My Bohemian Self Versus My Corporate Self

I spent a glorious week in New York City earlier this month. My best friend from college lives in hipper-than-thou Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I spent a few days with her getting to know that neighborhood and its denizens pretty well. Then I spent a weekend in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, where my best friend from high school got married. As we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house marveling at the architecture, and biking the Laurel Highlands that surrounds it, I struck up conversations with intellectuals from Japan, Russia, Israel, France, Italy and the UK. When I returned to Brooklyn, I ate up my favorite Middle Eastern delicacies and gobbled up conversations about great works of literature and laughed my ass off as artist-musician-writer types joked satirically about mass American culture. 

Less than two short hours of returning home from my vacation, I was told I was being promoted. My boss looked me in the eyes and said, this is it, Holly; this is the big time. You do this right and it’s only a matter of time before you’re up there. I went about my day giddy from that high, but something nagged me in the back of my mind. How is this compatible with that wonderful part of myself I had rediscovered in New York only a few days before?

Here I am, this corporate ladder-climber, who could honestly be no-less-thrilled unless Guy Kawasaki himself had sent her an email. And I write this crazy blog that I might be a little embarrassed by if anyone I worked with actually read it, which I’m pretty sure has even kept me from getting a second-round interview. And I want to get my MBA in marketing and entrepreneurship, and I eat up books like Groundswell, Rich Woman, and E-Myth with the sloppy voracity of a pig in a garbage dump. Two of my friends refer to me as “career lady” and my hair stylist knows we have to toe the line between cutting edge and work appropriate. I’m trying to figure out how I can dress J. Crewish without looking so damned yuppie.

Then there’s this other part of me, the part of me that would be happy to be a coffee-slinging barista for the rest of her life, the part that oh-so-briefly dreamt of making the leap to a shared apartment in Brooklyn with four part-time jobs to make ends meet. It’s the part of me that sits in cafes for hours blogging, reading Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, and attending political rallies when I’m not supposed to since I work for the media.

How these two halves of myself possibly be at peace with another?

They usually aren’t.

When I had my weekly call with my life coach and told her about my promotion, she heard the hesitation in my voice. Is this at odds with who I am, who I want to be, I asked. What happens when I’m 40 and I look back and wonder how I got caught up on this corporate ladder?

She reminded me that this isn’t forever. I’m not making some huge statement about who I am or what I believe in. Just because I got a promotion doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still be looking at business schools and applying. This will lead to other things, as every previous position has led to new opportunities.

What’s a different perspective you could take on this, she asked me.

I hesitated.

“I could be like, a bohemian corporate climber?” I asked more than stated.

I could be the blogging, intellectual, semi-rebellious analyst, the manager who challenges the old way things are done, and bringing a new kind of savvy to the business table.

Isn’t that what this whole Gen-Y thing is supposed to be about? Changing the face of achievement in the workplace, challenging the definition of success, and infusing our workplaces with new ideas?

Create a soundtrack to your life

One of my favorite childhood memories is of my parents’ record collection. I would sit in front of our stereo with the records spread over the living room carpet, balancing the much-too-large headphones over my ears. I would close my eyes and listen with delight, awe and sadness to The Kinks, Peter Frampton, Janis Joplin, Cream, Chicago, and the Allman Brothers. What I heard affected me.

It’s a wonder my parents didn’t guess I would be a DJ and run a radio station one day.

Music can move me in a way nothing else can. When people ask me about my spirituality, I tell them that it’s one part music, one part night sky and one part ocean (gawd, I sound like a hippie). Nothing gets at my soul as quickly and profoundly as music does. I can still spend an evening happily with my headphones on lying on my own living room floor, just in front of my computer now instead of a hi-fi.

After spending this past Saturday night hanging out with GIWS listening to music and talking for a few hours, he pointed out a habit I’ve known about for a while. “You and your kicks,” he said. “You get on these kicks with certain albums.” It’s true. I tend to take an album, whether it just came out or I suddenly get the urge to revisit it, and I listen to it over and over and over. For like weeks, usually months at a time, until I’m absolutely sick of it and can’t stand to hear it for another 6 months or so.

The really amazing thing about my little habit, which has annoyed the crap out of almost every boyfriend I’ve had who doesn’t understand my relationship to music, is that it creates an aural memory-inducer. In layman’s terms, later in life when I hear a song from that “kick” it takes me instantly back to that few weeks or months of my life.

It’s fantastic.

When I hear Death Cab For Cutie’s “The Photo Album,” I am swept instantly back to my sophomore year of college. I was playing it non-stop in the fall of that year, and it reminds me of my best friend Amanda, trying to repress my shouted requests when they toured through Orlando that year, and making out with a cute, cute boy to track #3.

When I hear Coldplay’s “Parachutes,” I am instantly sitting on the shared upstairs porch with my dorm mate Heeral, drunkenly shouting the lyrics after sauntering back to campus as a freshman who somehow didn’t get carded at a British pub. It always reminds me of the way you could tell she was drunk because she’d start speaking with a British accent.

When I hear Neil Halstead’s “Sleeping on Roads,” I can vividly remember my first apartment in Orlando and how gorgeous the spring was that year, my junior year of college. I would put it on while doing little things, like putting clean, hot pink sheets on my bed or sitting in my favorite chair (a hideous green wool La-Z-Boy I bought for $5 at a garage sale) overlooking second-story trees in bloom while reading. It reminds me of much simpler times.

What I’ve done with my play-the-crap-out-of-it habit is create a soundtrack to my life. The Verve is what I listened to my first month of sobriety, and “Lucky Man” is the official song of my sober life. Pete Yorn is what I listened to as I fell for GIWS. And now, as I go through what I can only describe as a new painful period of growth, I am stuck on Radiohead’s “The Bends.”

I don’t fight it because I know that it will help me get through today and that one day in the future I’ll hear it and be swept back to these days, fondly remembering how I didn’t know yet what was in store for me. Maybe that’s the fun part of making the memory – realizing that this will be the past one day and that I might as well enjoy where I’m at.