Wait. You think of one, now. Quick. Just any one…

So I thought of a time:  it was in my grandparents’ huge yard with fruit trees and flower gardens and grass for running. And it was so peaceful.

What you remember as really nice tells you something about where you belong. Whatever you thought of, learn something from that.

Where I belong is in nature. And in quiet. When I lived in New York City, I spent most of my time in Central Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most people who live in New York City say they spend a lot of time in Central Park. I almost lived there. I thought I would die if I didn’t go there each day. (Wait. Here's a test to see if you belong in New York City. I definitely don't.)

When I drove up to the farm, the first time, I knew I belonged there. I think I fell in love with the farmer that second. And I saw my whole life as the process of coming to grips with the fact that I am not as fast and cool and cutting edge as I wish I were. I do not belong in a city.

So you’d think, now that I’m marrying the farmer, I’d finally get my farm. But I don’t. Farm land is not like any other possession in the world. Laws of marriage and property and value do not apply. We went to a lawyer to get a prenuptial agreement, and it turns out that it’s not marital property. Instead, it’s everyone’s security, and everyone’s life long dream, and everyone’s connection to the earth.

So maybe I will not get to live on this farm. It’s ironic, because when the farmer first started seeing me, he wouldn’t really do it unless I agreed that I could come live on the farm. And I said yes, I could, way before I really thought I could, because I wanted to be with him so badly.

Now I love the farm. But maybe, the farmer will have to buy different land. It’s not clear. Surely, I will love whatever land we live on, because it will always be a farm. But I really love this farm. It’s where I fell in love with the farmer, and the country, and where my kids looked happier than they have been in years.

I’ve never posted a photo of the farm because I am scared to want it. I’m scared to want to live there because I can’t really control if I live there. It’s between the farmer and his parents. But today, I’m posting a picture. Because part of coping with adult life is allowing yourself to want something even if you are not sure you’ll get it.

So many of the questions I get from people are questions they answer themselves, in the very email where they ask the question. They ask if it’s okay to want what they want because they’re so scared to want it: A book, a blog, a job change, lots of money, less money. It’s scary to want things in life. But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t even know which way to move.

The trick is to admit what we want, even if we are scared we won’t get it. We can only be who we are. And if we are disappointed, later on, well. I guess that’s just part of being a grown up and knowing what we want.

So. This is what I want. To live here, on this farm.

Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try to keep this in mind each day, and consequently, I spend a lot of time planning my interactions.

But sometimes my plans fail. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’m going to walk you through my most recent parent-teacher conference. Which was a disaster.  And while it was a meeting in a second-grade classroom, it could have been a meeting with anyone, anywhere.

1. I can’t tell the difference between social niceties and reality.
I think I'm late.  I am bad with transitions — I space out from the stress of change so I drive around the school a few times without noticing before I go in. I am bad with time, because I don’t totally understand how to predict what the next number will be. So sometimes I forget where I am in the hour.

But then I get to the school and I think I am early to the conference, and I go to the bathroom, because the school halls are bustling and I want calm.

I get to the room and the teacher is sitting at her desk. Doing nothing. I think this means she is waiting. So I ask if I’m late. She says no, but I am pretty sure she means yes. I know some people say the answer they think would be good manners instead of the right answer. I stare at her body language for a clue.

2. I get sidetracked by insisting on telling people what they don’t know.
I forget to listen to her talking because I’m stuck on if I’m late or not, but I perk up when she says that my son’s cursive writing is too slow and he needs to print like the rest of the class.

Because I need her to know that spending any time on kids’ handwriting is stupid.  I tell her there are no jobs that require people to have decent handwriting, and definitely no jobs—besides wedding calligrapher—that require cursive.

She thinks I'm saying kids don't need to learn to construct paragraphs, or book reports.

I try to clarify that I mean good penmanship is useless.

She says she's sorry that I am upset.

This is when I realize that I picked a fight, and parents do not pick fights with teachers unless the parents are jerks or idiots or both. And I don't even know what I'm arguing for any more. So I try to get out of the argument. I tell her that I will explain to my son that cursive writing is for at home until the rest of the class is doing it.

3. I interrupt constantly and don’t realize it.
She tells me my son is great at math. I tell her that it’s typical of boys with Asperger Syndrome to be great at math, so that’s not what I’m worried about.

I tell her I’m worried about his spelling. She tells me about his spelling and I tell her that he can spell the words he’s missing but he can’t listen and spell and write all at the same time.

I start to tell her about sensory integration disorder, but I see that I am lecturing, so I stop. And then she is hesitant to talk again. That’s when I realize that I’ve been cutting her off.

I feel terrible and tell myself I have to be a better listener. And then I start focusing on how terribly I’m doing and I forget to be a good listener. I am upset that I am offending her. I think about the  psychiatrist who says people often mistake someone with Asperger Syndrome as a narcissist. I think this is a moment when the teacher is thinking that I am totally self-absorbed and not caring at all about her.

4. My mind is too scattered to focus on being nice.
Just when I start thinking of how to care about her, she says, “in conclusion” and then I panic. I will not have time to show her I appreciate her.

I remember a photo of the Obama’s going to their parent-teacher conference and Michelle is carrying a vase of flowers. I should have brought a vase of flowers.

I try to focus.

