They always ask about the freebies. Advance copies of highly-anticipated albums, film screeners, television pilot screeners, book galleys — anything, really. The concert tickets. The access to celebrities, the invitations to velvet rope fashion shows, the elbow-rubbing with other media elites. They ask what’s it like to see my name in the byline. “What’s it like to have The Hollywood Reporter link out to your story?” They ask about the angry commenters wielding torches and pitchforks. They are always hungry for the glamor and attention.

They are not wrong for being curious.

But.

They never ask, “How are you?” Never do they ask you about the emotional toll, about the fact that you haven’t been able to afford dinner or a dentist visit; that you haven’t flown home in ages because you are so broke; that you can’t really hold down a relationship because your bank account can’t afford a series of meaningless coffee and cocktail dates that end with no consequence. Nobody is ever hungry to learn about the spiritual and sometimes physical squalor this kind of life sometimes forces upon you.

Nobody actually stops to look at you long enough to see the bags under your eyes or to see that while you can crack jokes out of celebrity culture effortlessly, it is a trade that wears on you.

It is not fulfilling.

So when you leave this world, or at least choose not to be a resident, they are stunned. How dare you step away from covering the lives of the glitterati! Mostly, they stop returning your calls, e-mails, or texts.

You are no longer important.

You might see them at bars, and they might greet you, but they’ll just as easily move onto the next person. After all, when your hunger no longer feeds theirs, they’ll find someone else.

~

Deep in the vaults of Sarah Lawrence College is my graduate-level thesis. It’s called The Wonderland Motel. It is a collection of my fiction prototypes that was submitted in 2008. It is better left forgotten. If you are tracing my career as a writer, you can start there, but it is not necessarily the beginning. The hand-written journals I made as high school English class projects, that’s the beginning.

While The Wonderland Motel was a middling collection of self-aware prose, the Wonderland Motel is an accidental metaphor for this part of my life, where I was at the mercy of magazines that paid me pennies to write about pop culture. I had finished graduate school and checked into a life brimming with glittering possibilities. I use the Motel to describe a particular culture within the New York media world that, in essence, exists in any trade where people want a job and other people want cheap, easy labor.

I was enamored, for the longest time, by the thrill of it all — and by mostly how easy it had become for me to cultivate some kind of an online audience.

I wasn’t even necessarily the best at cultivating the audience, but one had formed around my body of pop culture work. Folks had crept out from the woodwork.

Soon, I was drunk on this attention. I made excuses for not wanting to go corporate. “They’ll give me my full-time break, soon!” I proclaimed about this magazine. If you choose to believe that feasting on scraps is wonderful, the abuse dealt to members of New York’s entry-level media denizens can seem as idyllic as a Heironymous Bosch painting.

And if you choose to hold yourself to your actual worth, this picture of paradise quickly turns grey. The fruits rot and when you go to grab any meat, you find it’s all been picked clean. You’ve only got bones to gnaw on — that is, if they’re not already crumbling in your hands.

~

It is now the beginning of 2009 and I’m hungover. I have had this magazine job for several months now. I’m irritable. I’m definitely hungry and I’ve honed a talent for eating breakfast late enough (or lunch early enough) that if it’s substantial enough, it can tide me over until the evening. Coffee serves as a wonderful, cheap appetite suppressant.

There is a gallery opening tonight. I’m told there will be appetizers and wine (cheddar crumbles and shots of Riesling, most likely). I will enroll my best friend at the time to join me. We will hit all the art shows in Chelsea that evening, nosh on all the free food we possibly can, and then end the night at a gay bar where happy hour seems to run forever, where hamburgers and French Fries are randomly offered to us for free because the bartender feels sorry for our sad existence.

I’m hungry. I want to get noticed. I believe my next big break is just around the corner, at the next bar, at the next art show, at the next product launch.

We go to all of these things. We pocket all the freebies we can; who knows where the next meal will come from.

