Terri Trespicio - Unfollow Your Passion: How to Create a Life that Matters to You

Engaging, no-nonsense, and challenges conventional thinking.

Sarah Knight, New York Times bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck

Unfollow your Passion

How to Create a Life that Matters to you

Terri Trespicio

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Copyright 2021 by Terri Trespicio LLC

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First Atria Books hardcover edition December 2021

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Interior design by Suet Chong

Jacket art by Stocksy

Author photograph by Kimberly Vandrilla

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Trespicio, Terri, author.

Title: Unfollow your passion : how to create a life that matters to you / Terri Trespicio.

Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021043101 (print) | LCCN 2021043102 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982169244 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982169268 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Self-consciousness (Awareness) | Success.

Classification: LCC BF637.S4 T75 2022 (print) | LCC BF637.S4 (ebook) | DDC 158.1dc23/eng/20211004

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043101

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043102

ISBN 978-1-9821-6924-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-6926-8 (ebook)

To my uncle, Rev. Robert Barone

Dont aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

Viktor E. Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning

I t didnt rain every day in 1996, but it felt like it did. I was twenty-two, temping for a socially awkward ob-gyn who smoked in his office. I worked in a windowless room, booking surgeries for women at odds with their ovaries. These were the days when you had to call in to your answering machine to check your messages. Every hour or so Id call my own number and wait for the robot to come up empty. For a chain of indistinguishable days, I stepped out of the building at 5:00 p.m., unfolded the umbrella like a damp wing, and huddled beneath it, biting back tears the whole way to the T.

I lived alone in a walk-up on Strathmore Road in Brighton, Massachusetts. I ate watching reruns in front of a TV on a wheeled cart. Thats what comfort was: temporarily staving off hunger under the spell of shows you knew the ending to. Around 9:00 p.m., Id call home. My mother would pick up the phone, as she did yesterday and would tomorrow. I cried into the phone; she listened in her loving and tireless way. Then Id go to bed.

A few months earlier, Id been in the car with my dad after graduation, and as we exited the campus and headed onto the Mass Pike he said, in a jovial way, though I wasnt feeling jovial, So? What are you going to do now?

I have no idea. And then I stopped talking because I thought I would cry.

Youll be OK, he said.

Since then, things had flattened out. I experienced a kind of miserable synesthesia, in which life became flavorless, colorless, textureless; I woke up each day inside the sensory deprivation tank of my brain, unsure of where I ended or began. I stood in the kitchen, eating cereal over the sink.

That spring, I had been busy and brimming with potential, my world like a sky crammed with stars: good grades, great friends, a boyfriend. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, won a cash grant awarded to the senior with promise of a writing career, moved into a sunny summer sublet with friends.

When summer ended, I was on my own. I invented errands. One Saturday I drove to the Chestnut Hill mall, believing what I needed was a pair of small hoop earrings. I sat in the car, looking at two glaring bits of metal in a box, and felt a nauseating swell of self-loathing. On the way home, sitting at a red light at Cleveland Circle, I realized with numb clarity that there was nothing to look forward to anymore, except that in a few moments the light would turn.

Fear sprouted a fresh green blade: What if this is it? What if Im never going anywhere and nothing ever happens again?

Im guessing youve been there too.

Maybe you thought you had it together and now find yourself eating straight out of a box, wondering WTF your life even is. Maybe youre six months out of college, ten years into a marriage, twenty years into a career. You liked it, maybe loved it, and now resent it. You may have suffered large losses, disasters. Or perhaps nothing seemed to happen. When asked how you are, you say you cant complain. And you mean it. You cant complain. This is life, you think.

Id been temping for six months or so when I got an informational interview at a then little-known business publication called Inc. magazine. The editor offered me a position as an editorial assistant on the spot. I was afraidthat I wouldnt know how to do it and thus would fail, that the salary was too low, that I didnt know anything about business. Though you know how you learn about business? Work at a fucking business magazine. Id like to leap back right now to 1996, march myself into Inc.s lovely waterfront offices by my own earlobe, and say, $18,500 a year? Great. Well take it.

I had the mistaken idea that I was supposed to know what to do, and that I had to know more or be more than I was to do anything of worth. And that I should figure that out first.

One night over the phone, my mother said, Honey, you dont plan your life, then live it. You create it by living it. Please take a job, any job. And so I did. I took a full-time job as an executive assistant at a management consulting firm. I needed the structure, the people, the benefits, the work. And that job, that basic office job, is what ultimately turned my life around and got it moving. Yes, I learned hard skills, soft skills, I learned to do things. But after a year or so, I also felt differently about myself and what I could do. It didnt matter that I had no interest in management consulting, or that I would leave that jobwhich I didand go back to school, and get another job after that. The momentum began the way it always does: By moving. The direction almost didnt matter.

I know what its like to feel youve done everything you were supposed to do and yet things arent clicking into place. When you know youre perfectly smart and capable, but your self-confidence acts like a trick kneesturdy and functional one moment, but can easily give out the next. You cant point to any one thing thats