In 2001 I was a magazine writer and editor and I realized I hated everything about the work except the parties. During that time I was working as a freelance editor for a new travel magazine. I went into the office to meet with the top editor and the fact checker on the section I was working on.

The fact checker had an MFA in poetry and his hatred of me was so powerful I felt it almost as heat. We had a cordial interaction but I got what he was laying down, which was I didn’t deserve the work I had been given. I wish I remembered more but there were no fireworks or overtly nasty remarks, just his glowing disdain for me.

Someday soon afterward—maybe that day—I realized I never wanted to go into another magazine office again. It wasn’t just this fact checker. It was everything. I could feel, even in 2001, that there was no air in the business. There were a lot of parties and laughs and cocktails, but very few jobs that could support a person. I saw no career path in front of me, and what I could see I revolted against. I needed to find another way to make a living, and it better be a better living.

I bolted for advertising and quickly realized that as a 30-year-old woman I was too old to start from the bottom. Then I found pharmaceutical advertising and that’s where I’ve been ever since. It has the science and the data from my first career with more money and more jobs. It has no status in the wider world and is a punchline for people in regular advertising.

Pharmaceutical advertising has been the field regular advertising people fall into when their careers end due to ageism (so mostly women). I used to meet 40-year-old women in the bathrooms of agencies who said, “I’ve always been in real advertising but I can’t get a job so here I am. Can I pick your brain?” They wanted to know how to do HCP advertising copy, which is what I mostly do, in which you make complicated ads for doctors, not patients. You talk about studies and science and data and P values.

I like the work. I like selling doctors on products that work and help people. It makes more sense to me than selling products that don’t help people, or that don’t have clinical trials showing that the product helps significantly more people than it hurts through side effects. Remember, everything has a side effect, and that everything isn’t just drugs. Everything has a side effect.

The Trump administration has many side effects

One of those side effects is the serious harm being inflicted to my industry, pharmaceutical advertising, via the attacks on the NIH, the CDC, the FDA, and, of course the delightfully stupid tariffs. My business is powered on research and regulation. Research and regulation are under attack by the Trumpies and badness is here and more is coming.

I keep reviewing 2001 and what made me jump ship so quickly and completely. I want to know if I’m feeling the same way now then I did 23 years ago. I don’t feel panic at the thought of another ad agency. I just don’t see a place for me in a much smaller and changed Pharma advertising world.

I did not see the end of journalism coming though I would love to tell people that, like I was this seer, this Cassandra in 2001. But I am a terrible liar and all I really felt was that there was no place for me in the business—I figured it was my fault. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t make no money anymore doing work that I realized I hated doing.

After 2001 I watched friend after friend lose their jobs and/or their regular writing gigs. It was horrifying and a little gratifying. Had it been the business, not me? I think it was mostly me but the business really tanked. I have half a dozen friends who still make a living as journalists. That is all.

Today in the present, with destruction of government agencies and regulatory entities so senseless and fast moving, it’s hard to know what the next move can be. I have no idea what sectors will remain viable. Where do I jump? Where do I try to pivot toward? What is safe? What can I do that I can be paid to do?

Mothering moments of wonder

My daughter Daisy came down for Passover with her best friend. Daisy and I have been having trouble and it has been painful. The long story short is that she is separating from me, as she might have done when she was 14 or 15, but is happening now because she tends to do some things later than other kids.

It is awful! It feels terrible. There was a moment in January of this year when I realized I did not feel the connection to her that I take for granted, that we are aligned in our love for each other. Instead I felt her absence. She did not want to talk with me. She did not value my opinion. We had bizarre and petty fights. She didn’t want to talk on the phone. She found me tiresome.

Things have become somewhat easier. I accept this is where she’s at. I have backed off. She has backed off a little too. We had a great time at Passover and I love her friend, the kindest, most thoughtful and warm person I can imagine as a 20-something year old.

They describe their friend group and invariably there is a crazy-ish person in the mix, a person who does off-putting and self destructive things. And every time they tell a new story about a different person, I identify with that person, the one who seems like they mean well but are constantly thrown by their own personality.

I want to say to Daisy and her friend, “Go easy on them! They are so confused. I was like that person and they don’t know who they are or why they are doing this stupid stuff.”

And I look at Daisy and think, was this what all the normies from non-psycho families were doing in college, while I was beating my head against one wall or another? Just living nice lives and learning and growing?

When academic people address changing generational trauma, do they talk about how reformed jagged people experience their healthier offspring encountering jagged people in their lives? Jagged people is the best I can do for a quick description of what I was like. I like it. It’s pretty accurate. I have seen no mention of this in the books I read about people who changed themselves so they wouldn’t raise someone like they had been raised.

A small bit of neighbor news

I said briefly in my previous post that I thought Maggie’s mother had died. The day after I posted, her sister brought Maggie home. Calvin and I watched them unload bags of stuff from a car we had never seen but we thought was her mother’s car.

The moment that hit the hardest was when I got a good look at the face of Maggie’s sister. The thing with Maggie is that she is totally insane on top of her non-crazy personality being totally awful. Before she lost all her marbles, Maggie was very mean, very competitive, and totally savage about trying to claim what she thinks is hers. After conversations in the past with non-crazy Maggie, I would feel like I’d been slimed by an expert in sliming.

Maggie’s sister could be Maggie’s twin, but without the crazy. When I looked at her face I became afraid. This non-crazy person from the family that had presumably made Maggie the frightening person she is today was walking into Maggie’s house and for a second I was terrified. I backed away from the window, hiding from Maggie’s sister, who I’m pretty sure could not have seen me anyway.

What would things be like with non-crazy Maggie installed? What would they do to us?

“I give her 30 minutes max in that house,” Calvin called to me. “She’s not staying to help her. If she’s half as bad as Maggie, she isn’t going to help her now.”

Three minutes later, the sister was gone, out of the house, into the car, and away. And it makes perfect sense. Whatever made Maggie mean did not make this woman helpful.

So no news.