I look at the teacher to focus on what she is saying and she is saying my son is delightful to have in class. I hear this as something she says to every parent. Then she gives me an example, which is that he is very easily redirected when he is not doing what other people are doing.

I tell her that his problem is not that he can’t be redirected. People with Asperger Syndrome are dying to please everyone around them. People with Asperger Syndrome don’t want to stand out or be the center of attention. They just want to get along with people and have things run smoothly.

So of course if she tells him what to do to fit in, he’ll do it. The problem is that he will not have someone around him for the rest of his life telling him that. I tell her it would be a positive thing if he could tell things were going badly and then he knew the right way to get help in order to make himself do what is expected.

I look at the teacher. She is clearly exhausted from dealing with me. It occurs to me that teacher conferences are only fifteen minutes. Of course we cannot cover anything significant in this time. This is a friendly, get-to-know-each-other moment. It’s a small-talk-and-smiling moment. And I should have known to ask someone to come with me, to cue me, so I would do what is expected.

The problem is that we are not taught to ask good questions. We’re trained to answer questions. But only answering questions doesn’t make an interesting life. After all, if you have all the answers, and you’re spewing them all the time, then you are not learning anything new.

Asking questions is how we get smarter. One of the earliest signs of a child with Asperger syndrome is that they fall behind in their learning because they do not understand how to ask a question. It doesn’t occur to them that someone would have information.

And maybe all my blog posts are actually about my obsession with a good question. For example, my recent rant about how blogs need topics is really about how a good blog is based on a good question. (My question is: how can we make the the intersection of work and life better?)

Today I’m going to focus on the kinds of questions that back us into a corner.

1) The question that asks: What is the meaning of life?

I think a lot about how people ask questions because I get them all the time. Often, the questions are so vague and poorly framed that I can’t believe the person actually sent an email. Here’s an example of one:

Hi Penelope,

I am from Bangalore India and an avid reader of your blog. I have recently quit my job at [big, international tech company] after working with them for many years. I would like to start something of my own but do not know how to go about it.

Can you guide me please?

Thanks for taking time out to read my mail. I will look forward to your response.

I sent a reprimanding email back to this person. In hindsight, I should have directed him to the post titled How to Write an Email that Generates a Good Response. Instead, I told him that there is no answer to this question. The question is so vague that it is not actually a question but a plea for respite from the inherent difficulties of adult life.

2. The question that reveals that you don’t care.

The questions that are most interesting are ones that create a conversation. My friend, Marci Alboher is great at these questions, because I love the conversations we have, even though she never likes my answers.

One of the most frequent mistakes people make in a job interview is when you switch to complete BS when the interviewer asks, at the end, “Do you have any questions for me?” Face it: the best way to ask questions in an interview is to ask them the whole time, not just at the end, so you can create the conversation that the interviewer needs so she can learn that yes, you are the right person with the right ideas for this position. If you wait until the end of the interview, it’s obvious that you don’t care—you have already had your conversation, based only on you answering the questions and having nothing to contribute on your own.

3. The question that generates an answer you can’t cope with.

I like to think that I’ve learned to be great at asking questions. I spend days dreaming up the perfect question for my mentor who I haven’t spoken to in a month. I want to make sure I ask a question that is interesting, and engaging to him and useful to me.

And I hear so many bad questions that I think I have become immune to asking them.

But it turns out that I’m not. Because I knew I was going to have a hard time getting myself to write a blog post today. Last year, I’d often go five days with no post. But that was when I was CEO of Brazen Careerist, and traveling every week, and also worrying that the company had no money.

Today I have a relatively calm life. The company is going great, and there is a new CEO, and my job is to write this blog, be a thought leader about the workplace, and talk to the press.  So I need to be posting more regularly.

I know that having a trick works for me, from days when I can’t get myself to go to the gym. Like, I tell myself I will go to the gym and just sit in the locker room and listen to my ipod and then go home. Invariably, if I convince myself to do that, I don’t actually stay in the locker room. I end up doing some sort of exercise.

So I thought of a trick for blogging. I told myself that I’d make a game of it. I asked my Brazen Careerist chat group (sign-up required) for a topic. I told them I’d write about the first three topics people suggested.

But here’s what happened: I didn’t like the topics. Well, some of them I liked a lot. Like, Karen Gaustad and Mara Lunaria both asked why we link to Facebook profiles from Brazen Careerist. It’s a good question, because I talk all the time about how Facebook is a network for personal –and often unprofessional — aspects of your life, and Brazen Careerist is for building your professional network. So I actually don’t know why we link to Facebook. I keep asking Ryan and Ryan and they say something which I will summarize like this: Wait. Hold it. I can’t even summarize what they say, because I can’t remember exactly, but I think it’s something like “You’re too old to understand” but I don’t want to write that.

Okay. So I asked a good question that generated good questions in return. But I don’t like that question. I try to spend my life not hiding from hard questions. You’d think it’d be the abortion stuff that flummoxes me. But I’m pretty clear on how I feel about that. Why to link to Facebook, though? That’s a tough one.

4) The question that has unintended consequences.

Melissa Mansfield asked me to write about how companies that are highly ethical and also highly profitable. She will think I didn’t write about this topic. But I did. Because we can’t control companies. We can only control ourselves. So I’m always more focused on how I can change the world personally than how I can try to require institutions to change the world.

