The Professional Resume of Survival Jobs (Abridged)

BA, Theatre, Small Liberal Arts College, 2017

I graduated in the spring of 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in theatre (spelled with an RE to show this was a deeply academic and artistic liberal arts theater program). I moved to Chicago from the small village in Ohio where I studied with dreams of “making it” as an improviser and comedy writer. As a junior, I had spent a semester off-campus at the Second City in Chicago, and I thought I knew all there was to know about the world of theater and improvisation and comedy writing in Chicago, and I was ready to HACK IT. Next stop for me: the SNL writer’s room.

When I moved to Chicago full-time after college, I was devastated to learn it would not be that easy. It was one thing to be an artist in the city as a student; my days were scheduled from nine to five with clowning workshops and comedy history seminars with a cohort of fifteen other comedy nerds. It was quite another thing to suddenly be alone in the city with no institution or structure to answer to. If I was going to make it, I had to take control.

It turned out this “making it” business was going to be more expensive and more time-consuming than I first thought. I needed to make money to support my artistic ambitions.

Ticket Sales Associate, who will cry if a patron is mean to her, 2017 – 2018

My first survival gig was a minimum wage job at a mall kiosk smack dab in the middle of the Chicago Loop. I sold half-price theater tickets to tourists who just couldn’t understand why we didn’t have discounted Hamilton tickets to sell them.

I had gotten a job in theater, which is, one has to imagine, what theater majors are supposed to do. I spent my days talking about theater and thinking about theater and explaining the excellent productions happening across the city, but I didn’t actually go to plays. The paychecks from this job couldn’t cover theater tickets, even at half-price, and, by the time I got off work, there wasn’t enough time to go home, make dinner, and then head out to a show. Theater existed in the abstract. It was something happening in these world-famous spaces around the city. And all I could do was talk to tourists about the cool things they were doing at the Second City, the Goodman, Steppenwolf, and so on. This job at an organization with “Theatre” in the name was not actually bringing me any closer to my theatrical ambitions. As I sat at that mall kiosk, fielding low-grade sexual harassment from random passersby, I began to resent the art I could not see, could not make, because of this job.

I didn’t want to fall out of love with the art form that had brought me to the city in the first place.

While sitting at that mall kiosk, I read Real Artists Have Day Jobs by Sara Benincasa. In the title essay, Benincasa writes, “I am a real writer now, and I will be a real writer until I die, whether or not I always do this as my full-time job. I have had day jobs in the past and I have no reason to believe I will not have day jobs in the future.” She recounts her time as a teacher, as a paralegal, as a start-up employee, all the while asserting that she was always a real writer.

I realized that what I needed at this point was not proximity to a theater organization. What I needed at this nascent stage of my creative career was the financial stability to support it. Money could buy me improv classes and theater tickets and humor books, and—most importantly—money could buy me time to write without worrying about rent, utilities, and groceries.

And this is when I tripped and fell headfirst into the world of tech start-ups.

Receptionist, who has to regularly google what SaaS means at a SaaS start-up, 2018 – 2020

I applied to every job with the words “receptionist,” “assistant” or “coordinator” in the title until someone finally got back to me.

“You do improv? No way!” The hiring manager said, as she gave me a tour of the office. “That’s so cool.” We walked past the beer keg, the kitchen stocked with snacks and Pamplemousse LaCroix, and the “Ideation Lounge” before we settled into a conference room for the interview. Its glass walls and fluorescent lights made the whiteboard walls seem even whiter. Yeah, I thought, I guess I could work here.

Two days later, I received an offer with health insurance and a 401(k) match, the kind of things I didn’t think someone with aspirations in theater and comedy was allowed to have.

But, I reasoned to myself in my journal, if I have stability, then my creativity will flow freely.

And it did. I wrote at my desk between deliveries and phone calls. I printed sketches and scripts on the office printer. One time I printed a sketch titled “Ass Worms” for a show at the Second City Training Center to the wrong printer and had to sprint across the office to retrieve it before one of the Account Executives found it.

This world, I realized, was going to be the solution.

I might have stayed at that ergonomically fraught receptionist desk forever, writing plays and movies and novels.

But, like most things from 2019, it would not survive the coming year.

Official Mooch, Illinois Department of Employment Security, 2020

The first clue I had that maybe my life as an artist and my life as a start-up employee weren’t compatible was in a Zoom interview for a recruiting coordinator job. A recruiter stared at my resume on his second monitor. His ear faced me.

“I see you got an undergraduate degree in theater,” he said.