We still end up going home hungry and unfulfilled.

Over the phone, my parents are freaking out. I am fielding panicked cries of, “You should’ve gone into law!” “You should’ve got a real job!” “What are you going to do?” “Come back home!”

They are panicked because it is almost a year since I’ve graduated, several months since the Great Recession sucker-punched America, and the only job I’ve snagged is an unstable gig blogging about pop culture for a middle-of-the-road lifestyle magazine. It is a magazine that seems to have all the money in the world to throw lavish parties, but can never seem to afford to mail me my monthly stipend on time. College educations don’t quite prepare you for this kind of reality.

Despite my weariness, I am still excited by the opporutnity, by the ability to shape my destiny. I am still hungry for my big break.

Smash-cut back to the previous Fall.

This is a rare opportunity I scare up through tenacity, emailing my old boss from an internship over and over again until he finally relents and throws me a bone: The magazine is dipping its toes into a digital presence. They’ve hired a new guy to run it and he’ll refer me to him. When the offer comes, I greedily accept.

I have absolutely nothing to lose.

The Great Recession has cratered everything. So there I am, diving deep into those craters, looking for any value, any legal tender that can fill up my hollow cash reserves.

I am hired to blog about art, a subject I know nothing about. Artist friends of mine are livid that someone has decided to pay me money to do this. I shrug. I am fucking broke, so I can only shrug. I don’t apologize for taking an opportunity to make money.

It is job that allows me to make of it what I will: I research my subjects, I conduct interviews, I go to obscure art shows in West Harlem and home galleries in Brooklyn, in addition to the flashy productions in Chelsea. I take my appetite for learning and try to learn what makes visual artists tick.

I meet wonderful people. I am barely making ends meet. I have no health insurance. I am writing. I am not eating well and I am drinking too much. I am a writer. I am physically hungry, but finding spiritual sustenance in the stories of the artists I tell.

How precious.

~

Soon, my editor tells me the digital department is expanding and asks if I would like to start writing less about art and more about pop culture — and at a higher frequency. Again, I greedily accept.

I am brilliant at it.

At times, I am writing eight to ten posts a day; I am furiously cruising message boards for story tips and performing competitive analysis. I am doing things that were revolutionary then, that are now assumed requirements of this kind of job these days.

It is an important experience. It is where I learn to push back, to do more uncomfortable things, to actually walk into the magazine’s offices in order to collect past-due checks, to ask about full-time opportunities over and over again. With time, I learn to become louder in asserting my value. I watch as less-capable bloggers are promoted to full-time editorial roles.

With my friends, I entertain theories: The new full-time staffers are skinnier, they are white, they have easier-to-pronounce names than I. They are better schmoozers. They have connections and benefactors. They have mentors. They know the magazine executives. This is not a meritocracy and the jobs are not necessarily going to the best writers or the best SEO gamers.

I am maybe wrong about these theories. There’s a reason for everything becomes a thing I start hearing a lot.

Again, I am not the best at what I do in the industry, but for the magazine’s website, I am told my work is among the top driver of traffic.

I am bitter.

I am also still too naïve. I still bide my time for months and months. I still try. I still go to all the parties hosted by this magazine. I am still regarded as “that freelancer who interviewed Frieda Pinto right before Slumdog Millionaire became a big deal at the Oscars and got a shit ton of traffic for the site.”

I smile, I sip my sugary cocktail, I try to play off how uneasy I feel at being other-ed by peers within the media world.

At one such party, Irish pop star Róisin Murphy nearly stabs my eye with her fashionable protruding shoulderpads.

I feel blessed.

~

It is weird because this is the same time that “micro-fame” really catches on as a thing among people writing for the internet. I am drunk on all of it: Julia Allison! Hanging out at Botanica with media elite! Gawker rooftop parties!

It is all wonderful and we are all best frenemies forever.

