounting to four hours of attention. You think, “What's the point of it all?” until you start to feel the itch for validation again, and the cycle continues.

As a blogger, you face a lot of unconventional problems, but that doesn't mean you're exempt from dealing with typical workplace politics. In every occupation, there's an unspoken rulebook. You can't say certain things about certain people for reasons x, y, and z (the reasons, by the way, are usually bogus and vague, but you aren't allowed to challenge them), and you must be nice to certain powerful figures because they've been deemed important. But since bloggers are so physically alienated from one another, the rules can be even more intense. For example, people have huge fights over something as arbitrary as a work acquaintance deciding not to follow you back on Twitter, or a website is angry with another website for taking its advertisers away, or—oops—someone was made fun of on a blog like
Gawker
by someone they've actually met a few times at parties. Bloggers hope that you'll be too nervous to call them out on their bad behavior in person. They like to pretend the things they do online don't have any effect on the lives they lead outside of work, but everybody knows that's not true. In this day and age, the things we do online almost matter more than the things we do offline.

Beyond having to navigate murky relationships with your professional peers, being a blogger also means you have to deal with the insanity of Internet commenters. One thing I learned very quickly at my job is that people are angry. People are upset about a lot of different things and they take it out on the Internet because it's easy, because it's expected, because the Internet doesn't have a face. I've never understood commenting culture myself. Before working for
Thought Catalog
, I had never once left a comment on a blog post. I just didn't see the point. If I read something I didn't like on the Internet, I would simply x out of it. I never felt a desire to tell someone I didn't know how much their thoughts offended me. I could be doing something far more productive like color coordinating my bookshelves on Adderall. Unfortunately, the Internet attracts this miserable breed of human and provides them with a soapbox on which to stand and TYPE VERY LOUDLY AND ANGRILY. They ruin the fun for everybody. Some days I want to wash the Internet and the gross people who populate it off me, but I guess you can feel frustrated about every job. You work all day and even if you love it, it seeps into your bones and you just want to scrub it from your body: the fluorescent lighting, the sad tuna sandwiches in their Tupperware containers, the phony behavior people adopt to make you respect/fear them, the passive aggressiveness, the competitive mood that looms over the office, the incessant gossiping on Gchat, the burdensome task of trying to look busy when you have nothing to do, the issue of not feeling valued by your employers or, perhaps more accurately, the fear that everyone is going to realize that you've tricked them and you actually have no idea what the hell you're doing. If being in college is all about discovering yourself and embracing your specialness, getting your first real job is about realizing that you know absolutely nothing. It's not a bad thing, though. In fact, it's a gift! Because only when you discover that you know nothing can you really start to learn something.

After spending almost three years of my life being the Internet's slave, I decided I'd had enough. Not only was blogging about my personal life getting monotonous and stale, living in New York was also starting to lose its luster. No one tells you this, but the city is only a fun place to live if you're twenty-one or have twenty-one million dollars. When I first moved there, I was down for anything. “Wow, there's a warehouse party in deep Bushwick starting at one a.m.? Great! I'll just drink some Four Loko and we'll head out!” Even when things didn't turn out the way I wanted them to, I didn't mind, because the pain felt just as exquisite as the euphoria. But, like with every great romance, the honeymoon period had to come to an end. I remember one time taking the subway home after a long day at work and counting down the moments until I could be home in bed watching bad TV. I looked up from the book I was reading and saw an advertisement that said, “You didn't move to New York to stay home.” I thought, “Oh my God, you're right. I guess that means I have to leave now.” I used to be that person who felt more comfortable being out with my friends than vegging out on the couch, but those days were over. Now I wanted the stuff you couldn't get in New York—like space, quiet, and nice weather. I figured there were 10,000 twenty-three-year-olds who would be more than happy to take my life in New York, so why not let them have it? It's their turn to live in a glorified closet and stay up till 7:00 a.m. and cry on street corners. I was done.

When thinking about where to live next, it took me 1.5 seconds to realize that I should move back to LA. This was for two reasons. One, it was close to my family, and as I got older, I felt a stronger urge to be near them in case they accidentally died a tragic early death. Two, LA was the place I could write my ticket out of the Internet and pursue my dream of being a TV writer. Growing up I was always obsessed with working on television shows. For Christmas and birthdays, I would ask my parents to buy me
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Dawson's Creek
scripts. And whenever I watched something I'd put the closed captioning on so I could pretend I was reading dialogue. In college, I tried my hand at writing fake episodes of shows like
Gossip Girl
with my then BFF Sarah, but then our friendship blew up and I lost the confidence to write without her. I tried to forget about writing for TV and began to make sweet professional love to blogging instead, but the more I wrote for the Internet the more I realized it wasn't a sustainable career path. The pay wasn't great and my ideas were getting recycled over and over for hits. If I had to spend one more minute thinking about what insanely personal aspect of my life had the potential to go viral, I was going to Ctrl+Alt+Delete myself. So before I left New York, I got my shit together and wrote a pilot, which is an episode of an original TV show you use to get staffed on an existing one. My pilot was called
Gimp
, and it's about—what else?—a gay guy with cerebral palsy! I sent it to my book agent, Lydia, who is a boss bitch and just the right amount of terrifying. She read it and was like, “This is hot garbage, Ryan. Go make it better!” Following Lydia's orders, I retreated into my writing cave and emerged a week later with a script that was bearable. Lydia then forwarded it to a talent agency in LA that specialized in TV and film representation. An agent there liked my script enough to take me on as a client, so one month later, I was living in LA and looking for work.

