I’ve worn many hats in my life. Dropping out of high school, being addicted to something most of the time and generally having no plan at any given moment has put me in a lot of different jobs and situations.
Somehow, all the twists and turns my life has taken—usually as a result of bad decisions—have rounded out my skillset as an activist and an organizer. It just took years to realize how.
My first ever job was a summer gig on a conservation property. Every day I hiked around a few thousand acres of private land in Montana with a backpack full of herbicide and sprayed clumps of knapweed. Sometimes we did other work around the place like building fences, laying irrigation pipe, and controlled burns.
I did that for two summers, and during the year I wrote freelance online. Remember those stupid “Top 5 whatever” articles? You used to get like $100 a pop for those, and I spent a ton of time in writers workshops grinding those out for beer money.
My second real job (I think) was landscaping, which I did for about a month. I worked maybe three shifts and then quit.
After that I worked in a frozen yogurt shop. My job was to come in at night to take apart and clean the machines, then in the morning I’d put them back together, mix new batches, chop fruit for the topping bar, other prep stuff. That job sucked.
I did that for about six months and then went back to the coast to trim weed, this time managing a trim scene and then helping to manage a farm the next year. The third year I ran my own farm…into the ground, then floundered for another year before moving back in with my mom, broke as shit.
From there I got a job as an apprentice tile setter at 23, which I did for four years. (Somewhere in there I worked for about six months at the only pizza place in my town that was open after bar close. Many Whiteclaws were shotgunned in the walk-in.)
At 27(?) I quit that tile job and got a 12-month work visa in Australia; I worked a couple weeks at a shitty burger restaurant, then found a full time job re-grouting showers. The hours were insane and the work sucked. Every morning I’d wake up at 5:30am and drive all over Melbourne to grind the old nasty grout out of people’s showers, re-grout and seal them, and head home. That was the worst job I’ve ever had.
My apartment happened to be down the street from a world-famous MMA gym so I started training Muay Thai nightly after work. I’d be dog tired from work and awake for 14 hours at that point, but I went every night. I had to, because living in Melbourne was the most miserable I’d ever been and fighting for a couple hours a night kept me sane.
After ten months of that I’d had enough so I moved home early. While in Australia I’d managed to save up some money—one of the few upsides to working 60 hour weeks and never going out—which I used to move across the country and start my own business, which will either live or die depending on this year’s tax season. I could be back to scrubbing showers soon, who knows!
I say all of that to say this: every single job has taught me something valuable, something that’s added to my skillset as an organizer and made me more effective at the work I do today.
For instance, I didn’t realize it at the time, but that nightmare job I worked in Australia made me a really good talker. Some background: when I took that job I was socially illiterate, having spent my whole life on job sites, farms, and back-of-house—usually very drunk. I couldn’t talk for shit, and taking that job was terrifying.
But over the course of doing a couple hundred house calls, I learned to meet clients at the door and get through introductions, explain what I was there to do, and answer questions before they were asked, all in a matter of minutes. I learned how to get a script ready in my head and adlib stuff on the fly, how to answer questions with authority even when I wasn’t sure, how to explain a service a client didn’t understand in terms that that were digestible; not to mention learning to navigate all the small talk in between.
Now when I get to someone’s door while we’re doing union canvassing, I am efficient. I used to organize in the back because I didn’t want to talk to people; driving, heavy lifting, shopping, whatever kept me away from people. Now I’m out in front, something I never thought I’d say. I’m in there talking my ass off because I’m good at it now! I know what we’re there to do and can present it in plain terms, I can hold eye contact and keep someone engaged, I can ask the right questions, and I can rattle off important information quickly. Getting a complete stranger to sign a petition is a game of seconds—who the hell are you, I’ve got dinner on the stove—and that horrible year working for The Grout Guy made me an absolute weapon on someone’s front porch.