Of course I am among one of those people chasing micro-fame, too. I’ve become complicit in this culture. I am strategically planning my outings. “If I hit up these clubs or house parties, I can expect to run into these editors, writers, agents, and publicists.” This is the part of my life where I have lost sight of the reason I moved to New York in the first place. Or maybe my priorities have shifted. I have stopped writing for myself since I submitted my graduate thesis months and months ago.

Maybe I want to win at all costs. I am not sure I would later learn that I wasn’t even up to the game. I am blessed.

Suddenly self-appointed tastemakers are reaching out to me. “Come have drinks with us!” I feel included. I am part of an exclusive club. They are seeing the comments, the clicks, the shares my written words are generating. They are not so interested in the process that led to those posts, but rather what happens next. They want to be part of what happens next.

These self-appointed tastemakers are amusing because they prove an idea I have about the way gods exist: Once everyone stops believing in a deity, that deity becomes an artifact of the past. These tastemakers are only as relevant as the coterie of followers hanging on their words. I entertain their invitations, hang out with them. They want to ride my coat-tails, want me to ride their coat-tails. I fear becoming an artifact of the past, so I participate.

I am amused. They are mistaken in thinking that I have coat-tails, let alone that they can ride them to their own career peaks.

Again, I am not the best at what I am doing. I am very good, but not the best.

Keep chasing, brothers and sisters.

~

As all this happens, I am still watching as awful writer after awful writer is promoted to associate editor positions at the magazine which still employs me as a barely-paid blogger. I am still chasing paychecks that barely cover my monthly rent in Gowanus; these checks are sometimes 45, 60, or even 90 days past due.

A clock turns on and starts counting down. I already know I have to check out of this stage of my life. I am in my mid-twenties and this kind of poverty is not where I want to be in my mid-twenties. I need an exit strategy.

In a bid to win that Godot-esque full-time opportunity, I interview one talented performer after another: True Blood’s Michelle Forbes. Amanda Palmer. The lead singer of The Cardigans. Martha Wainwright. Goldfrapp. Rasputina. Erykah Badu. All brilliant women who are just so freaking good at the art that they create. It’s my way of covering celebrities while giving a platform to very talented people whose pitches might otherwise go unheard.

And in these conversations, I hear something electric in the voices of these ladies: They love what they do. I get a sense that they don’t know what else they would do with their lives and that they’ll be doing these things until their last breaths.

Forbes cackles wildly when she tells me how she prepared for her role as wild maenad Maryann Forrester on True Blood (“By watching Ken Russell movies.”) and I hear the frustration in Palmer’s voice when she tells me about how she’s working a few things out with the major label she was signed to at the time. Erykah Badu takes me on a tour through the underground studio where she was wrapping up mixing on New Amerykah, Part Two: Return of the Ankh. These are all experiences that start lighting a spark in me that had become dormant as my goals slid towards achieving micro-fame, not producing creative work of my own.

Seeing how successful artists stay motivated, remain passionate, and build new project after project, begins fueling a hunger.

~

My editor from this magazine is a wonderful guy who I still keep in touch with, and who I still look up to.

While I blog for the magazine, I only seem to clash with him when my checks are past due. I have to tell him that without them I can’t afford a trip to the supermarket. He is sympathetic. I chalk it up to working at such a dysfunctional enterprise, that he can’t be the kind of mentor he wants to be. I am thrilled when he makes big career leaps of his own later on.

Suddenly, another editor is hired in to run operations in his stead as he moves up to a larger strategy role. She doesn’t research my past work for the magazine, learn my voice, or study the traffic generated by my work, and instead begins micromanaging my work down to the tone. It is frustrating; it is her way of saying, “Oh that’s cute, you’ve done things, but you probably don’t know what you’re doing.”

My future posts are scrubbed and twisted into her voice. Suddenly my own narrative presence starts vanishing from what I submit. This is the final straw.

There’s a shrill, unignorable beeping. That ticking clock goes off. Time’s up.

