I'm Changing My Life Again
‘Tis the Season for More Personal News.
I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.
As a kid, I wanted to be a pop star. I never wanted a stethoscope or an astronaut helmet. I wanted the headset microphone that Hilary Duff wore to sing “What Dreams Are Made Of” in The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
I wanted to be Aaron Carter, to the point where I dressed up as him for halloween in kindergarten. Every other boy was a Red Sox player or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and I was the teen pop sensation behind the hit song “I Want Candy.”
I wore his look from the cover of the Aaron’s Party album: denim-on-denim with a white undershirt, complete with my very own Aaron Carter wig. A custom wig, that is. My mom — a trained hair stylist, never forget — bought a little-girls Goldilocks wig then cut, colored, and styled it to look like Aaron’s spiky blonde-ish hair. When I eventually get my completely earnest heart-and-arrow MOM tattoo, I’ll think of that.
I imagined myself telling that story on talk shows. I would RipStik (remember her?) around my neighborhood talking to myself as if I was in conversation with Ellen DeGeneres. I was not normal!
But pop stars aren’t normal! And becoming one just felt like a forgone conclusion to me. Nevermind that I couldn’t dance or read music or play an instrument — it was going to happen.
As I got older, I broadened my horizons. A little. I didn’t have to be a pop star, I just had to be a celebrity. I saw life as a Choose Your Own Adventure book where every adventure made me extremely famous in a some way. I’d end up an Oscar-winning actor or a best-selling novelist or an iconic fashion designer.
None of those adventures involved sports. If the Aaron Carter costume didn’t give it away, I was not a sporty kid. I was the kid in the outfield, too busy daydreaming about his world tour to catch the ball directly in front of him. In middle school, I had to write an essay about an athlete I admired and I chose Payson Keeler, a fictional gymnast from the ABC Family show Make It or Break It.
Yet here I am, writing to tell you that I now work for a professional sports team. Anything is possible, kids!
IT IS SO OVER
Yes, I got a job. Our long national nightmare is over. Again.
Season 2 of Colin: Do You Believe In Life After Layoff? was a thrilling, traumatizing ride: part gay sitcom, part psychological thriller, part whatever-Stanley-Tucci-is-doing-on-CNN.
Fortunately, there is life after layoff. There’s even life after two consecutive layoffs, although this time, I really didn’t think I was strong enough.
I’m not going to do the thing where I give advice and make it seem like me getting a job is somehow proof that I did something “right.” Because I didn’t. I mean, I did most things wrong. I essentially just shut down, avoided anyone that tried to help me, and fled the country. I’m not exactly the poster child for coping.
I’m also not going to tell you it all happened for a reason. Try as I might have, I couldn’t “everything happens for a reason” my way out of the fact that I was going to get paid to go to the Olympics in Paris and then I didn’t, but got to watch as all my coworkers did. If that was a blessing in disguise, I fear it hid itself too well.
I will maintain that applying for jobs while unemployed is one of the most demoralizing things a person can experience. Even worse than the time I went to a party to meet a guy I’d been talking to on Tinder only for his friend to approach us, point to me, and say “Oh! You’re the one who looks like a muppet!” I don’t know which part of that story is more tragic — that it wasn’t the first time someone told me to my face that I looked like a muppet or that I still brought the guy home. It was mortifying! And yet… still not as bad as job searching.
By the time I actually got a job, it felt less like I’d succeeded and more like I’d survived.
I have many people and places and things to thank for ensuring said survival the past six months. Special shoutouts to the countries of Italy and Turkey for their hospitality and their bread, the cast of Bravo’s Summer House for their Shakespearean-level dramas and delusions, and the slice of gay heaven along the Columbia River known as Rooster Rock.
Thanks to two very special women in my life: my therapist, who kept insisting I watch the 1998 Reese Witherspoon movie Pleasantville but didn’t get mad when I never did, and more importantly, World No. 1 tennis player Aryna Sabalenka. I spent more time watching her matches this year than I did talking to any of my long-distance friends or family. Which, shout out to all of them for not taking it personally when I got depressed and went full zero-dark-thirty. Or maybe they did and they all resent me now. In which case, sorry!!!
