Fumbling Towards 38
By: Jana Schmieding
Tags: Unemployment, Women, Entertainment Industry, Television, Career Change

Fumbling Towards 38

It has been both a privilege and a burden that I continue to ask myself, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” A recent article in Gallup stated that millennials are the “job-hopping generation,” that a majority of millennials aren’t staying with their current jobs and are we’re always looking for new and better career opportunities. Instead of trying to understand this phenomenon, non-millennials enjoy bitching about how “this is why our country’s job market is so unsteady! These little fuckers aren’t grateful for anything!” But as a top-tier millennial/genX cusp, I’ve seen the perks and pitfalls of this job-hopping trend play out in my own life and the lives of my peers. Like a lightly tragic Lifetime TV movie from the 1990s, people of my generation have been pursuing our dream careers at literally all costs. These costs, these sacrifices we’re making to break free from being corporate drones, are heralded as life accomplishments and they carry a lot of cultural value. A few American dogmas that I’ve personally given up in my pursuit for career fulfillment have been financial stability, partnership, parenthood, healthcare, the invisible allowance that men in the workplace have earned to hug me or touch my ass, and, most crucial to my current existence today, I’ve had to sacrifice employment itself. Isn’t that fucking nuts? I am now on month 15 of frictional unemployment so that I can maybe sneak into my dream career.

Let me paint for you the adorable scene that is my current state. I’m in my late 30s, I drive a hand-me-down car from my parents, I live in an apartment with two other roommates and I’ve had to stop paying my student loans this year because I’ve been without full-time employment since August of 2018. One might ask, “Wait. How?” Great question! I ask myself this every morning when I roll out of bed, rub out my stiff jaw muscles and immediately launch into an all-day existential panic. A few things: first, my parents have been helping me. Their financial support these last few months have been so much more than a blow to my stubbornly independent adult ego. My parents are not independently wealthy. They’re retired educators who’ve built their entire lives around caring for and supporting their family. They’re fucking unicorns and I don’t know how else to cope with their generosity other than to say that my ultimate life goal is to make sure that they move into old age floating on cartoon clouds of golden luxury.

My dinners these days.

Secondly, I saved. Before I left the field of public education, — a very stable profession if you call being paid and treated like shit “stable” — knowing that I was going to launch myself into an unpredictable career shift, I saved up about half of a year’s low-wage salary and stretched that out for an entire year. There have been a few consulting gigs here and there and I’ve transformed my beadwork from a creative practice to a tool for survival. But, I have absolutely been living on severed beans sandwiched between two transparent slices of bread like Donald Duck in Mickey and the Beanstalk. And, as Donald exhibits in that very memorable animated scene, poverty has taken a serious toll on my mental and emotional health. I grapple hourly with issues around self-worth, jealousy, social anxiety, lack of motivation and food insecurity. Compound that with an emotional foundation built upon intergenerational trauma that comes with being a Native person and a culture structure reinforced by the notion that my chubby body is abhorred, disgusting and clearly a result of years of laziness and gluttony. The wage gap for fat people is a palpable systemic issue and unemployment for Native populations in this country is a statistic more dismal than I have the capacity to confront. Because we don’t have universal healthcare, I don’t have access to the medical attention I need for my ever-intensifying depression and yet, and yet, I live with so much privilege! I am still living here! In Los Angeles! Could I be making more rational decisions about my life and career? Absolutely. But I can’t turn back now. I am so close.

Lastly, and perhaps the most crucial element that has held me together through all of this, is the circle of incredible women by which I am surrounded. I really cannot emphasize this enough. The people who have pushed me forward, purchased my beadwork, shared my podcast asked me to contribute to their books and who’ve built community with me have all been women — largely women of color. I hate to say that men have done nothing to advance my career but I’ve come to the really honest reality that men have done absolutely nothing to support my career endeavors. And I would say that men don’t owe me — don’t owe us — anything EXCEPT THAT THEY VERY MUCH FUCKING DO. I just… Ya know what? I won’t dwell any further on that in case I drive some of my male friends right back up into their own tight little assholes but I just want to say, as I finally look toward a career that has potential, that I cannot wait until I’m in a position to return the favor to many more of the broads who are living this same impoverished existence that I am. I lock arms with you, fellows. We rise together, bitch. All that.

My dusty 2004 Ford Escape pulls up to one of the gates at Warner Bros. studios and the very kind security guard points to my destination and explains how to get there, which I don’t fully comprehend because I’ve never been here, I’m overly excited and I’m nervous enough that my sweaty hands are having a hard time gripping the steering wheel. As I drive across the lot looking for my designated parking spot, I’m so charmed by the movie sets and street scenes surrounding me that I take out my iPhone, conceal it as much as I can and film some of the sets to send to my family later. I’m going to a general meeting at a production company residing on this lot. This is one of many general meetings that I’ve been scheduled for around Hollywood because in autumn of 2019, thanks to the recommendation from a good friend from the comedy hustle NYC, I signed with a manager at 3Arts, a talent management agency that supports the careers of many of my generation’s comedy greats. I pinch myself about having a manager just about every day because it’s something that — as a woman in comedy…as a Native woman in comedy…as a fat, Native woman in comedy — I truly never believed would happen.

Me being enticed by a career in TV.

That’s the one thing I’ve always been assured of in my pursuit of work in the Entertainment Industry: it’s actually not ever going to happen. It’s really not! Why I’ve persisted in this fool’s errand is beyond my rational mind. I blame my top-tier millennial-ness — my aversion to monotonous grinding — and I also blame The X-Files, Mr. Show, The Wire, Sex and the City — basically all of HBO’s programming *wink*. It is the cable television renaissance I’ve been raised by that has wooed me in like Mickey Mouse when he catches a delicious scent (to reference another Disney cartoon). And that desire to be a part of the telling of a story using this specific medium has driven me into unemployment, poverty and a state of hopelessness that makes Jessica Jones look like Snow fucking White.

The current fruits of my labor: I leave beaming from my general on the WB lot, confident that I really do have the skill and expertise necessary to write for television! That alone will keep me alive for another month at least. I stop on the way home to fill my car with $10 of gas which is…two whole gallons? When I arrive home, I let the lull of depression wrap its heavy arms around me, I wipe off my thick makeup, and at 4:30 pm, I climb right back into bed. I sleep or lay awake for two hours, get up to begin a beadwork project that I’ll hopefully sell and then go back to bed at midnight when I’ll dream of not knowing my lines to a Shakespeare play that I’m in so to carry on, I improvise the entire show.

I am so grateful. I am humbled beyond measure that I have this opportunity to be employed in this industry at some point. Has it been a grind? Yeah, but dating is a grind and raising children is a fucking. grind. My choice has been to opt out of those and focus solely on my career. I’ve worked quite hard for this, perhaps the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, and that’s saying a lot after teaching in the Bronx for 10 years. But I think I may have earned a bit of selfishness. A career in public service, in education especially, is extraordinarily taxing. As I look around at all of the personal strife I’m encountering in my quest for a fulfilling career, it pales in comparison to the mental and emotional tax I paid trying to enact change in the public school system. Nothing will ever be harder than that work was, and I promise to create a show about it someday. It’ll be an hour-long drama series on HBO about the school to prison pipeline, set in a high school in the South Bronx. And it will not in any way be like Dangerous Minds so just relax, top-tier millennials!