Yet, I carry on, I bide my time. I try to get used to the shrill, uginorable beeping.

~

I do tire of not being able to afford things. I accidentally spill coffee all over my laptop one morning and have to borrow money to buy a new one. I am not able to go out to brunch.

I am not able to hang out with those friends of mine who live in the corporate sector. Withdrawing money at the ATM gives me anxiety attacks. I’m not sleeping well. I only get haircuts every few months, when I go home. I eat things out of cans. Fresh vegetables are a luxury. At product launches, I stuff extra food into my messenger bag. I try doing laundry by hand, over the sink or tub, as my ancestors must’ve once upon a time.

I attend glamorous VIP parties and yet still reside in a shit-hole in Brooklyn.

One night, I come home after drinking too much and find a cockroach lingering in the time display of the microwave clock. Moments later, carpet beetles skitter across my bedroom floor.

Later, mysterious bug bites surface all over my skin; they don’t heal. They ooze pus and leave marks in their wake. I bug-bomb my apartment. No matter how much calamine lotion or prescription ointment I apply — or how many times I bug-bomb my apartment — more bites appear. My skin looks speckled, like a cheetah’s fur coat.

This is not the life I want.

Everything about this lifestyle is disgusting and I am realizing that at this point, I have managed to produce at least 1,000 blog posts and then some, over a year, and I am now depleted.

I have grown to hate the act of writing. Of putting words together, of drawing conclusions, of telling stories, of communicating new ideas to audiences. I feel flattened out. My novel is buried under a pile of dust; it has been untouched. I’ve hammered out a premise, but have remained unable to execute it. I am too anxious; I am looking for long-sleeve shirts that can hide those inexplicable bug bites that even WebMD can’t diagnose.

I go to bed crying for what seems like the millionth night in a row.

There are editors who likely bathe in such tears. It is an unfulfilling bath, I’d presume.

~

The ringing of that timer is deafening, so with a heavy but decisive heart, I quit my magazine blogging gig with just shy of 18 months under my belt — over e-mail.

I check out of the Wonderland Motel, for some reason not feeling like I physically could until I had actually pressed the SEND button on that e-mail.

Quitting seems like an immediate analgesic. My anxiety starts settling. My love for writing returns. I go corporate.

Soon, I have settled into a new job. It is a grown-up job that gives me grown-up perks like health insurance and a liveable wage. I can finally fly home to visit family regularly. I begin rebuilding my savings.

Yet after I land this grown-up job, I watch as all the fairweather friends fall away. They stop returning my e-mails and texts. I have nothing they want any longer. As their god, I am now dead. I am sad, a little. It is here that the idea of micro-fame is one that I must let go.

But I am grateful, too. I am content to collect a paycheck that is not directly linked to how well I can schmooze. I am content to have a job that starts and ends at two specific times — and allows me the rest of the time to work on my own art.

The mysterious bug bites disappear. I am eating better. I am sleeping better. My quality of life has improved a hundredfold. I am so freaking happy.

I am content to separate art from commerce. I breathe a sigh of relief. A stranger isn’t meddling with my words anymore. I have found a way to love the act of writing again.

Yet, I look back at blogging for that middle-of-the-road magazine with some gratitude. It was the perfect pressure cooker that allowed me to write a high volume of throwaway pieces; it allowed me to get the first 1,000 bad paintings out of my oeuvre so I could begin finding greatness with the 1,001st.

It is an experience which taught me about the wonders of the comments section, both good and bad: Fans, trolls, and fans who turn into trolls.

It is an experience which allowed me to hear the stories from some stunningly talented artists — and further compelled me to draw strength and inspiration from their stories.

Months after I am in my new life, I keep a pulse on the magazine and the industry. I watch as everyone I know moves onto other pursuits. The staff is replaced by a skeleton crew a fraction of its size. One of the skeletons reaches out to me for a new opportunity and I end up sabotaging it because I have no desire to go back to that world.

