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This is a story about you.

Every story is a Moleskine story. This one is yours.

By Nicolette KierPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
Top Story - March 2021
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This is a story about you. It doesn't end poorly, and this comforts you. You hope that you make it – wherever “it” is for you – and that immediately makes it true.

Life is only what you think of it, which is why this is a story about you.

You work from home now. You used to work a minimum wage job, standing all day. Then you learned a few skills and landed a desk job. You didn’t think it was going to be your own desk. But no one saw this year coming.

You often think about how living and working were meant to be mutually exclusive. So, when they barreled into the same room, the space became distorted and it broke your reality a little. Your hideously orange couch is sometimes a table at a restaurant, sometimes a movie theatre seat, and sometimes it was just a couch. Your desk chair is part think tank, part throne, part grimy-piece-of-furniture-your-father-stole-from-a-warehouse.

Every day you sit at your desk. You crack open your laptop, and then you turn it on. Sometimes, you feel a little excited about what’s to come. Mostly, you feel tired, like you haven’t gotten enough sleep, despite sleeping for hours before ceremonially sitting down at your desk and starting another day.

You write for a living. You were excited about doing something creative and interesting, something that brought you the freedom to work whenever you wanted. And the time you saved on your morning commute could be put to use on your personal projects.

You heard that you should do your most creative work in the morning. You also heard that you should do small tasks first thing, to get the ball rolling and build up momentum. You know that you have a list of things that need to be done, none of them pertaining to your life in particular.

Your energy lowered, just a little, month after month, until you were so sick of writing the same kind of article day in and day out that you never wrote all the things you thought you would in your spare time. You watched TV, sitcoms mostly. You liked that at the end of thirty minutes, everything went back to normal, and the characters happily went about their lives.

It wasn’t sadness that you felt. There was no onslaught of strong emotion. It was just boredom, slowly seeping in as you did the same thing, every day, with nothing new in your line of sight.

Sometimes, you thought about the life you could have: You could go back to school. Or, you could find another job, one with a wider variety of daily tasks. But by the end of the day, you were tired, and so you sat on your orange couch. You were in the middle of Letterkenny. The TV show has nine seasons, so you’d be locked in for at least a few weeks.

Today, a Friday, is one of those rare days, where someone has already claimed your time. You were sent an invite for a virtual meeting two weeks back. You accidentally thought it was last week, and initiated a Zoom meeting with Nick, your boss. It was one of the more embarrassing moments of your professional life.

These things happened, though. And your boss went home to TV and worked hard to forget about how he was going to be an actor. He had told himself when he took the marketing job that it was “a temporary setup.” That was six years ago. In his nightly forgetting, he forgot about your little mishap, too.

But this isn’t about your boss. This is about you.

Today, you join the Zoom meeting at exactly the right time, “entering” the meeting room at five-forty-five p.m. You have previously learned how awkward it is to be on-screen with only one or two coworkers for those two minutes before a meeting officially starts, so you are never early. You are rarely ever late.

Your boss starts the introductions. You quickly realize that you have no idea what this meeting is about. You are a content writer. All you do is send in articles every week. In fact, you have only ever been invited to one meeting, and that was when you were first introduced to the small marketing team.

You quietly panic, debating whether to ask what you’re here for or to go along with it and hopefully figure out what the meeting is about. Everyone in the meeting looks so calm, like they know they’re in the right place.

You are not sure whether you are in the right place.

Finally, you speak.

“I’m going to be honest,” you say, because you don’t know what else to be. “I have no idea what this meeting is about.”

A feeling rises, not quite mortification but more than embarrassment.

“Oh,” Nick says. “We’re showing our writers how to use this new article generating app. It’ll make the process easier, and help our posts get ranked higher in Google search results.”

He says it simply.

He shares his screen and goes on to show us exactly how to use this tool that is going to put you out of a job in six months. He doesn’t realize that. He will, but not right now.

“It’s easy. You just type in a topic and click the search button. The app will pull up the highest-ranking articles on Google. You can see the kinds of titles, section headings, and wording these articles use. You can even click on parts of the articles, and the app will generate a template with them.”

