It had reached a point where I had no choice but to leave.
There I sat on the comfortable faded red Ikea couch in my spacious corner office with two walls of windows. I had grown up in this town. I had worked at this ad agency since I was nineteen. Four long years. I would leave the following day on my cross-country trek to California. I felt weird—depressed, anxious, sad, excited, scared, happy, uncertain, all at once. Transitional. That summer had just been kind of a pain in the ass, what with having my heart broken by a college “sweetheart,” finishing up my Bachelor’s degree, erroneously being given an F in my pesky summer school class, and realizing I was now a grown up college grad and that I hated the career path I had chosen. Minor details!
Even back then, I sought to live in the present moment. I felt on the verge of something big. I didn’t know what, when, why or how, but I was a girl on a journey. (Still am.)
Within a week of moving to the Bay area, i scored myself a job. Not just any job, a job at Google. I felt a little hesitant to jump right into full-time work. Plus they’d flat out told me that i may be overqualified for the job. I’d dreamed of being a full-time yoga instructor once I lived in The Golden State, but I knew it wouldn’t happen overnight. Google offered decent pay, free lunch, all the soft drinks you could swallow, healthcare, hammocks and babbling brooks in the landscaped lawn surrounding the office complex. For a while I convinced myself it was corporate heaven on earth. I couldn’t say no to the world’s most popular search engine.
I was hired as a temp in the advertising department. I settled right in and began my first and only task: reviewing Adwords ads. You know, those little text ads that come up on the right hand column of any google search. The job was mundane, robotic, unbearable. Sixty other temps and I would review those teeny text ads and their corresponding websites against dozens of policies on everything from grammar to product claims to acceptable pornography. Yes to girl on girl. No to S&M. Our managers emphasized “quality,” whatever that meant, but it came down to a sheer numbers game. How many ads could you review, correctly, in the eight hours of mind numbing screen staring Monday through Friday? I was a caged monkey with a blistered index finger. The other temps lived in constant fear of being laid off, and the flies were already starting to drop. I was invincible though. I had five years of advertising agency experience under my belt. They’d be crazy to let ME go.
I treated it like a game. How fast could I go? (P.S. Treating your job as a game is not a good idea.) I’d go to lunch with my fellow ants and we’d speculate about the people who’d been fired. So I was blindsided when the manager who looked and spoke like he had a stick up his ass asked me if I “have a minute,” led me to a secluded conference room and lowered the guillotine.
I was shaken by the immediate shock of rejection. I’d been FIRED. My ego was bruised, my root chakra punctured. I was blabbering. Ohmygod? what am i going to do i just moved here from Texas how am i going to pay rent can’t i have another chance why oh why woe is me. I’d been in California less than a month. I went “home” to my friends’ apartment where I’d been sleeping on an air mattress in the living room. The moment I found an uninhabited space, I went inside, shut the door behind me and sobbed.
But you know what? When I woke up the next morning, I was calm and content. Relieved not to have to go to a job I despised. Being released from my duties at Google was the best thing ever for my yoga teaching career. I blanketed Silicon Valley with my yoga resume. I took jobs of varying degrees of oddity to pay the immediate bills. I was unstoppable. A 23-year-old vegetarian, neo-hippie, left-handed, ambitious yoga teacher. I earned ten W-2 forms that year. I was a web monkey, a freelance copywriter, I probably taught about 200 yoga classes, worked at Stanford Hospital, Stanford Bookstore, and catering for half a day before deciding food service was not my cup of tea), valeted parked many BMWs on crazy steep hills in San Francisco, wrecked that limo, worked for that horrible Halloween store at that horrible mall. At the same time I was attempting to run a small business — my brainchild, Yoga Freedom.
The yoga gigs came in slowly but surely, enough to where I was able to phase out some of the more heinous employment. Then it went to the other extreme, and I was teaching at least twelve hatha yoga classes each week. Then I was really overstretched and underpaid. You know what they say: if you don’t go within, you go without. Burnout was imminent. I shed some of my commitments and vowed to take more time for myself, my personal yoga and meditation practice, simple pleasures like walking the dog and watching Seinfeld reruns and getting a pedicure. And reading. Oh how I read! Novels, short stories, self-improvement books galore, magazines, websites. I loved my life, after all.
I knew I had come full-circle when I began posting my own Google adwords ads for yogafreedom. I clicked ‘submit’ and sent a little vibe of compassion to the poor peon who would be reviewing my ad at the other end. In hindsight, it’s obvious I had sabotaged my advertising career. I hated working 9-to-5 in an office, even if it was a colorful, “eccentric” pre-IPO Google office. What a waste of a day!
What a joy it is now to look back on how that experience led me to where I am today.