At first I was optimistic about getting a TV job, even though the odds were definitely against me. It's a notoriously difficult business to break into, especially if you are, according to my agent, a “white male with zero connections.” Six weeks in, I felt my optimism start to fade as I found myself in the most depressing scenario ever: alone on a Tuesday afternoon in an empty gay bar in Venice Beach nursing a glass of white wine. I had been on my feet all day and needed a place that would let me relax and charge my cell phone without judgment. I had never gone to a gay bar alone before, but it was 3:00 p.m. and the only other people there were two lesbians in cowboy hats, so I figured, “What the hell? This is the perfect place to lose my solo gay bar virginity. Let's hope it doesn't hurt too much!” I sat there, gingerly sipping my white wine, which tasted like delusional dreams, and wondered how the hell I ended up in such professional purgatory. Earlier that day I had talked to my dad on the phone and he asked me, “What happens if you don't get a job writing for TV?”

“It's going to happen, Dad. Trust me.”

I told him that not because of ego but because I knew there wasn't any other option for me. If I couldn't write for TV, I'd have to go back to the Internet and do what? Write listicles until I'm eighty? I don't think readers have much of an interest in an article called “10 Signs You Have Dementia.” I had to take a gamble on my future to avoid being stuck in a dead-end career, but here I was in LA pursuing my dreams and feeling like an aimless postgrad all over again. You're always one mistake away from being back at the place you were after college: in your underwear, refreshing Craigslist, the heat of your computer searing your thighs. It's the ebb and flow of life. Some days you're on top of the world, sipping champagne and cheering to some professional milestone, and others you're unemployed and alone at a gay bar. Isn't it funny? No. It's not. But it's something.

“Dude,” the bearish bartender called out to me. I was near catatonic, staring into my glass of wine, which was starting to look like piss.

“HELLO,” the bartender yelled again, loud enough for me to snap out of my fog and register where I was.

“Yeah?”

“Your phone is ringing!” My iPhone had been behind the bar charging. The bartender yanked it out of its charger and threw the phone down in front of me. I saw that it was my agent and remembered he was calling to let me know if I got staffed on an MTV series called
Awkward
. It had been my first staffing meeting ever and I thought it went well, but you never really know. There are a million reasons why you aren't hired on a show, most of which are beyond your control.

I picked up the phone and thought, “Okay. This can either be the darkest moment of my life or the happiest. He might tell me I didn't get the job, and then I'll hang up, cry in public, order ten shots, get wasted, and have a triple kiss with the lesbian cowgirls next to me. Or he might tell me I got it, and then I'll still cry and order ten shots, but I probably won't make the grief-stricken mistake of kissing two lesbian strangers.”

“Hello,” I answered, my hands shaking on the receiver.

“Hey, Ryan! How are you?” my agent, Tom, asked me.

“I'm at a gay bar by myself, Tom. I've been better.”

“Yikes!”

“Yikes indeed. What's up?”

“Well, I just talked to the people over at the network . . .”

I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit. “Oh, really? Awesome. What'd they say?”

Tom paused for a really long time. It was like we were on
The Bachelor
and he was about to tell me if I had been given a rose or not. Agents are so dramatic!

“Ryan . . . you got it!”

I started crying. The bartender and lesbian cowgirls shot me sympathetic looks.

“Are you serious?” I managed to squeak out.

“Yep. You got the job!”

More tears. They never stopped coming. Eventually I had to tell my agent that I would call him back when I was more stable to get the information. Then I just sat at the bar and continued to cry out of complete and utter happiness.

Your career is comprised of a series of high and low moments. The rejection that comes from pursuing your dreams can be devastating, but it's coupled with these brief instances where you realize you might not be so fucked after all. I'm talking about the times you don't feel like such a hopeless mess and something finally clicks inside you that says, “I can do this!” That's how I felt when I got that phone call. After spending most of my life feeling like an idiot who didn't even know how to break down a box, I figured I was finally onto something. The person who knew nothing was finally starting to learn something.

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