I'm
one of the those individuals who falls somewhere between "Generation
x" and "Millennials." I'm old enough to know what it's
like to spend an entire summer playing in with neighborhood kids the
street but I also used to charge those kids 25 cents a pop to come
inside and watch us play Tetris. I'm tehnologically savvy and wired to the gills but so uncool that I thought "on fleek" had something to do with the Navy. Either way, it just seems more relevant to just round up my birth year and lump myself in with the younger, lost generation.
Recently, Millennials
have received an unfair onslaught of criticism from our media and
politicians. We have been told that we are lazy, entitled and
incompetent. We are expected to simply recover from things that we
did not invent, like subprime mortgages, by showing more "gumption."
I'll
use my story as an example. I graduated from LLHS in 2001, took
advantage of the lottery scholarship and enrolled at UNM. I earned a
BA in English, a first-generation graduate, the American dream.
I
landed a job as an editor issuing corporate press releases. I saw
myself at the bottom rung of a golden ladder, eager to reach the top.
My first summer, in 2007, I spent my days issuing an untold amount of
bankruptcy notices, my workload read like a shortlist for government
bailouts. I had a birds-eye view of the economic collapse but I
focused on staying busy, grateful to be employed. After work I'd
read stories of people living in cars and unable to feed their
families. I was determined this wouldn't happen to me. I worked
harder. My company had a round of lay-offs but I was promoted. I gave
100% of myself to my job and rung by rung I was making it up that
ladder.
My
life outside of work also blossomed. I got married and had a son. I
continued to work as my husband finished up his master's degree at
New Mexico Tech. When my husband landed a post graduate job at a
hydro-geological firm I made the difficult decision to leave the
workforce and to focus on our family. I had another baby and we were the ideal American family, one boy, one girl and a miniature pack of dogs.
Then,
my husband was abruptly laid-off. I've often tried to
figure out what was the most humbling moment of that whole
experience. Was it sitting across from a stranger at the WIC office
tearfully explaining I couldn't afford to feed my babies? Was it the
sobbing at my in-laws' dinner table asking for enough money to get
through "one more month?" Was it the hours spent in front
of a computer trying to get past online application algorithms in
hopes that somebody would look at my resume? Was it the my daughter's
first Thanksgiving Dinner, when I had to leave early to fold
tee-shirts at my minimum wage retail job? Was it the monthly smack in
the face when we got our student loan bills which we just couldn't
pay?
We
couldn't understand why we were working so hard and still had
nothing. We didn't want a handout but we had to take anything we
could get. We weren't lazy, we were exhausted. Finally, my husband
landed a job that kept him on the road 4 nights a week. It wasn't
ideal, the hours were long and the pay was low, but it was something.
I found job ghostwriting academic papers for pennies a word. Next to
nothing, but it still, something. For the first time we have hope, we
are dusting ourselves off and starting to climb that ladder again on
albeit, shaky legs. This is what we have to do, this is how we move
forward.
My
experience has shown me that we millennials are not struggling for
lack of trying. We are the smartest, most passionate generation in
history. Right now we are feeding on the scraps of a bygone era
but we will emerge stronger. Tasked with making something out of
nothing, we will bring about unprecedented innovation. We will get
there, we've got this huge mess to clean up before we can find our bootstraps, but it'll happen.