The thing is, though, that ethical workplace behavior is based on asking good questions. They lead to honest conversations and meaningful connections and the world of good behavior is build on relationships like these.

Not that every good question leads to a great relationship. The world is not perfect, of course. Because sometimes you ask a question that reveals only that the person you’re asking is useless.

I will never have great social skills, but I make them better by ensuring that I’m in my best social environment for work. For most people with Asperger’s, inadequate social skills are exacerbated by sensory integration disorder, which is a tendency to be overwhelmed by outside stimuli. This frequently overwhelmed feeling makes one unable to concentrate on social skills.

Here are the ways I compensate for sensory integration disorder so that I can focus on having social skills that will make people want to work with me.

1. Establish routines to limit input.
Food is a problem for me. I hate variety. I hate that I don’t know what is coming. My effort to control food got so extreme that I landed in a mental ward with an eating disorder. Today, I try to never go out for a meal. If I have to, I order salmon. Everywhere. And just looking for the salmon I get overwhelmed reading the menu. Too many details about food.

Given a choice, I eat a Power Bar for every meal and snack, (two= a meal, one= a snack,) and I hate if the store is out of both peanut butter and vanilla. I don’t like variety, even in Power Bars.

2. Find people who believe in you, and then reveal deficits.
I often tell people I’m booked for lunch or dinner, and suggest coffee. That way people only expect me to get a skim latte. The foam always varies, which is annoying, but I like that I always control the sugar.

Like most problems related to Asperger’s, when people know me, I am more forthcoming about the problem. This is the only way I can get help from people. For example, one of my favorite board members takes me out for breakfast each week. At first it was to control the company’s cash flow. Now it is to control for my eccentricities. He understands that I add a lot of value to the company, and he understands that I don’t eat breakfast when we go out for breakfast.

3. Assume that your most severe deficits relate to Asperger’s; you’ll understand them better.
I have math dyslexia. I don’t think people knew it existed when I was a kid. People said if I’d just do the homework then I’d be able to follow in class. But I couldn’t do the homework. Even with a tutor. By the end of high school I was in honors everything but remedial math, and still failing.

I also do not know left from right. Please, do not tell me your tricks. I know them all. For example, your left hand makes an L with your thumb and forefinger. The issue is that I don’t understand the concept of left and right: How can my left not change when I turn? How do you know my right? How can I tell which is right on the truck to my left? It all feels like a math problem to me.

4. Find people who are willing to help.
The first company I founded was, ironically, a community for math teachers. And I got killed on the financials because I didn’t ask for enough help. So with my second company, I hired a controller right away, and I spent two hours a day with her so that I’d always have a good handle on the numbers.

When I founded Brazen Careerist, I was very careful about who I partnered with because I know the gaps in my skills. Ryan Healy has a degree in finance and an ability to run numbers in his head that looks like magic to me. The first thing we did after we got our seed funding was to establish that Ryan is in charge of all the money.

Ryan Paugh has a core kindness and patience that makes me feel comfortable asking him for help in areas other people would not put up with. So, for example, I cannot read a map and I can’t follow GPS directions, so Ryan is on the phone with me all the time helping me drive to where I’m going. (“Turn to the driver’s side. The side your body is on. That side. Turn now.”) He has dealt with me crying because I turned the wrong way, even with those directions, and he has dealt with me being lost six blocks from where I grew up. Really.

5. Watch the words people use in order to see where you are distasteful.
I was always great at sports. In grade school, I was the only girl the boys let play kickball. In middle school, I was a regional figure skating champion. After college, I played professional volleyball.

But if I’m not focusing on the sport at hand, I lose track of my body. I bump into so many things that I almost always have bruises on my thighs, shins, and shoulders. This happens so routinely to me that it wasn’t until the past few years that I realized that not everyone bumps into each other, and people think I’m being inconsiderate.

I also find that I physically cut people off. Like, I jump in front of them in a way that startles them, or I walk so close to them they stop to let me pass. I can’t see how offensive I am until they are already saying “Hey! Excuse me!” but I know they mean “you are so rude.”

6. Pay more attention at work, where the judgement is most likely.
I try very hard at work to not invade peoples' personal space. This means consciously slowing down to watch where everyone’s body is before I move my own. Sometimes, if there are a lot of people moving at once, I just wait until there are fewer people moving before I move.

No one notices this, I don’t think. And when I’m very careful, I only end up bumping into people I work with once or twice a week. I don’t think they know I’m doing it. I mean, they know I’m a little jerky in how I move, but they don’t realize that I keep bumping into people.

I also try to notice if I’m standing too close to someone. And then I take some steps back. That means that people don’t know me for invading their personal space, which I know I am prone to do if I do not pay attention.

The thing is that this takes tons of mental energy. So I do not pay attention to this at all outside of work because it’s too exhausting.

7. Stick to one-on-one meetings, and use email a lot.
I don’t like crowds. They are too loud for me, and if the acoustics are bad, and it’s loud, I could actually end up in the bathroom crying from anxiety.

I can’t read nonverbal cues of more than two people at once. I can’t tell: Are they loud or quiet? Are they intimate? Are they anxious? Do they want to talk with me?

So if there are a lot of people, I either don’t shut up (because then I don’t have to do back and forth conversation) or I don’t say anything (so no one knows I’m missing cues).

I rarely go to parties. The only time I do is for work, and I usually have someone there who is translating for me. (Here is a good example of that, at SXSW.)

