How I Became A Professional Meme-Maker

When I was 18, I decided to start writing and publishing poetry. I started with a bad Tumblr blog, making image macros (poetic memes) and posting any small dumb poem I thought of. I started college, stopped taking my anti-depressants, dropped out, and got a soul-sucking office job writing news briefs about the alcoholic beverage industry.

One day I got an email from a man named Oscar. He had read my first ebook, The Islamic Takeover of 2013, a shock-jockily named collage and poetry tribute to my special relationship with my best friend, Austin Islam. He was helping to curate a selection of books to publish as part of a gallery show in Zurich, and wanted to include me. It would be my first time being published in print.

I was stoked. The book came out. I held copies of my work in my hand for the first time. I got fired from my soul-sucking desk job, and decided to order as many copies of my own book as I could afford and travel across the country reading to basements and DIY venues and college classrooms. I had built a significant online network of friends across the country through my Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter posts, and I traveled a lot performing my work, sleeping on the couches of internet strangers. I got published more times, releasing one print book a year for several years through a small publishing company based in Kansas. I toured the whole country. My 2006 Nissan Sentra took a beating.

The entire time, I was maintaining a home in Chicago, which had cheap-ish rent and a decent literary scene. I was happy. I was living off my art. But I was subsisting. I supplemented my income by doing karaoke in lingerie on cam sites, and working at a sandwich shop, and transcribing long interviews with celebrities for online media outlets. I did some journalism too, interviewing the first legally licensed transgender porn star in the United States, and sassily instructing men how to buy makeup for their girlfriend. I felt creatively fulfilled, but hungry.

A fan of my work was the senior class president at Sarah Lawrence College, located about an hour north of New York City, and he got the school to pay me to read there several times. College gigs were a good, reliable source of income for me, and I loved the excuse to be in the 'Big City'. I got a Spirit Airlines (widely considered to be the worst airline in the country) MasterCard, and used my points to get roundtrip flights to NYC that were sometimes as cheap as $40. I met good people there, and sort of fell in love with the drummer of a band.

In October 2016, the boy I sort of loved invited to me to come as a guest to a festival his band was playing in New York. Kanye was headlining. He said all I needed to do was get there, and they would get me an artist wristband so I could hang in the trailer and feel like I was fancy. I came, and, while watching some music, the boy put his arm around me and whispered, 'Move to New York and be my girlfriend.' I thought about it. I didn't really want to be his girlfriend, but I wanted to be in New York. I set a plan in motion.

New York was appealing to me for several reasons. I felt stagnant in Chicago. I was tired of just scraping by. And to this day, when people ask me why I relocated, I say the same, potentially idiotic thing: I wanted a career, and I wanted to live somewhere so fucking expensive that I was forced to be on my grind. And I wanted to be surrounded by people who were also grinding. New York, was, to me, a place of ambition and opportunity. Maybe that sounds naive, but I still feel this way.

In February 2017, I flew to the city and spent a week interviewing for shitty jobs, anywhere that would have me. I pretended I already lived in the city to encourage planes to offer me work. I did get offered a position, by a hair salon, as their receptionist. It was a job and they wanted me, so I took it. I worked four days crashing with friends, then every couple weeks flew back to Chicago for a few days to pack and tie up loose ends. I got my tonsils removed, my final painful experience in the Midwest, and moved to New York.

I worked at the salon for several months, sweeping up hair, answering phones, shampooing rich people, and having my appearance critiqued every day. I got comfortable, and lost sight of my purpose. One day, smoking a cigarette outside the salon, a stylist said to me, 'You're too smart for this. This is not a career for you.' It shocked me into action, and I sent out 51 resumes over the next 3 days. My resume was weird, because I had been working for myself for so long, but the decent-sized following I had accrued on social media for my personal brand spoke volumes, and I went to several interviews

I was offered two jobs on the same day - Job A seemed like it would be more fun and was walking distance from my house, but paid less, didn't offer benefits, and I didn't like the people there as much. Job B's staff had seemed chill and cool, paid more, offered benefits and a company computer, but the work didn't seem as thrilling. I took Job B, beginning my career as Content Creator at Flip.

Flip is an app and website that helps people find sublets and subletters. We verify employment, income, credit score, criminal background, and hold rent payments and security deposits in escrow so no one gets scammed. During the interview process, the CEO and CTO had looked through all of my social media and found it hilarious. I remembered my dad's years-long concern that my over-sharing online would keep me from getting a job. These potential employers had found it hilarious when I tweeted that 'doing meth one time was such a power move.' I felt blessed, accepted, and challenged by my new work.

The most exciting part of my new job was that, while the company had long established a Facebook and Twitter presence, they had yet to create a company Instagram account. I knew what I was good at, and I knew what would get results quickly: memes. I was given full reign over the direction the account would take, and I began churning out apartment-related original memes in mid-August.

Today, in early January, the account has over 10 thousand followers. I do other stuff at work, but every day, at least once a day, I find or create a meme about apartments, landlords, roommates or rental law. I'm reimbursed for travel to and from work. I have a MacBook for the first time in my life. And I work with awesome, down-to-earth, smart and driven people who value my weird mind and the stuff it creates.

I have a career, and a job where I don't have to worry about my employer Googling me and being horrified by what they find. I still have time for my creative writing. I'm working on a novel. I guess this post, my first post, is a way to get to know me and celebration of that; that I, a mentally ill college dropout from Indiana, have been able to find my niche and use my talents every day at a job I love in New York City.