Even more useful to tenant canvassing, my time as a tile guy made me an expert in water damage and mold, so I can walk through someone’s unit and spot that stuff in places where a lot of folks don’t even know to look. I’ve spent enough time on construction crews and doing handyman work that I can call bullshit on ridiculous repair costs and timeframes, but also identify the mechanics of an understaffed building maintenance crew and how those issues manifest in the lives of the folks who rent there.
Lots of people think organizing is marching in the streets and throwing Molotovs, and I was also bummed to learn it’s actually just spreadsheets and emails most of the time. Here I fall back on my freelance writing experience constantly, back to when pitching articles was about speed and clarity and how much weed I could smoke depended on how many I could crank out. Editors for any given site might either approve or trash dozens of pitches daily, so those pitches have to be skeletal, concise, tight; “title, body, sources;” and when I send an email it’s straight to the fucking point and laid out to be read and processed as quickly as possible, because I’ve had a lot of practice.
It isn’t just different jobs that I pull skills from; all of my hobbies and experiences have contributed something to the work I do today.
Combat sports are great for learning how to hospitalize someone with leg kicks but more importantly they taught me how to manage fear and navigate verbal confrontations. Distance running and weight lifting taught me how to push through pain and stay focused on a goal, which I often find useful when sitting in rush hour traffic or requesting access to the same Google Doc for the fifth time. Being active on the administrative side of addiction recovery groups helped me understand how to run a meeting, hammer out agenda items and keep shit on track, manage donations, make a schedule.
The last piece to all of this is the amount of information I’ve consumed during all of these chapters of my life. Spending most of my adult life mostly working alone meant I could keep the audiobooks and podcasts absolutely cooking for six, eight, ten hours a day, and you can burn through a lot of theory during a two-hour trip to the gym. And every night I didn’t go out and drink were more hours I could spend learning something.
Obviously I didn’t just wake up one day and have every prerequisite skill I needed to be effective; for instance I still had to put myself through paramedic training so I could be a medic for protests and gun groups, and there are a dozen more new things I realize I need to learn every day. I’m still learning hard practical lessons whether I like it or not. But the things I picked up along this frantic and poorly thought out journey that’s been my life have somehow coalesced into a very well-rounded skillset for the work I need to do now.
So my message to you is this: always be learning and doing stuff. You may take a lesson that informs the rest of your life from unlikely places and experiences. A job like re-grouting people’s piss stained showers could make you a politician-level yapper without you even realizing it til one day it just kicks in. Your shitty construction job that you hate might give you insight into building codes that could help someone fight a wrongful eviction. There’s something to learn and gain from everything we do and experience, whether we know it or not.
And lastly, I know a lot of folks in leftist spaces are as socially inept as me and one of the biggest barriers to getting active in organizing is talking to people. Brother, I promise that if you just grind that shit out for a while the skills will come. It will become comfortable and something you can do instinctively, just like any other skill that needs practice to get good at.
We collect skills from all over. Every new thing learned, every new area of competence or even expertise, makes us more effective as individuals. Nobody can learn everything but on our own we can learn a lot, we can find and hone our strengths, and when we come together we’re that much more effective as a group.
Tonight at an AA meeting a guy dropped an analogy about how we’re all slices of Swiss cheese full of holes—stuff we don’t know, weaknesses we have, things we haven’t experienced—but when we come together, we’re a pack of Swiss cheese slices and the holes are all sealed up by…another piece of cheese? Honestly it was a really bad analogy, but it does lend itself to my point.
this is called resilience! You never quit, and always found a way forward! Good job! I’ve also had a plethora of jobs since I entered the workforce 10 years ago. I’d say my worst job was working at a Chipotle and I wasn’t even on the line, I’d have to throw out the trash and the trash would fill up so fast so I’d literally just be going in circles and sometimes the bags would rip and disgusting meaty sodaie juice would fall on me and I’d question life. I definitely learned, never to eat chipotle again…
hey! Did your TT page disappear? There’s a group on here that’s looking for safety info for protests etc and before I deleted TT I came across your field kit videos I told them to look for you but they can’t find your page.