I am not a good collaborator in group meetings because I have to work too hard at reading people to also come up with ideas. So in groups I am either the person leading the meeting, and it’s informative rather than collaborative. I collaborate via email (finally, a good use of the “reply to all” button).

I spend most of my time one-on-one. Most people like me one-on-one because I am my most normal self. People who work with me accept that I am not my best self in big meetings and rarely invite me to them unless I’m leading them.

I know this is a lot of information for someone who is trying to deal with Asperger’s. The two most important things to take away from this are:

1.     Understand common deficits of people with Asperger’s. You probably have them.

2.     Surround yourself with people who will coach you through situations.

So it was a big day in May when he sent me an email inviting me to Burgers and Brew.  It took only one email for me to let myself be obsessed with him again. (The great thing about a Blackberry is that if you spend the day at the office  reading a romantic email fifty-five times, you don't look obsessed; you look like a hard worker.)

The festival is a big deal. Restaurants here in Madison, WI understand the draw of the grown local movement, and the Farmer’s pork is the meat of choice for the most picky chefs in the city and also the best pizza places. 

Last year, when I had not met the farmer, his first invitation to me was for Burgers and Brew, and I declined. It struck me as one of the moronic, provincial invitations I get for Wisconsin stuff every day.

But somehow, somewhere, I became a Wisconsin girl. I’m not sure when it happened. But I remember last year, when the farmer introduced me in his town of 500 people, he’d say, “She’s from Madison.”  And I thought it was ridiculous, because I felt like I was from New York. I don’t even know what “from Madison” means, because it seems to me that everyone from Madison is not actually from Madison but from a farm and thinking they just moved into a big city.

When I came out of my giddy stupor from his email, I realized that Burgers and Brew was the same weekend as maybe the biggest schmoozing event of my life: Guy Kawasaki invited me to spend a weekend on the USS Nimitz with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and others.

I said yes to the weekend, of course. Because how can hanging out with these guys not be great for me? It’s probably what I’ve been working up to my whole career: a weekend like that.

People always talk about how you need to give stuff up in order to have a fulfilling career and a fulfilling personal life. What people don’t realize is that the better you get at your career, the more amazing are the opportunities that you give up. But this is a hard reality to swallow. So I said yes to the farmer and yes to Guy and lived in an alternate reality where there are no hard choices in life and I was doing both events.

Until finally I told Guy that I couldn't go on the trip. Right after that, I was besieged by the greatness of the people going on the trip. For example, Charlene Li ended up being the source for a quarter of the statistics in my investor pitch. And someone asked, “Do you know her personally?” And I thought, well, I could. If I hadn’t fallen for the farmer. Again.

And then I went to the airport for one last trip before Burgers and Brew. And I saw Pam Slim’s book there. And first I thought, “She’s amazing to have gotten her book such good placement." And then I thought, "She’s amazing to have such passionate views on the workplace." And then I started to think that my career is going totally downhill, when I could have spent a weekend with her and I’m not.

But you know what? Burgers and Brew was great. And there does not seem to be fallout from my decision to pass up the USS Nimitz. And, in maybe a little message from God that the farmer is more important than my career, Michael Arrington cancelled as well. And then I felt like I had this great self-knowledge about myself, that somehow I know how to balance a boyfriend and a career. Like, one good decision begets many more.

So for our second date this time around, I cut out of work early, and we go to a state park. I don't say, “This is ridiculous. I can go to a state park with a city guy and I want to be on your farm.” I don't say that because I want him to know that I’m the new, agreeable me. And I know it’s going to be hard to be agreeable on the tough stuff, so the state park seems like a nonnegotiable. I have to say yes.

I am nervous. I knew I would have to change in the car from my work clothes to hiking clothes, but it was a rushed morning and I couldn’t make important decisions, so I brought every bra I own. I have to make the decision if I should wear a padded, looks-great-under-a-t-shirt bra, or a soft, lacy, your-hands-will-feel-good-here bra.

I go with the second one, but I tell myself not to be too optimistic. I tell myself that the key to keeping him is to let him do things at his own pace, and I need to not just say I’m okay with that. He’ll see through it. I need to really truly be okay with it.

He doesn't watch me change in the car, which is funny since we’ve been together for seven months before. And it’s not funny because I think to myself, "Where are we now? What are we doing? We are not at the beginning but where is the middle and are we there?" I’m not sure.

We start hiking and I am nervous. I just want things to go well. I am not sure if he knows what I’ve been up to. He doesn’t have an internet connection at his house, and he always has to be careful what he reads at his parents' house, but somehow he always managed to read my posts anyway.

Now I wonder, did he read my post about the 25-year-old?

It turns out he did because he says, “Why do you need to write about oral sex in every post?”

I say, “I don’t put it in every post. But it seems to just come up.”

“I think you force it.”

I am quiet. I think there is no right answer.

Then he says,“What’s your goal with all that? Why do people need to know how much oral sex you’re getting?”

I am quiet.

And he says, “What do you want to be known for?”

I can tell that this is his real question. So I had better have a good answer for him. I pause. Then I say, “I want to be known for being honest in my pursuit of a good life.”

Then we are quiet, while we hike through the forest.

