1
Josie
"Follow your passion, and you will find your true self." That was what my mom told me right before she ran off with her new boyfriend. His name was Dave, and he liked to dress up as a clown and sit on the sofa, nursing an old hang-gliding injury.
That was the last time I saw her. Not that I was upset about it. My mother was a bastion of terrible advice. "Follow your passion" seemed pretty innocuous though compared to Mom's other advice, which ran the gamut from how to make a papier-mâché wasp nest to keep the power company from switching off the meter to where to buy used pregnancy tests to trick a man into staying with you.
Like I said, it was best that she left me with her aunt Myrtle. And once Aunt Myrtle went to the great canning club in the sky, I realized life was short and maybe Mom had been right about one thing after all. I decided to follow my passion and earned a marketing and graphic design degree. Everyone I worked with raved about my talent, and right out of school, I was offered a high-paying job doing creative, fulfilling work with wonderful people…
LOL! Nope!
Follow your passion was probably the worst advice my mother ever gave me. I followed my passion off a pier into an ocean of soul-crushing student loan debt. I added an astronomical amount of credit card debt to the pile in order to work three unpaid marketing internships with some of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed people I would ever meet. Unable to afford anything better, I rented a cardboard refrigerator box in someone's living room in Manhattan. At night, I worked for a content farm, writing articles about vitamin supplements that totally didn't contain steroids or meth.
One evening while sitting in my box, I realized this was it. I had followed my passion and found my true self. The real Josie hadn't come very far in life, and the highlight of her week was eating a bowl of ice cream hidden under a pile of gummy bears. My true self was a real bum.
I needed to make a change. You only live once, and I was going to live life to the fullest. I gave up the box and found a new roommate. Anke was Russian and spent money like water. She always had the best clothes and stayed in the nicest hotels. She was #YOLO personified. We traveled together, partied together, and shopped together. My Instagram never looked so good. For about six months, I lived the glamourous life of a digital nomad. By day I worked from chic cafés in the cities Anke and I traveled to, and at night I hung out at the coolest parties. I was living the #YOLO life, until I YOLOed right off a cliff. Turned out Anke had been running a scam the entire time, and when the scam crashed and burned, my meager life savings were collateral damage, and my credit score was nuked from orbit.
Now I had nothing, not even my box.
"Have you heard from her at all?" my friend Willow asked. When I came back from that final trip to Morocco, tail dragging, credit card companies breathing down my neck to pay for all the stuff Anke had put on my cards, my friends took pity on me. Marnie finagled a crappy little assistant job for me at Svensson PharmaTech, and one of Willow's hipster friends was willing to gift me a tiny house.
"I haven't heard from her in months," I said. "I've sent her hundreds of emails asking, sometimes begging, for her to help me." In Morocco, Anke had promised to pay me back if I put the luxury hotel suite on my credit card. Except I had woken up one morning to see that she had disappeared in the night. The hotel wouldn't let me leave until I had paid off the balance. I split the remainder of the payment across my other cards and booked the cheapest plane ticket I could back home. Now I was left with the carnage. The vegan fried ice cream I was eating churned in my stomach.
"The credit card companies didn't let you contest the charges?" Willow asked, pouring me more wine.
"I showed them the police report, but the hotel showed them pictures of me staying there, so they won't eat the charge," I told her. "It's not like Anke stole my credit cards and used them." I sighed and dribbled some more chocolate sauce on the last ball of the crunchy, sweet treat.
"Are you going to ever be able to pay it back?" Willow asked. "Maybe you should file for bankruptcy."
I looked around the little vegan café in the quaint town of Harrogate. From our seats at the reclaimed-wood counter that wrapped around glass cases filled with desserts and baked goods, I had a good view of the room. It was filled with happy, thin, well-dressed people who didn't seem to have a care in the world.
"I don't know," I told her, watching as people trickled into the café, one of whom was a tall man in a well-tailored suit. His dirty-blond hair was in a 1940s-style undercut, making him look a little like Chad Michael Murray from that TV show Agent Carter. "Too bad I can't just find a rich man who would fall in love with me. Maybe I should have taken Mom's advice to heart a little more." I poured more wine; I needed to slow down. I started my new job in the morning.
"Isn't she living in a trailer park in Florida?" Willow asked, wrinkling her nose.
"Yes, but she doesn't have to pay for any of it," I countered. "Maybe I need to lower my standards."
"They're already pretty low," Willow said. "You're going to be some corporate douche's assistant."
"Don't remind me."
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the Chad Michael Murray look-alike talk to the cashier. He had an annoyed look on his face as he walked a few paces away to wait for his food.
"He seems like he's in a bad mood," Willow remarked, following my gaze.
"I mean this placeisvegan," I said.
"Vegan is good for the environment!" Willow protested.
"I mean, I guess. But maybe he wanted a steak, but instead he decided to buy his obnoxious girlfriend a vegan treat that she is going to take one bite of and complain about how fat it's going to make her and that she's such a pig," I said, stabbing at my fried ice cream ball in annoyance.
When I was stressed, I ate, and the Anke situation had me going through a bag of sour gummies a night. My waistline was paying the price. I started to get angry at the girl who was making the poor blond guy so stressed, but then I thought,What am I doing? I have too many real problems to start tackling imaginary ones too.
"I don't think I can be a good assistant," I admitted. "You know how disorganized I am. I wish Marnie had found me anything else. Maybe you can bring me in on that marketing project?" I pleaded.
"You don't want to be on that project," Willow replied. "It hasn't even started, and I can already tell it's going to be horrible. The marketing director sounds like a real piece of work."
"It can't be that bad," I said, trying to keep the jealously off my face. "They're putting you up in a hotel."
