OBLIVIOUS
When tears silently fell from her cheek upon finding the note from her lover, 3 days before their daughter was born that read: “I'm sorry. I can't do this.”
ASHAMED
When classmates asked where my daddy was. I lied & told them he was Crocodile Dundee, and had to be in Australia to tame the outback.
CONFUSED
When we used different money than everyone else to buy bread & milk.
BITTER
When I was 14 and sat in the hospital waiting room on a sunny June day. When my Uncle Jimmy finally emerged, after what seemed like hours, he handed me a pamphlet. It read, “Helping Your Family Cope with Terminal Cancer.”
NOSTALGIC
When I would hear Puff Daddy's “I'll Be Missing You” come on the radio after he died, just a few short months later, after tearfully asking me to call him “dad” instead of “Jimmy,” like I always had. I got to call him it twice.
MORTIFIED
When it was just me & my mother after that, and all of the other 15 year olds had basements underneath their houses. We had wheels.
FRUSTRATED
When my mother's debilitating anxiety & social disorder prevented her from ever coming to watch me play volleyball more than once in 4 years. We were nearly state champions.
RELIEVED
When the founder of Monster.com thought I was worthy enough to be awarded a 4-year, all-expense paid scholarship to a private, liberal arts school—room & board included. The scholarship was based on financial need & demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit. My mother cried.
GUILTY
When I took the scholarship and left her all alone.
SADDENED
When an unexpected card would arrive with $25 that she didn't have inside, telling me to go buy myself something pretty.
ANNOYED
When, a few years later, I found myself back in that same hospital waiting room. But this time, it was my mother I was waiting on to come out of the doctor's office.
SCARED
When I realized the seriousness of the matter.
PATIENT
When she taught me how to pay all of the bills, as I wrote out check after check from her hospital bedside, as nurses came in and out to take her blood.
LIVID
When the doctor's arrogant insensitivity to her pain one day made her weep.
VENGEFUL
When I let him have a piece of my 20-year-old mind.
FRUSTRATED
When college friends ragged on me for not going out that weekend to party.
RESENTFUL
When I couldn't.
SHOCKED
When I got the phone call while driving to my first day at my internship at a local TV station.
DEVASTATED
When, by the time I got to our trailer in Northeastern Pennsylvania, the coroner had taken her body.
BITTERSWEET
When, 4 months later, I walked across the graduation stage & got my college degree, not even bothering to look out into the crowd for a familiar face.
INDIFFERENT
When I hastily auctioned off all of our things.
LOST
When I sold our trailer for $13,000 at market price.
DISTRAUGHT
When I moved to Philadelphia and knew no one.
HOPEFUL
When I landed my first job in marketing.
WORRIED
When I didn't have anywhere to go that Christmas.
GRATEFUL
When I was so good at my job, I received a promotion to head up regional marketing efforts. And then another promotion. And then another.
DISHEARTENED
When I'd see planes pass by my office window, and longed to be the kind of person who didn't let life pass them by.
DISAPPOINTED
When I realized that sitting at that desk, serving to make big companies even more money, was my entire purpose in life. I didn't want to waste my life like my parents had, always waiting until tomorrow to be happy—because tomorrow, you're dead.
DISILLUSIONED
When I discovered that my dreams of becoming a corporate hot shot weren't my dreams anymore.
DESPAIRED
When friends told me to suck it up, and that work was simply that: Work. (It wasn't supposed to feel nice.)
LONELY
When I felt like no one understood me.
ARROGANT
When I quit my job & decided to start my first business, instead. I was going to do what I had been putting off for years: I was going to write.
FOOLISH
When I made some hasty financial decisions.
EXCITED
When that same year, I got a contract to write my first eBook.
SMART
When I developed my own site to sell the book there, too.
DETERMINED
When I laboriously tried to learn HTML.
ELATED
When I saw my very first sale come through.
INTRIGUED
When I discovered the world of Google Adwords.
ADDICTED
When I took my love of marketing and applied it in new ways.
CONFIDENT
When I painstakingly slaved over a book proposal to write a non-fiction narrative titled, “The Truth About Mangoes.” (Let's not talk about what a horrible title that was.)
TORN
When I repeatedly received the infamous rejection letter (after rejection letter after rejection letter after rejection letter).
DESPERATE
When the waterfall of poor and hasty financial decisions finally caught up to me.
HOPELESS
When I caved & took a job in advertising in order to pay the bills.