Then we get to some rocks, but they are uneven, and I end up being taller than the farmer. Not by a lot. Maybe an inch or two. In this case, most guys would subtly move me over to the spot that is a little shorter and then go over to the spot that is a little taller. But he doesn’t care. And he kisses me.

We hike to the end of the rocky part and he tells me he doesn’t think I should write about our relationship because maybe it won’t last.

I tell him if it doesn’t last then I will write about being sad.

I tell him that I have to write to make sense of everything. But, to be honest, it’s not making that much sense to me now why I was so critical of him before, yet I’m not now.

Here’s an example: He’s really erratic about touching me in public. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. Initially I told him he was totally immature and that this is the problem when a guy has almost no girlfriend experience and spends all his time eating meals with his parents.

This time around, though, I am more observant. For example, we went to the county fair, and I reached for his hand and he said, “We can’t hold hands here. I’ll look whipped.”

I laughed. I told him that’s hilarious, but he didn’t think it was funny. He told me to look around and see who else was holding hands. And honestly, he was right. It was dark, people were drinking, most people were with a date, and no one was touching. Really, I did not see one couple touching each other.

And then, in the dark, he put his hand on my back.

Me: Are you happy?

Him: Yes. Can’t you tell?

Me: No.

Him: Well, I have a nice tone of voice to you. And I’m touching you in a nice way.

Me: Oh. Yeah.

But each of you has a list of things in your life similar to that, it's just a list you don’t want to talk about. I’m not special—I don’t have more stuff that is difficult to talk about. I just have more difficulty not talking about difficult stuff.

This is why.

I'm going to start by telling you that I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. I was in a post-traumatic stress support group afterward. People were divided into groups of ten based on their experience at the site—how bad things were for you that day. I was in a group comprised mostly of people who narrowly escaped the building before it fell and, as they were running out of the building, were splattered by body parts from people who were jumping out of the building.

We had individual therapy as well. Here’s what my therapist said to me: “Your childhood was so terrible that your experience at the World Trade Center was nothing compared to what you experienced as a kid. Your post-traumatic stress therapy needs to focus on your childhood.”

That was the first time I really had a sense of how bad my childhood had been. I knew everyone in the world thought things at the World Trade Center were terrible. So this must mean that my childhood was really terrible.

I was 34.

When I was five, I knew something was not right. That’s when I started therapy. I was never totally sure why my parents were sending me.

When I was seven I knew something was not right because the neighbor came over to our house when my parents were smashing picture frames over each others’ head. The neighbor said to me and my little brother, “Come with me.”

Then my memories get blurry. The next thing I remember is my high school homeroom teacher. I skipped a day of school and then came to school with a black eye and a note from my dad that said I had been sick. She said that she was not accepting notes from my dad anymore. She said I could not come back to school the next time I miss a day unless I called the police.

I don’t remember what I thought when she said that. Except that I thought, “Does she know what’s going on at my house? How does she know? I never told her anything.”

I remember the next time my dad beat me up though. I called the police and they came. Like always. And my dad said nothing was wrong. Like always. And then the police started to leave. Like always.

But then I said, “Hold it. Wait. My teacher won’t let me back in school unless I get a note from you that says I called you.”

I don’t remember what else happened. I remember the police asking me if I want to leave. I remember my mom saying, “Yes. Please. Take her away. Please.”

I went to my grandma’s to live. I spent all of high school living at my grandma’s. The school social worker spent the rest of high school trying to convince me that my parents did something wrong. My grandma spent the rest of high school telling me that my parents were completely irresponsible. Except at family gatherings. When my parents were there, with my three brothers, and everyone pretended that everything was normal and that I did not live at my grandma’s.

I don’t remember very much. I went to college and spent my time trying to sort things out: abusive boyfriends, bulimia, anti-depressants, and cutting. Getting nearly straight-A’s for a lot of the time. I sorted very little out.

I went to a mental ward the summer of my senior year. My parents visited me. They told me they were happy I was in the mental ward. My extended family visited me and they did not mention my parents. No one talked about why I might be there. My parents were anxious and loud in the family meetings: Begging the doctors to keep me from going back to their house. But even the doctors could not quite figure out why I was there: I worked on my senior thesis, I was a model patient, and I started dating a doctor right after that.

After I graduated, I moved back to Chicago, where he lived and so did my parents. I couldn’t figure out how to support myself and there were so many opportunities for me to try nude modeling jobs. The doctor thought it was ridiculous. He thought I was too uptight to model. I said I probably was, but I wanted to try because it was such good money. I said they first test you out in a swimsuit.

He said, “Don’t you need some sample photos?”

I said, “Yeah. I have some,” and I pulled them out of my bag.

The doctor looked. He smiled. He said, “Who took them?”

I said, “My dad.”

The doctor flipped. He went nuts. He couldn’t believe it.

I was mostly surprised. I had no idea that my dad taking the photos was weird.

That I didn’t know it was weird made the doctor even more upset. I remember trying to figure out why I thought it was okay. Or why he thought it was not okay.

I was 22.

I didn’t tell anyone about the pictures. I started having nightmares about having sex with my parents. I started not being able to sleep. I didn’t tell anyone though. Because I thought I was crazy.

Then my dad visited me a few years later, when I lived in Los Angeles. He wanted to go camping. I went. I was so nervous about being alone with him that I read almost all of One Hundred Years of Solitude before I went into the tent.

