Page 6 of Cuts like a Knife
Text that I am supposed to write because I’m a professional7 writer.
I have absolutely no journalistic credentials. I didn’t go to “J-School” which is what media people call college-level journalism programs. I majored in Sociology in college, and then I sort of stalled.
I didn’t want to go to grad school. I didn’t want to become a social worker. I didn’t want to do teacher’s college. I didn’t really want to do anything. Not anything traditional, so I sort of didn’t know what to do with myself.
I guess — and this is really embarrassing now considering where I’ve landed, but I’m going to say it anyway — I guess I wanted to do good, you know? To be good. I wanted to make a difference8.
So like so many sweet summer children, I got a super-entry-level job at a not-for-profit that ostensibly supported the environment? Women of color? The unhoused? A smattering of all-of-the-above?
Talk about things that are embarrassing to admit. I barely knew what we did at that first job of mine. Or what we were supposed to do.
It turns out this is a super common issue with a lot of not-for-profit groups. They’re notoriously dysfunctional and toxic. I had no clue at the time, but it’s a thing.
Anyway, I was super young, I was making just enough money to survive, sharing a one-bedroom hovel with Bex and eating a lot of stovetop ramen. I figured I’d move up eventually and that when I did, things would get better.
But work sucked. I knew I wasn’t making a difference at all. And I wasn’t enjoying myself either.
What was I supposed to do? Quit? I had no safety net. Unless you count returning to my family home to live with my crazy Madison parents.
Crawling back to a life under the roof of Erica and Frank Madison was just a big fat nope for me. Thank goodness, because they actually split up for awhile and my dad moved out and it was this whole thing that no one ever explained. But they’re back together now. Mysteriously. Had I quit and gone back home, though, I could have ended up living alone with my mother.
I shudder to think of the bullet I dodged.
Anyway, I needed to work. I could have made almost as much as a barista or whatever, but I didn’t go that route because I wasn’t bitter like I am now. I hadn’t practically given up.
Sure, I was beginning to lose hope that I’d ever be able to do anything of value at the place where I was working at the time, but I still believed that valuable work was, like, a possibility for me. Somewhere else. I still wanted to do good9.
So that’s when I started getting really involved in the protest community, especially online.
I didn’t have a huge following — my profile was relatively tiny, frankly — but I started going to events for causes that made sense to me, participating in marches and whatnot, and then tweeting and posting about all of it — with my own photos and (okay, I admit it) hot-takes. I was signal-boosting. Spreading awareness. And keeping it light and making jokes at the same time.
I hit the 1K follower mark and felt pretty darn proud of myself, I have to tell you.
Anyway, that’s how I became a so-called journalist. In the dumbest way imaginable. A series of my tweets went viral.
Well, one went viral. I won’t even tell you what it said. It was a joke — a really mean, really raunchy joke — about a certain political party member. It was a joke that leaned heavily on reference to his lack of sexual appeal10.
It had over a million retweets. My mean joke was referenced in articles and on news programs all over the country.
And when I saw it blowing up, I sort of lost my head and starting making more jokes about the guy. I think I pushed out like ten in total, each tweet meaner than the last.
He wasn’t even that bad, like, politically. As far as politicians go, the guy was pretty mundane. Relatively inoffensive. Not perfect, but who is?
I eviscerated him.
My excitement at going viral kind of made me lose my head. Meanness, it turns out, can be a total rush.
And in the end, being mean changed my whole life.
So there’s that.
Chapter Two
So being mean for no reason is how I became a “journalist” because being mean on the internet, for no reason whatsoever is how I got hired at Flash — a real-life, big-time publication that was brand-spanking new and part of a huge parent conglomerate.
My mean tweet about the politician guy blew up and the newly-assembled powers-that-be at Flash (which was then still in the planning stages) slid into my DMs like, ‘Hey funny girl, want a job as a writer?’
And I was like, ‘Um, yeah, but I have no training as a writer. I work as a grunt for a non-profit.’