My final shoutout goes to THE girlie, the diva who, yet again, literally kept me going during a time of crisis. She never asked questions, even when I started going to Barry’s three times a week despite not having any income at all. She never said “no” when I had a new adventure in mind, whether it was Idaho or Italy. I owe her so much, I may need to name my first child after her: I think Chase Sapphire Preferred is a great name for a baby girl, no?
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL PERSONAL NEWS
The aforementioned job: I’m working for Gotham FC, the professional women’s soccer team in New Jersey and New York! I actually work there, present tense, and have since November. I hate surprises yet I always seem to be full of them.
I even surprised myself. After Nike, I said I was done with sports and fitness for a while. With one exception: if I could work in women’s soccer.
Portland has changed me in many ways: I’ve become more active, more outdoorsy, and more annoying about my wine. The best improvement, though, is that I’ve become a huge fan of women’s soccer.
I’d been a fan in theory but that mostly meant tuning into the World Cup finals and following Megan Rapinoe on Instagram.
I learned very quickly that Portland loves soccer, to the point its nicknamed itself “Soccer City, USA.” It only took me one Thorns game to understand why. Not only is soccer extremely fun and easy to watch, the crowds are the most inclusive I’ve ever seen in sports. There are so many girlies and gays in these stadiums, you’d think you were at a MUNA concert.
So I became a superfan, with all the merch to prove it. Soccer became a fixture of my social life: I’d sit with my friends, talk shit, and eat the stadium’s surprisingly good vegan dogs.
Suddenly, sports made sense to me. As I screamed my lungs out for Sophia Smith, I understood why I often felt like my dad loved Tom Brady more than he loved me.
And now this sport I’ve become obsessed with is now my job. I mean, I’m not playing it, I’m working in marketing, but still.
I’m wary of getting too excited about any job given my history but I’m also wary of succumbing to pessimism and assuming the worst. So I’m choosing to be excited, because that’s more fun. My job is literally to make women’s soccer even bigger and better, and turn everyone, specifically everyone in the New Jersey / New York area, into Gotham FC fans.
In order to do that, I do need to live there. Which means, yes, more personal news.
WE ARE SO BACK?
I’m moving out of Portland at the end of December and moving back to New York.
I think I’m more surprised by this news than anyone I've told it to. I worry everyone thinks I’ve had this planned all along. I assure you: I have not! I haven’t planned anything… ever. I move in less than two weeks and I still don’t have an apartment. The extent of my “packing” is just a single box with two pillows in it.
I guess I understand. I spent almost exactly two years in Portland, an amount of time so perfect, it sounds like I had to have planned it that way. Two years in a new city is a brief hiatus; I basically went to grad school. I do think working at Nike is the closest I’ll get to going to a real college. NYU was kind of a fake school, designed mostly so nepo babies have a place to go for a semester before pursuing generational wealth full-time. Nike had a proper campus with cafeterias and bikes and straight people everywhere. That’s what college is, right?
But, no, I didn’t go to grad school and I didn’t plan to leave Portland. I didn’t even really want to. I’m not leaving because I don’t like it here. If anything, I like it too much.
I’m leaving because this felt like the type of opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. And because, even if it hadn’t been this one, I felt like any professional opportunity that was going to excite me was not going to be in the Greater Portland Area. The options I saw for myself here all looked too familiar. Literally. I could try and get another job at Nike or I could go work for one of the very few other brands with presences here, most of which are direct Nike competitors. Or I could do something fully remote and slowly lose my mind, just like I did in Covid.
I didn’t really want to do either of those things. Which kind of sucks. Because everything else here is great. I’m very, very sad to leave. I love my friends, I love my apartment, and I love the summer so much that I can almost tolerate the winter.
The more life I live, the harder it becomes to change my life. I weighed my options and, this time, they all felt heavier. Staying or leaving felt like a choice between comfort and ambition. Do I prioritize settling into something good? or do I keep searching for something better, knowing full well I may never find it?