Then he took off his clothes, down to his underwear, and snuggled up next to me, with his arms around me and his penis up against my back.

Then I knew.

Or I thought I knew.

I slept outside the tent. I didn’t talk the rest of the time. I don’t think he even noticed.

I know the street in Los Angeles we were parked on when I finally asked, “Dad, did you do sexually inappropriate things with me when I was younger?”

He said, “Yes.”

I had no memory of what, exactly, he did. I still have no memory of it. And I was scared to ask him more. I asked my mom the same question. She gave me the same answer.

Both parents have said they were sorry. But that is not my point. My point is that my childhood was ruined by secrets.

In hindsight, so many people kept the secret: my family, the police, teachers before my freshman year. Decades later, when I asked my high school friends what they thought of me in high school, two of them told me that everyone thought I was nuts coming to school beaten up so often.

I’m not kidding when I say that I thought I was keeping that a secret.

So what I’m telling you here is that I’m scared of secrets. I’m more scared of keeping things a secret than I am of letting people know that I’m having trouble. People can’t believe how I’m willing to write about my life here. But what I can’t believe is how much better my life could have been if it had not been full of secrets.

So today, when I have a natural instinct to keep something a secret, I think to myself, “Why? Why don’t I want people to know?” Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I’m trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I’m doing is fine to tell people.

That’s why I can write about what I write about on this blog.

And when you think you cannot tell someone something about yourself, ask yourself, “Really, why not?”

Here are five steps to follow:

1. Aim to be great at something that matters in the world.
The process of being great is long and hard. It requires you to try a lot of stuff to figure out the intersection of your gifts and what the world will pay for.

It’s hard to be great at something you have to stop doing. But that’s the reality you face if you are going to be a star performer. It’s about self-discipline. When I was in graduate school, my writing professor was reviewing my writing, and he announced to the class, “She writes the best sex scenes I have ever read. Week after week she surprises me with her wry, funny, salacious approach.”

I had to look up the word salacious to make sure it was good.

Then I had to stop writing about sex. Because it was clear to me that being great at writing literary sex is too narrow. The greatness is so small it doesn’t matter. Greatness needs context that has value.

2. Expect that being great will entail many levels of disappointment.
So I got a job in a marketing department in a Fortune 100 company where we spent lots of time talking about whether HTML accommodates a proper em dash.

I felt sad, for sure, that I had given up the process of novelizing my sex life. But at that point, I had also given up some other stuff that I was really good at but could not achieve greatness: Beach volleyball, for example. I was good enough to have games against the US Olympic team. But I was never going to be good enough to save myself from getting my butt kicked.

Since then, I have tried a lot of stuff that I’m good at, but not great. I wrote a book. It got great reviews, but you know what? I’m not going to write a New York Times bestseller. I don’t have the patience for the long format or the long-term investment in promoting a book. (Warning to the uninitiated: It takes, literally, a year of preparation to promote a book properly.)

3. Try starting and stopping; we feel desperate to do what we're great at.
I think what makes me great is something at the intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship. Both are time-consuming and most people fail at both, and because of that, I have tried to stop doing both. I can’t stop.

But I still have to figure out: At this intersection of blogging and entrepreneurship, where am I special? Where am I a star? I am always searching and trying new things.

4. When you know what's special about you, refuse work outside of that.
Some things fail. Like the polls on my sidebar. I wish it were working. Because I think that part of what makes me great is that I love hearing what other people think about the topics I’m thinking about. But the poll strikes me as disingenuous. The choices are limiting so I don’t really find out what people are thinking. And then I feel like a fake running a poll. And I am certain that whatever I am great at will include authenticity of some kind. So the poll is a distraction from me figuring out how to be great. I need to get rid of that poll.

Another thing I’ve done is public speaking. I would say that I’m in the top 10% of all speakers. This is not scientific. It’s my instinct. I get a lot of feedback. Including my fee. And my fee is high and my feedback tells me that I’m special. This doesn’t mean that I am perfect, but it means that the greatness I already have in the field of public speaking, and the synergy it has with other things I’m great at, like, blogging (ideas) and entrepreneurship (sales) means that I should keep working on it. I need to speak slower. I need to stop using the F word. But working on that is a good investment for me. (Look. Here's a speech I gave at Cornell University.)

5. Quit quickly if you won't be great. You don’t have time for mediocrity.
I thought that because I’m great at speaking and great at ideas, I’d be great at radio. So I agreed to do a radio show with Webmaster Radio. But here’s something I didn’t realize about radio: It’s actually about social skills. You need to be a great conversationalist, and you need to be able to read what someone will do next in conversation.

You know why I write so much about social skills on this blog? Because mine are so sub-par and I have to work so hard at learning how to make myself less awkward socially. So radio is never going to be my strength.

And here’s another reason I know: because people are, at their core, honest, caring, and supportive. And people will tell you, effusively, if you have exceptional talent at something. Because it’s fun to see great talent, and fun to be a part of watching it bloom. And people do not say that with me and radio. They say they like the show, but I know what it is like when people think I have huge talent. So I am not doing my radio show anymore. Because maybe I’m good, but I won’t be great. And I don’t have time in my life to not be great.

