Assimilation is Futile (Part I)
It’s taken me a good long while to find my tribe. Next month I turn 34, which means it’s taken nearly 34 years. This occurred to me as I walked around a local beach town a couple of days ago, flooding with memories. Twelve years ago I had worked in that beach town, slinging coffee to high-strung older women with over-the-top plastic surgeries, arrogantly wealthy older men, and their narcissistic young counterparts. There was the odd nice person, obviously; but for the most part I spent my days immersed in a world that was completely alien to me–and vice versa, to be fair. (We are all guilty of preferring homogeneity, to some extent.)
Don’t get me wrong; the business of not fitting in was not new to me. I was a bicultural kid with one immigrant parent, grew up in a sketchy neighborhood and went to schools for gifted kids, which happened to be in pretty decent neighborhoods. At home, my interests were weird and highfalutin’, as were my grammar and lack of accented English. At school, my cultural knowledge was weird, period, as was my background and lack of American colloquialisms. Somewhat absurdly, I continued to hear the opposing refrains of Why you tryin’ to sound like a white girl? and Well, when I said that about Mexicans, I didn’t mean you, all the way through high school in the early 90s.
In college, I switched majors three times, going from English to Psych to Theater to English. I just couldn’t imagine wanting to do only one thing for the rest of my life, and the self-imposed pressure not to waste the tuition money was huge, resulting in, of course, a total lockdown on my cognitive thinking skills. I was wound pretty tightly by the time I hit 22 and was notified that I was about to be removed from my mother’s insurance. Given that I’m a type 1 diabetic, living on no insurance wasn’t exactly an option. And while my mom was more than willing to pay out of pocket for my meds and doctor’s visits, in retrospect I think it seemed like the perfect opportunity to avoid having to decide which box I would live in. My best friend at the time told me she could hire me as a receptionist at the film and TV production company where she worked, and I jumped at the chance. I explained my situation to my professors, who were kind enough to let me finish out the semester by writing a couple of papers, and I entered the world of entertainment.
It was pretty thrilling. I went to a few parties and movie screenings, met a few celebrities. Although I was the lowest on the rung, that company didn’t subscribe to the dog-eat-dog practices found most everywhere else in Hollywood, and so I was made to feel welcome and valued from the beginning–to say nothing of the ridiculous amounts of fun I had working with my best friend (one word:T-R-O-U-B-L-E.). In short order I became the publicity assistant, organizing parties and writing press releases. I enjoyed the production company and learned more than my fair share about Hollywood, business and life in general…but I was bored, frankly. I felt somehow that I was done, that I needed to move on. Within a year I had gone to work for the PR company that handled our account.
To be continued…