I chose ambition. I was (am) jaded by capitalism and corporate life. If I had to work again, I wanted it to be something completely different. I wanted a challenge, I wanted to have fun, I wanted to work really hard at something I cared about. And I got that! It just happens to be in New York.
I don’t know if it’s the right decision because unfortunately “right” decisions only exist in hindsight. So I’ll just have to wait and see.
I do know that moving to Portland was the right decision. I’ll miss it a lot, which is probably why I’m waiting until the last possible second to pack and move. I have so much to say about my time here and I will be doing that in the next one of these. I promise!
For now, I’ll say this: I got robbed three times in my first six months here, then lost the job I moved across the country for, and I still think this was the best decision I ever made. I experienced more life these past two years than I had in all the ones before. I met some of the best people I’ve ever known and only, like, two of the worst.
I loved it so much more than I expected, which seems to be the moral of all my stories here. Exactly nothing has gone the way I expected it would.
It’s been the story of my life, really. I mean, I expected to be a pop star and now I work in sports.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
What if I told you that I still want to be a pop star? That I often lay awake at night wondering about this.
Not the popstar thing specifically. Don’t worry, I’m not to announce my debut EP of Jack Antonoff rip-offs. I mean the thing where I don’t really know what I want to do with my life even though I’m actively doing something with my life. Something I like doing!
As I was deciding to take this job and make this move, I kept asking myself: when does a job become a career?
When I got hired at Peloton, I was 21. I had just graduated from my maybe-fake college. I certainly didn’t think I was committing to a career in fitness and sports. I thought, “great! a job that seems not-miserable and will pay me enough to stay in New York!” I figured I could go do something completely different after that.
But then one job led to another and “doing something completely different” became more like… doing a slight variation on a thing I already did. Fast forward six years and I’ve worked at Peloton, Nike, and now a professional sports team. It certainly starts to sound like I’ve got a career in sports and fitness. But is it true? Did the little gay boy picking daisies in the outfield, daydreaming about Aaron Carter, became some kind of sports-businessman when he grew up?
Yes… and also… no. I’ve decided I haven’t grown up just yet.
I’ve decided to be young again. Or rather, I am young and I’ve decided to believe that again. And where better to do that than New York.
I’m choosing to believe that I haven’t gone too far down any one path, that I can always start over again. I don’t need to decide whether sports are forever or New York is forever. The big picture is overrated.
My life is still a Choose Your Own Adventure book, although maybe every adventure doesn’t need to end with me being extremely famous. I’ll take niche fame.
I want to be one of those gay guys on TikTok with a middling sense of humor, millions of followers, and an eight-figure podcast deal.
I want to be a writer that lives in the woods, throw my phone into the ocean, and communicate only via letters. I want to spend my days locked in a cabin writing the Great American Novel. Or at least a half-decent romance novel someone can describe as “surprisingly clever” in a four-star review on Goodreads.
I want to go on Survivor and win and I also want to go on Survivor and lose but be such a fan-favorite that I keep getting asked to come back.
I want to live on the beach and run a tiny bookstore. Ideally in Australia.
I think what I really want is to be Selena Gomez. I want to be a pop star and also star in a critically-acclaimed TV show with comedy legends and also get Oscar buzz for a supporting role in a foreign film and also be a beauty mogul and also host not one but two cooking shows on Discovery+. She’s genuinely inspiring because she does everything, even though she’s not particularly good at any of it.
I realize that I’m not Selena Gomez and I probably can’t do everything. Maybe one day I’ll accept that. Maybe one day I’ll find myself confidently headed down a path without any urge to veer wildly off course. Maybe, I’ll grow up. Or maybe I won’t!
I still think I can do anything. I can change my life again and that’s precisely what I’m doing. I’m choosing my own adventure. Right now, it’s soccer. Maybe pop superstardom is next.
Thanks for reading. I love you like a love song, baby.
my favorite reads :) so excited for u Colin. this is major. nyc 2.0 xo
(Im)patiently waiting for the Survivor arc 🍿