The New York Times reports that we’re experiencing a sea change in the career department because the former favorites are no longer prestigious, and new choices, like teaching and government service, are rising in popularity. But, as college grads contemplate their options for June, and twenty-somethings watch pink slips fly, here’s something to consider: The prestige job of the new millennium is waiting tables and folding shirts. That’s right. If you are in your 20s, you should try retail. Here’s why.

Retail enables an honest approach to adulthood
Emerging adulthood makes life in one’s 20s more difficult than ever before in history. Being lost is important in terms of navigating to adulthood. And the most dangerous thing you can do in your 20s is try to get around the discomfort of being lost by over-committing to a career. You will change careers five times in your life. You will depend solely on yourself to build your own skill set and forge your own path. So give yourself time to figure out what’s best for you.

Going to grad school burdens you with an amount of debt that severely limits your career choices. And it’s a way to prolong childhood by continuing to have someone tell you what to learn and reward you for doing it.

Posturing as someone who makes only perfect choices means you’ll probably end up lying to yourself: Only 12% of people make a good career choice for themselves right out of college.

The best way to figure out what you should be doing with your life is to give yourself time to explore yourself and the world. Which means you need time to think. Retail is flexible, and it doesn’t take a lot of brain power. This leaves a lot of time and energy to do what you really need to be doing: Trying a lot of things on for size.

So the people who are honest with themselves about where they are in life also are brave enough to admit they are lost and should take a retail job to give themselves space to figure things out.

Retail gets you the American dream
The American Dream is no longer about money and things. It’s about self-knowledge. The ultimate achievement is not a huge house and an expensive car. It’s a solid family life and self-knowledge to steer clear of a quarterlife crisis or financial meltdown.

Kurt Anderson captures this shift in his essay in Time magazine: “[Too many of us have been] operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. (That was always the yuppie dream: an aristocratic life achieved meritocratically.) Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations of the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life.”

The best way to give yourself that knowledge is to give yourself time in your 20s. It’s difficult to explore who you are after you have kids. And it’s difficult to focus on yourself once your career is in full swing. So you need to establish a foundation for personal exploration by practicing in your 20s. Practicing a lot. Retail enables this.

The new dream job is a combination of jobs – retail is usually a part of this, at least to start.

It’s clear that the age of job security is gone. And the best way to get security is to have multiple revenue streams, so that if one fails, you have a backup. In her book, Marci Alboher labels this the “slash” life – where you have more than one profession and a slash between them.

In a nod to this trend, PayScale created a list of a new type of dream job – one that affords a slasher life, and also enables the type of control and flexibility in life that accommodates the values of the new American Dream. The dream jobs Payscale cites are freelance, hourly, and generally creative on some level. They validate the idea that the American Dream is not about money but instead about personal growth and control over one’s life.

It would be great to be able to support yourself in one of these jobs, but it’s tough going. Especially if you need health insurance. So retail is a stepping stone to the dream jobs of the new millennium. Retail gives you a safety net, a financial cushion, and the flexibility to build a dream career.

Retail gives camaraderie – something you really need in your 20s
One of the most jarring aspects of emerging adulthood is that in college we are surrounded by friends, and after college, our friends disperse. This means that at the time in life where we are separating from our parents, learning to support ourselves, and trying to figure out where we fit in the world, we’re doing it alone. This is why depression is such a huge risk for people in their twenties, and why a support system is so important.

For everyone in the workforce, having two friends in the office can save a worker and a job. But this is especially true for people in their 20s because while other people probably go home to a significant other and maybe even kids, many people in their twenties go home to no one. In an office full of people in their 20s – which is most retail and not most offices – the shift from college to adult life is not so drastic and lonely.

Not too long ago, I started a new job, in which I moved my self from point A (college town) to point B (Bay Area). This was supposed to be my career launch. It took me about two weeks to admit to myself that I was unhappy. So I quit.

I had the security of knowing I could go back to my parents’ house to live. (Which, by the way, is such a good idea that 65% of new grads do it.) Here are five reasons why I am sure it was a smart decision to quit my job after just two weeks:

1. Your job performance will be terrible if you hate your job.

If you hate your job from the beginning, then you will never fully dedicate yourself. In fact, you'll resent both the company and yourself for staying at a job that you knew you didn't like early on.

I get it: You have this desire to prove to yourself that you are capable of sticking it out. Or you're worried that this makes you a complete failure and you have given up. So what? You learn from your failure. You learn from that mistake. You’ll end up quitting at some point soon, so why draw it out?

2. You'll have more respect for yourself if you respond to your needs.

Once I admitted to myself that I hated my job, I worried that if I didn't quit this job immediately, even if I had no backup plan, that I would be setting myself up to allow negative situations into my life. If you know that going to your job will make you stressed, unhappy, and angry, every single day, then continuing to go is being disrespectful to your well-being. The more you continue to disregard your own feelings, the further away you get from happiness.

When we're in our twenties we need to learn about who we are and what we like, so that we can find a work life we are passionate about. Staying in a job you hate doesn’t help.

3. You'll prove your commitment to passion and engagement at work.

Quitting that job after two weeks is actually one of my proudest moments. I think it shows that I have integrity and passion. I understand the fact that productivity comes more easily in the face of happiness. Quitting quickly is showing impatience for a meaningful work life. Everyone should be impatient for that.

Also, people who switching jobs regularly makes people more engaged in their work. This makes sense. If you stay in a job for a long stretch of time, your learning curve goes down and things do not feel as new and stimulating.

