How I Accidentally Became a Writer After Buying Cloud Storage

A Late 20s Pivot Story

At 31 with ADHD living through New York City and therapy for 3 years (I say “through” because every day is not a winding, but an onslaughting road, in this town, Sheryl Crow), I’ve noticed a sudden inversion of my goals and values for the first time since high school.

At 15 or 16, I decided psychology was more pragmatic than the textiles that garnered me superb questions like “Do you put knitting needles up your butt?” I was a pragmatist before I could legally drive.

The last software version of my ennui.io––buggy, underfunded, and incompatible with joy––was released in my college psychology program, when I realized the field took studies of middle-class white Midwestern men and extended those truths to everyone else. I like deep dish, but that’s as far as our Venn diagram goes.

After college, I fell into tech and devoted myself to DEI––the nest where I laid my career eggs. But after five years (could’ve been five minutes) of living in San Francisco, I was feeling a little malaise, a little depression. Educating privileged tech workers about pronouns, Juneteenth, and Native American trivia in November has its limits.

I recall working with one tech startup where a founder (naturally, a straight white guy) whom I’ll call Jason Burger, interrupted me in the middle of my presentation to ask, “Why do pronouns matter? I know your gender.” I said “Well, Miss Burger––may I call you ‘Miss’, I don’t know if you’re married––because you may think your suit is drag and wear dresses outside of the office. I wouldn’t want to address you improperly in the event that that’s your kink.”

The pandemic, plus the bipartisan cocktail of rapacious greed and white nationalism, didn’t exactly renew my sense of purpose. And no, I don’t actually know the meaning of “rapacious.” I believe in consent and would never act on a word with ‘rāp’ in it.

In 2021, in June, when you sort of imagine gay people are supposed to be doing unspoken things in exotic locations named “The Meat Rack” and “Gloryhole” and sending OOO emails, I took my Dogecoin winnings (the only thing I regretfully have Musk to thank for) and shipped my life to the Big Apple to rediscover my creativity.

Of course, you can’t fit a textile studio into a one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment with collapsing ceilings, so I posted an ad on Craigslist: “Looking for cheap creative space.” A day later, someone replied offering me their cloud storage––1 terabyte for only $500 a month. They said they didn’t need it anymore. I sent back an enthusiastic “yes!” along with my Venmo. And just like that, I became a writer.

The start wasn’t glamorous. I spent a year using an AI tool to scrape editor emails on LinkedIn and pitch hundreds of editors with a proposal that was, apparently, “too caustic” in its critique of cultural appropriation. Sometimes I replied, “I’ll leave my headdress at the dry cleaners next time I message.”

After being rejected for being too caustic, I naturally became less caustic by writing about a raunchy queer weaver, which apparently is the sweet spot editors were looking for.

The pressure and the high of publishing got to my head. At a party, I bumped into an AAer whose five-years sober dinner I attended a year prior. He asked a typical question to a virtual stranger who once had written absolutely nothing: “How are you?” Jabbing in return at small talk, I replied “Oh you know, another day, another article,” which I delivered with my signature booming laugh that a colleague once called obnoxious. Overhearing, my boyfriend grabbed me and whispered in my ear so aggressively that the spit almost completely obstructed me from understanding him. “What are you doing?!” I replied, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m talking with this guy from the program.” Brandon, my boyfriend, said back heatedly, “You sound like a jerk. Who do you think you are, Carrie Bradshaw?” I shrugged.

Reflecting on how I arrived here, I return to a line from Freud: “The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” Call it sappy, but the artist who'd lain semi-dormant, like Guatemala's Mount Acátenango, now erupts every twenty minutes––which is either a sign of creative vitality or I should really see a doctor about this irregularity.

My tech fantasy had promised security and the tacit millennial dream of home ownership, a dog, maybe one day a child. Instead, I got the far more precarious reality of long-form writing––plus the peculiar satisfaction of finally listening to that voice.