sea change
This Tinyletter turns seven on Wednesday, which means my freelance career is just a few weeks behind. Seven years! (If it feels like all we're doing lately is anniversaries, I promise that this is the last one. What can I say-- the spring of 2016 turned out to be transformative. And then the fall, ha ha.)
So maybe it's fitting that I'm sending you a link to some writing in a new medium: my first podcast episode, which I did for a show called Scamfluencers. It's about how Lou Pearlman changed pop culture forever... and also ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes in American history. (When Madoff happened, Lou gave his first-- and I believe only-- interview from jail claiming that his scheme was "smarter" than Bernie's.) (When I was researching this episode it was the only thing I could talk about-- one of those rabbit holes where you show up to dinner and someone asks you how you are and you're like, "Did you know that Lou Pearlman made up a fake German bank in order to try to get paid out by his own bankruptcy proceedings??" Anyway I got fun facts and killed darlings for days on this one.)
It's especially nice to have a new thing because one of my longest-lasting and frankly favorite outlets to write for shuttered abruptly late last week. RIP, BuzzFeed News, which helped make me into a public-facing Kardashian expert. I also got to publish a zillion other cool pieces over the years I wrote for them, including one about my best friend's stillbirth, how fillers took over our faces, and probably my favorite thing I've ever written, about why we're so attracted to celebrity relationship conspiracy theories.
It's not news that the digital media ecosystem is fucked. I think about this Megan Greenwell post, The Adults in the Room, almost every day at this point. And like, stop me if you've heard this one before, but I don't think I can do this much longer. I made $80,000 last year-- a pretty substantial number, certainly for me personally. To comfortably afford a one-bedroom apartment in many neighborhoods in Los Angeles, I would need to be making $130,000. Journalism-- the type I do, the way I do it, anyway-- is simply never going to get me there. And I'm exhausted by the trying.
That doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing it entirely. I have to keep selling pieces until I figure out what I want to do next, and how to do it. How to bridge the hole in my income it will leave. But when I woke up on Thursday morning and saw the BuzzFeed news on my phone, I had the same feeling I had when I turned 30, yes, just a few days into 2017, after that transformative year, after I quit my job and published my book and started taking an SSRI, after I did all the things that would get me to where I am now, typing this in a house in Eagle Rock. I feel like I'm walking out of a house that's on fire. Like there wouldn't be any turning back, even if I wanted to go.