Nick goes on to build an entire article from ones that had already been written. He is absolutely giddy to rip off other websites.

You feel your face grow increasingly warm. At one point, you glance at your face on the screen to see if it’s as red as you think it is.

It is.

“See? You can draw inspiration from them,” he says, and then continues talking.

You feel a push and a pull – you had always felt compelled to speak your mind and, at the same time, to keep your head down. You always, always ended up speaking up, and it was never, ever worth it.

“Would you call it inspiration?” you say, cutting him off.

“What do you mean?” he asks, stunned. The five people in the meeting all turn their attention towards you.

“Well, you know,” you say. “You’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.” You think he will know what you’re talking about.

He does not.

“Well, there’s a formula for ranking highly on Google search results. You want to include the words people are searching for, follow a certain structure, right? But when everyone wants to rank highly, everyone is using this same formula, so we all end up writing the same kind of articles. I mean, you are literally writing the same article as everyone else with this thing.” You gesture vaguely to the screen, where the app is still showing a copy-pasted article that’s basically plagiarism at this point.

“Umm,” Nick says. He makes a few sounds, a few false starts that have no ending.

You watch as he slowly deflates, like one of those wacky inflatable arm dancers at a car dealership that’s crawling towards bankruptcy. He looks at the others in the chat room, his eyes careening in what looks to you like no sensible direction.

But no one says anything.

After all these months of writing generic articles, you understand what it’s like to veer off the road of your life’s purpose into a ditch of nothingness. You feel for him. Purpose is a precarious thing, and it’s easy to lose track of.

Finally, Marcus, the marketing manager, speaks.

“Well, yeah, but see, you’re just supposed to draw inspiration from this. It’s your personality that’s supposed to shine through in the rest of the article. And you,” he says, lifting his eyebrows and then lowering them,” have one of the strongest, most personable voices out of all our writers.

“In fact, don’t even worry about using this app. You keep doing what you’re doing, because you do it really well.”

The rest of the meeting is stifled and awkward. Your chair is more uncomfortable than usual. You roll your neck back and forth, thinking about how much you sit in one place and stare downward at a screen.

You heard that you should get a standing desk. People aren’t supposed to sit for so long, you read once, and you believed it. But you didn’t get the desk.

Finally, the meeting ends. Everyone does the awkward wave right before closing the Zoom app. You are left alone with your yellowing walls, your sitting desk, your time. There’s so much time, and you often feel like you’re wasting it.

You need something new. Something to contain all your time, some way to use it well.

You are paid a relatively ridiculous amount of money to write these repetitive articles, and feel the impulse to quit. You think about how we always say we’re “spending time”, as if the hours are a form of currency.

You consider how much money you have in the bank, but you just can’t quit. Can you?

I want to write something real; you whisper quietly to yourself. You need...something. You don’t know what. You don’t know what you’re looking for.

And then, miraculously, you find it: You can’t believe it, but there it is, in the form of an ad on Instagram. You know Instagram’s advertising game is strong, but you’re rarely ever drawn in. You wonder whether it’s a scam, but it isn’t. It’s genuine.

It’s a writing challenge, sponsored by Moleskine journals. $20,000 for a story that includes a little black book. You turn your head slightly to the left, to the bookshelf that houses the little black books that house all your stories. You had started many. You finished some.

There’s possibility in those things, you think. You used to take one everywhere you went: to school, to boring social functions, on that road trip to Ohio. They held all your dreams, all your “Someday I’m Going To” musings on Tuesday afternoons, all your “I Could”s, all your stickers and jokes and grocery lists. They held a life – a life you wanted very badly.

You stopped carrying one a little over a year ago. But they would end up being your way out.

You reach out and grab a half-full journal. All your journals are black, classic, each one midsized so you could take it anywhere and have enough room to scrawl ideas and drawings and whatever else you thought up.

You go outside to write your $20,000 story.

And it is a story about you.

success
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