Am I bad at jobs?

happy (almost) labor day

I don’t mean to brag, but I once had a job. A full time job. 

It was a good job. And for the better part of seven years, I thought that I was pretty good at it. 

Then in 2021, I got laid off. And I started to think: Well, shit, maybe I'm not pretty good at it. Maybe I'm not good at it at all.

Before long, I joined the 45% of Millennials who are freelancers – partially by choice, and partially, as this extremely cheerful NYT headline indicates, because of the media landscape:

Oh, joy.

Since the day of my own mass layoff (#spr!ngisH3r3, IYKYK), I’ve bounced around from company to company, freelancing my little income together each month like one might construct a patchwork quilt. 

And with each new position I have become increasingly convinced that I was not only bad at my full-time job, but that I was (and am) bad at JOBS. Period. 

Shortly after the big layoff, I accepted an offer for another full-time job, but before we could even begin salary negotiations, I was unceremoniously informed that - Oops! Actually, there wasn't enough money to bring me on full time. 

Instead, I accepted an offer to work for the company in a freelance capacity for about a year, which basically amounted to me having unplanned, haphazard meetings with the boss whenever she had time, receiving randomly scheduled assignments, and little to no direction on how to cultivate the brand voice they claimed they were looking for. 

Before the year was up, I was getting too frustrated to try hard anymore. This frustration came to a head when, after asking why I hadn't been paid for a specific assignment, my boss accused me of delivering “inconsistent” writing.

The screaming match that ensued was not my proudest moment, especially because I was conducting my end of the very loud phone call in my building's shared laundry room. (Sorry, neighbors.) But the jab at my ego came after a year of being strung along with the promises of a full-time job and confusingly mixed messages about the quality of my work. Sometimes fawning, other times dismissive and angry. 

When the whole thing was over, I couldn't tell what I did wrong, or how to be better. 

It’s the same feeling I had a few weeks ago, when I was informed by another employer that my contract would be ending at the end of the month. This time around, I anticipated the news. My hours had been slashed in half, and I wasn’t being given much work to do. Like in my almost-other-job, I received mixed signals about my writing. Sometimes I heard that it was excellent, other times I notice that it had been heavily edited, or changed completely after submission.  

I’d ask – What can I do better? How can I make your life easier? And time and again I’d hear the same thing – There’s nothing you can do. Your writing is good. You’re not making our lives more difficult, we promise. 

But all I really hear when they say this is: You are bad. At jobs. 

This feeling of being a failure at work has followed me around since high school, when I nearly did fail at my one job: to graduate. I had failed a required class and my name was placed on the not-graduating list. 

This was a pretty major inconvenience, seeing as I was slated to be the graduation speaker. 

It was my teachers who rallied around me to help me pass the class. They reasoned with the teacher who failed me and eventually convinced him to pass me with a 65, if I promised to come in and complete every single homework I’d missed over the course of the semester. 

They did this for me because they could see, regardless of my struggles to complete my work (or stop cutting class just because it’s “nice out” and our school was so close to Central Park), that they believed in me. They believed in my talent and my potential.

I have never quite gotten over how much that experience meant to me. These teachers gave me a chance to redeem myself, and I did. I diligently completed about 20 homework assignments, got an "A" on every single one. I passed with a 65. 

Then, as evidenced by this photo in my nana’s wall unit, I graduated.

Okay, it was a happy ending, but did it mean that I was "good" at work? Or just that people like me enough to let me get by? 

Maybe that's the problem. Distinguishing between these two things as if they are not intertwined. Our talents only work when they are cultivated and valued by the larger group. 

I skipped a lot of classes during high school, but I wrote a lot of A+ papers in college for money. Nobody is faster than I am in the newsroom - especially when the topic is fashion or body image or family dynamics. Over the course of my career, I have become known for writing with speed, personality and accuracy. I know that I have a lot to offer. We all have a lot to offer. 

But most of us trying to survive in the gig economy are bounced around from job to job, plucked from one unique setting and plopped into another, expected to understand and achieve the mission of a company that we will know only temporarily — a company which does not consider us part of the team, which wants to amass as much of our work as possible without investing in us, without helping us become better at the jobs. How are we supposed to feel compelled to give those jobs our best work? How can we be motivated to do good work at all? 

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I used to have a full time job and I used to think I was good at it. But I neglected to mention that by the time I got laid off, I didn’t feel very good at that job anymore. I was bounced around between departments, living in a sort of purgatory where there were fewer and fewer assignments and I had less and less motivation to do them. While I had some great editors, and even greater friends, the entire structure of the job didn't help me get better at working.

Just like the gig economy into which I later graduated, I didn’t feel very invested in the job.

So, when the day finally came, I thought — Yes. I suck. Why wouldn’t they let me go? I had internalized a system, that, at the end of the day, doesn’t really care about any one of us, that treats us all as disposable. 

Of course there are things I can do to be better at work. I certainly have some issues with focus that, perhaps, one day, I’ll be able to treat with medication. But also, maybe being “good at jobs” is impossible given the environment so many of us, and more every year, are working in.

Maybe I’ll be good at a job again. I just might have to create a different world (and economy) to do it. Sounds easy enough.