“Yes, I did!” I chirped. Since I was laid off from my receptionist job in April, I had plenty of practice monologuing about the value of a liberal arts theater education—how it taught me to be collaborative, to work cross-functionally, to be curious and intentional, to embrace ambiguity—

“What made you buckle down and get a real job?” he asked.

The prepared words in my head cracked and crumbled. I wanted to gesture wildly at the world outside, the empty theaters and empty offices and empty restaurants and empty train cars. I’d rather be performing improv in a shitty bar or in rehearsal for my solo show than running audits in your Applicant Tracking System, I wanted to say. But I need money to survive a pandemic, and the government will stop paying my way soon.

“Oh, I…” I searched among the mess to find some words to answer him with. “I just… wanted structure, I guess.”

I wasn’t buckling down. I was giving up.

Reader, I did not get offered the job.

Support Specialist, currently having a mental breakdown at a mental healthcare start-up, 2023

Over the course of the next couple of years, I accepted jobs at a handful of start-ups, but because of more layoffs, or intense burnout, I didn’t last more than a year in any position. After a layoff in the Fall of 2022, I accepted a job at a mental health start-up that promised work-life balance.

There was more money, but there wasn’t a second of my day that wasn’t filled with the incessant dings and pings and rings of someone needing something from me, and then following up about it three times when they didn’t get a response in thirty minutes. I tried to log off at five every day, but it was getting harder and harder. The writing I used to get done between tasks back at the receptionist desk was pushed to the side in favor of writing emails where I directed people to my original email. I never ended a day feeling like I had accomplished anything, only that I had kept the lid on a boiling pot until nine a.m. the next morning.

In my off time, I had begun pursuing my MFA in Creative Writing, but at the end of the day, my writing came like the last of toothpaste in a tube. I searched my Google Drive for old work I could cannibalize into creative pages for workshop.

One day in March, about three months into my tenure, our boss called a team “learning session.” She had just started and had inherited a team in a severe morale crisis. She put together a presentation on it to help combat our teams’ growing morale problem.

On the first slide were all of our Slack profile pictures, stretched to a size beyond what the thumbnail resolution will allow.

On the second slide: a big, bold question.

“WHY DO YOU WORK HERE?”

“The answer,” she clarified, “can’t be that you need money or have bills. There has to be a real reason.”

I chafed at the word “real.”

I could feel, in the dead air of the Zoom call, that she wanted us to say something meaningful. She wanted to hear things about meaningful work and purpose and passion and mission.

A coworker’s long-winded and circular response gave me time to scramble to put an answer together in my head: something flowery about our start-up’s mission. The recitation of start-up missions curdled in my mouth two mission-driven start-ups ago, but I plugged my nose and swallowed.

I, for one, considered needing to pay rent not only the real reason, but the only reason, to have a job.

“We do this work, because it matters, because we’re passionate about it,” our boss concluded after we all gave our stilted answers.

Passion was what brought me here. Not passion for the start up’s mission to use technology to improve mental health care, but passion for the writing I wanted to do. I worked here because I desired to make art, and it is rare to make money from art. I needed a roof over my head and electricity in the walls and food on the table. The role of a survival job was to help me survive. I thought survival was a good enough reason. It was the only reason I had started down this path towards startups five years before.

The job was so exhausting that I barely had energy for the writing I was trying to support. I put my head down and did the work in hopes that I could find little pockets of time, little flickers of energy to write.

I thought the paycheck was worth it. I thought I was giving myself the stability I needed to write.

“When days get hard, I want you to think about why this work is worth it for you,” my boss said. “Can we do that?” I checked my face in the lower right hand corner of the Google Meet. I flattened my grimace and watched the mirror of myself on the screen do the same. I forced a nod, and my corporate counterpart in her tiny little box followed suit.

After the call ended, I thought about all my reasons—the reasons I couldn’t say—and had to face just how much the job had pulled me away from my real reasons for being here. And then I clicked into Slack to read through the fifteen notifications that had gathered while I was in the meeting.

Administrative Assistant, a University that does not pay me enough, but also doesn’t ask too much of me, 2024.

In How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee writes, “I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell to have the time to write.”

Six years ago, I began to sell my time to start ups, thinking that money was what I needed to perform, to write, to be an artist. I got laid off and got new jobs with more responsibility. I took on more responsibilities at those jobs with the promise of promotions that didn’t come, because I thought if I could have more money, then maybe, finally I could write.

I had made the wrong calculation. My time and energy was eroded by this transaction, and I tried to build two full-time lives that were in direct opposition with each other.

When I gave my two weeks’ notice at my final tech job in favor of an hourly job with a massive pay cut, I finally sold the myth of stability for more time and energy for my writing. Things are tight, but there’s more than one way to survive.