ENCOURAGED
When I got contract after contract signed on the spot.
UNCERTAIN
When, in my heart, I knew I needed more than signatures & commissions.
PETRIFIED
When, despite that knowledge, I was too scared to make any bold moves, knowing that I had no one in the world to back me up if I failed.
INCENSED
When I stood by and watched that fear get the best of me…for years.
OPTIMISTIC
When I enrolled in graduate school for my master's degree in Linguistics.
ANXIOUS
When I imagined that my degree would be The Answer™.
IRRITATED
When loan applications were denied without a co-signer.
STUBBORN
When I decided that I would tutor writing to make up for it.
HEARTBROKEN
When my best friend told me I needed to find a new place to live so her boyfriend could move in.
DEFEATED
When I had no choice but to go stay with a mysterious new guy I had been seeing.
DESTROYED
When, a few weeks later, was sobbing in the middle of the night in a Kmart parking lot.
HOPELESS
When I had nowhere to go.
ANGUISHED
When I looked in the mirror and saw the cranberry-colored fingerprints around my neck.
OBSTINATE
When I sat there in the middle of the night, determined not to be a victim.
DILIGENT
When I realized that I might not have had anything left, but the one thing I did have? Were my ideas.
COURAGEOUS
When I published an announcement to my baby email list to write a book I had not yet written.
VALIDATED
When I heard the first sale.
AMAZED
When reader after reader voted with their wallets.
EXHILARATED
When I realized that my writing could save my life—literally.
DEDICATED
When I continued to publish.
INSPIRED
When more and more readers came to say hello.
PEACEFUL
When my influence online grew.
INVIGORATED
When I discovered that you can make red, hot money from your art, using this thing called the Internet.
HAPPY
When, ten years later, I look around to find a whole different reality: One that I created by hand for myself. I’ve built a million dollar brand around giving the middle finger to societal expectations and finding unorthodox ways to live a happier life. I published the book, also called THE MIDDLE FINGER PROJECT, with the one-and-only Penguin Random House. (!!!) In addition to the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the book has also been published in places like Finland, Ukraine, Russia and the United Kingdom. (The Finnish cover is adorable!) The Audible version is hilarious. Seth Godin called my voice “a voice of originality in a world with too little of it,” and The Today Show was coming to my house before the 2020 pandemic upended EVERYTHING. (CBS, The BBC and Jenny McCarthy show, however, I was able to do over the phone. ?)
I've become known for my irreverent, voice-driven writing, have since ghostwritten other books with Penguin et al., and my independent publishing company, Irreverent Ambition, publishes the most fun-to-read newsletters & books in the world. I teach creative writing via my OTHER newsletter, Meat & Hair. I have a beautiful home in Costa Rica (read: fewer cockroaches than the neighbors), recently purchased a historic property in Philadelphia, and spend several months a year traveling around the world to places like Argentina and Italy; Ecuador & England—which sounds far more pretentious on the page than, perhaps, if we had this discussion while binge drinking wine. I work remotely from my Macbook, spend wide-open mornings writing words & sipping coffee, take leisurely two hour walks at sunset, and splash around in irritatingly clear turquoise water almost daily (which means I spend an inordinate amount of time sucking in my gut and trying not to look like a city slicker asshole). To add to the list of things-that-make-me-annoying, I have a wonderful partner with whom I share these travels and this incredible thing called life, we're building lots of things together, including a tourism brand called With Love From Costa Rica, as well as our own brand of coffee! I relish the finest glass of red wine I can find in the evenings with my feet dangling in a pool overlooking the Pacific Ocean (okay, fine, it’s the neighbor’s pool), and when I’m not cringing from the sun or stringing words together in meaningful ways, I’m probably on a podcast answering one question:
How did you go from sleeping in a Kmart parking lot with $26 dollars to your name, to creating a business and a life like this? (By which I’m fairly certain they mean the cockroaches.)
To which I respond:
For everyone out there thinking to yourself that it's unrealistic, YOU ARE WRONG.
For everyone out there shackled by fear, telling yourself that you could lose everything, YOU ARE RIGHT.
And for everyone out there that, despite that knowledge, is still willing to risk it by fighting for something more out of this fleeting speck of time we're granted here on earth, YOU ARE THE ONLY ONES WHO WILL TRULY SUCCEED.
Because at the very least, you know that you did everything you could.
Not everybody else can say the same.