When similar opportunities at other publications arise for me, I sabotage those too.

I begin feeling very protective of my words, of my stories. The spark ignited by the performers I interviewed from the past catches fire. Soon, there’s a creative conflagaration. I only work with magazines whose editors I trust with my words for one-off jobs. A small publisher offers to print a limited-run chapbook from me. I trust them with this endeavor. Months into my new life, I have brought a collection of short stories into the world.

A small book of my own fiction that people can buy and own.

This is the most like myself I have felt in years.

~

I am a lousy journalist, I think. I am more interested that you hear my side of the story. I am more interested that you hear what I have to say, regardless of the facts. I am an unreliable narrator. Facts are irrelevant to me, unless they allow me to make a more dramatic story.

I’ve always known this about myself, and it’s why I could never be the breaking news reporter that tends to do well in today’s blogging world.

I love playing with words; I love crafting how the story is told — not the speed at which it is dispensed.

~

There is something unsettling to me about building a career based on covering the lives of notable and newsworthy people. It turns the lives of artists into a commodity and currency for journalists.

To earn a larger salary, get promotions, and gain notoriety because I can use the personal stories of famous people to win my own audience feels like cannibalism. It’s probably for this reason, a clock started counting down to my exit from the Wonderland Motel.

One of the final things that began sealing me out of the Motel was possibly a passing judgment made by Badu when I had been interviewing her, to the effect of, “I can tell you’re not a journalist, but a writer.” It was in the questions I had prepared for her. Maybe it was in the scattershot way I was asking her questions. Perhaps it was her polite way of saying, “You’re not organized, what’s the matter with you?” but I took it as an indication from the universe that my decision to leave was correct.

The Wonderland Motel’s culture of human commodification is not unique to the world where journalists exist. As I pivoted to the literary world, I found echoes of this. So I decided to hang out on the sidelines — participate when I needed to, but never forgetting that my ambitions lie in telling stories and bringing ideas into the world, not in trying to get the attention of famous people. It is a culture that exists in every trade, across every career. We have to be aware when we participate in it.

I am so glad to have failed at the media game. I am glad I didn’t win any kind of reasonable micro-fame. The prize here is a glorified kind of hunger: No matter how hard you run the race, you always end up wanting more.

There is never a point at which you can feel settled with your hand and turn your attention to a tangible endeavor.

I do still exist as a tourist to this industry, though. I check in once in a while to interact with the stories that I want to. There are wonderful people from that part of my life who I am regularly in touch with. They, too, have grown up considerably. It has been thrilling to see them exit and enter the Motel at their leisure, too.

~

As with anything exciting, it is on all of us to know when to check into The Wonderland Motel — and when to check out.

I came across that letter on The Awl recently. It is one of the most visceral examples of someone banging on the doors of the Motel to be let in, of wanting to sacrifice themselves to this culture wholly. They are begging, pleading to be let in. That letter writer is not unlike the version of me that existed several years ago — biding my time for a magazine job that would never come. I cannot mock or deride that letter writer’s frustration or wanting to belong because we all start there. I understand his frustration and his hunger. We all start with that hunger — we are all banging on the doors of the Motel to be let in.

The response, however, is perfect. It reads, again, like someone who had managed to gain admission, but has left — and now visiting as a tourist:

Your idea about “media life” or whatever is so beyond. You’ve lost all perspective. There is no such thing. Like if you see five people on Twitter who hang out together once in a while… TRUST ME, that “scene” will pass. You need to go hang out with some bond traders or cab drivers or dog walkers.

The response sums it up: You want a life that will leave you hungry. Abandon this pursuit. Go find meaning in something that will leave you feeling full.

In any career, in any station of life, we’ll end up mired in a culture like this. It’s part of being a grown-up. It’s up to us to know when to check out of the Motel. We should always stop before we get too drunk, open up a map when we need to, and above all, never ever get distracted by the shiny, pretty illusions.

They’ll always leave you hungry.