4. You'll do the company a favor.

If you stay unhappy at a job and then quit after, say, six months, the company will probably never know that you had hated your stint there. When you quit a job after two weeks, the company will notice and question what they had done to push you away so quickly. (A smart company, at least.)

Employees at, Apple, for example, produce the best products in the world because they are passionate about the company's mission. You are not helping the company by staying at a position you hate when someone else may be better suited for it who will, no doubt, excel, while you are just getting by. Do the company a favor and quit so they can reevaluate their training, that position, and their hiring strategy, so the next person doesn't want to jump ship after a week.

5. You'll set yourself up for success.

High performing employees in companies like GE, Proctor & Gamble and UBS all get to rotate through a wide range of jobs at the beginning of their career. This is because job-hopping is a great way to build skills early in one’s career. We should all have that chance. There are no rules that say you need to stay at a job that is not teaching you enough.

And there are no rules that say how long it takes a person to know a job is not right. But there is a rule for who succeeds and who doesn’t: People who have self-confidence, respect, good teamwork instincts, and a sense of when it’s time to cut their losses; these are the people who succeed. That’s why high-performers leave bad jobs after just two weeks at work.

This is a guest post from Jamie Varon. She's 23 years old. Her blog is called intersected.

]]> http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/03/11/twentysomething-why-its-smart-to-quit-a-job-after-just-two-weeks-of-work/feed/ 297 http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/28/how-to-decide-if-you-need-to-see-a-therapist/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/28/how-to-decide-if-you-need-to-see-a-therapist/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:11:54 +0000 Penelope Trunk http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/?p=2036 I receive about fifty career questions each week. The questions have a predictable diversity, but not my answers. My answers are almost always the same advice: Know yourself better.

Watch:

Problem: My boss is a jerk. How can I fix it?

Advice: Understand what you can do differently to make people act differently around you.

Problem: My coworker got promoted instead of me but she does not work.

Advice: Understand why you are not as likable as your coworker and make yourself more likable.

Problem: I’ve been out of the workforce for three years and I want to reenter. What's the best way?

Advice: Understand the unique things you can offer your network and an employer, then craft a resume that shows those things.

Do you see the pattern? Self-knowledge is what helps you solve your problems. Sometimes we can get it on our own. But if your problem persists, and you can’t solve it, go to therapy. Therapy speeds up the process of gaining self-knowledge.

I can tell you that in my own experience, people who have been to therapy are more interesting than those who haven't. (Which is the genesis of today’s poll – I have a hunch that many of you have been to therapy.)

I will admit that I am probably biased about therapy. I have been going since I was five. My parents knew I was weird but didn’t know what to do about it, so they took me to a therapist, and we sat at his desk, because play therapy had not been invented, and I wondered how he could have had such a boring job, and then he told my parents I didn't need therapy.

But they kept sending me. Sometimes it worked: like when i was throwing up five times a day, on purpose, and I was in the mental ward with a great psychologist. And sometimes it didn't work, like when I was depressed in college and my therapist made a pass at me, in his office, while I was paying him, and I couldn't tell him off because he had prescribed me what was then an experimental dose of Prozac and I was hallucinating and I needed him to fix it.

Sometimes you don't know if it works. Like when I went to marriage counseling with my not-now-husband. That counts as therapy even though you go together and usually there is not someone else in the room to distract you. Counseling worked because it forced us to look at what we would need to change to save the marriage, and my husband said forget it. He didn’t want that change. So therapy helped us face the inevitable, faster. That's what I mean by speeding things up.

Of course, in business, you don't always want to work with those interesting, in-therapy people. My favorite people to do business with are actually the types who would never go to therapy unless their wives dragged them (a common reason for men to be in therapy, by the way).

But in NYC and LA, going to therapy is something to brag about. It's like going to the gym. You are telling everyone, “Look! I take care of myself.” Really, going to a therapist serves like a good personal ad: “Look! I understand how to be with myself and other people.”

But now that I live in Wisconsin I realize that most of the world thinks therapy is only for people who are messed up.

Understanding why there is widespread misunderstanding about the usefulness of therapy is easy, though.

Just think: in general, the people who do well in therapy are very interested in understanding themselves and interesting in changing themselves to more effectively meet their goals. Then it makes sense: people in big cities are generally optimizers wanting things to be better and better and not generally content. People in smaller cities are generally content with what’s in front of them.

So look at your weaknesses and ask yourself how much they bother you. If you have not been able to overcome them (and you want to), then see a therapist.

Remember those men I love to do business with—the steady, strong performer types? They’ve always had coaching. So if you don't want therapy but you don’t know where your weaknesses are to begin with, see a coach. But know that the people who cannot implement a coach’s recommendations should see a therapist next.

Of course, maybe not everyone needs therapy. Maybe lots of people would prefer a more relaxed pace of self-discovery. In this vein, I’ll leave you with a great poem by Hal Sirowitz, who writes about therapy:

Taking a Slow Train

You shouldn't keep telling your girlfriend,

my therapist said, that she needs to be

in therapy. You might think that you're

trying to help her, but she sees it

as an insult. Not everyone needs therapy.

Just like not everyone likes to take planes,

Some people prefer to take their time

& travel by train. And she may not want

to get rid of her anger right away. It

seems like she's getting too much enjoyment

out of it by directing it at you.