My "Career" Has Never Recovered

I'm still picking up the pandemic pieces.

About six years ago, much like this years new college graduates, I stood in the hot sun of an almost summer day, swatting the tassel from my university out of my eye-line as I took one too many photos with my parents on campus before I walked across the stage and would receive the degree I worked the past few years for.

This was the point in time where I was supposed to have some clue as to what I wanted to do with my life in my career. I still wasn’t sure exactly, but at least I had a plan.

I was supposed to be starting a career in book publishing.

I was accepted into the prestigious Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia University in New York City to get a job in publishing. The course was supposed to help me get “connections” as if I was a piece in a strange literary mafia.

I attended the many lectures. I studied up on the different pathways in publishing from editorial to production to marketing to see where I would best find myself once the next few weeks were all over and I could finally step out into the “real world” I’d been preparing myself for over the past decade of my life.

I tried to make friends for hopeful apartment roommate opportunities when it was all over. I shed tears in the hallway when I was told that almost every group during book and magazine week, would have one person that would be made an example of.

But that was just the way of life. Of the “real world.”