Kelly Williams Brown Is Done Being A Personal Brand. She Wants To Focus On Something Bigger Than Herself.

"It’s helpful to remember that the world really doesn't care about you, and that's not a problem because there are people who care deeply about you, so your focus should be on those people."

Photo by Leah Nash

This story has been edited for length and clarity from an episode of The Aftergrad Podcast titled “Adulting, Please Advise” where Kelly Williams Brown talks about how she navigated the early stages of her career and offers tips on staying resilient when life doesn't go according to plan.

Our first-ever guest on The Aftergrad Podcast is often credited with coining and popularizing the ubiquitous term “adulting” – a word and experience we’ve all become far too familiar with. Kelly Williams Brown is a New York Times bestselling author whose first book Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps was an immediate success, so much so that Reese Witherspoon recommended it in her book club and JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot was set to produce the book’s TV-adaptation. Since then, she has written two more books titled Gracious: A Practical Primer on Charm, Tact, and Unsinkable Strength in 2017 and Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things in 2021. In the past, Kelly has worked as a reporter, a copywriter, a brand strategist, and is currently the Media and Public Relations Manager at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.

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Kelly Williams Brown is all grown up. She parents a St. Bernard named Eleanor. She pays a mortgage in Salem, Oregon. And she has a real adult job that she loves tremendously. And although charming and picturesque, this stability took time to acquire — 15 years in fact.

Admittedly, Brown, 38, is not an expert on being an adult, even though she wrote a whole book on the topic. She too struggles to keep her house tidy or ask for a well-deserved raise at work. In her opinion, “adulting isn’t a noun; it’s a verb. It’s the act of making correctly those small decisions that fill our day. It is something that you can practice and that can be done in concrete steps.” To date, she has shared over 500 steps on different ways we can act like or become a grown-up, as new editions of her first book have been released over the years.

Via Zoom, Kelly joined us on The Aftergrad Podcast to reflect on her experience as a writer, discuss the lasting impact of Adulting, and share aspects of her postgrad journey.

Kelly Williams Brown: Thank you! I am beyond honored to be the first-ever guest. I can't believe that.

Victoria Gilbert: It’s an honor to be speaking with you.

Robert Cain: We really appreciate it. Thank you for taking time out of your Sunday to join us.

Kelly Williams Brown: Well, thank you for making such a really thoughtful podcast that I absolutely could have used when I was fresh out of school because it's a really confusing time for everyone... 

Victoria: I feel like a fitting place to start for The Aftergrad Podcast is hearing about what the aftergrad life looked like for you shortly after you graduated from university.

I wasn't really thinking about this until I was coming on the show, but there are some parallels in my experience as a very recent grad and the ones that you all and everyone who is graduating right now, post-pandemic, have had in so far as I graduated in 2006 in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina happened during my senior year in the fall, and I was gone from my college for the first semester because it was closed.

When I graduated, I had gotten my degree in Journalism with a minor in Spanish from Loyola University in New Orleans, and my next move was to go and take a job as a reporter for a newspaper in rural Mississippi. I was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, which is Southern Mississippi. And it was also quite devastated by the hurricane, so I would say the similarities were that it was a time when everyone carried a great deal of trauma from what had happened. But we did not have a sense nor a context or understanding of what had happened at impact. I used to joke, and it's not a haha joke, but when you were dealing with people, you really had to be so careful because you didn't know if they had had a hurricane experience like mine, where I was able to evacuate beforehand or if they sat next to their dead relative. And so, it was a time when you had to be incredibly careful and thoughtful.

So I took the job in Mississippi, and it was an amazing job. I met two women who are mentors of mine to this day, whose advice really inspired Adulting. And I was incredibly poor. My take-home pay after taxes was $1150 a month. I had $300 a month in student loans, and I had $500 a month in rent, which was very high at the time for Mississippi, but there was so little housing stock because so much had been destroyed by the hurricane. So it was an interesting time when my ability to purchase food for myself was often in question. I figured out something called the Walmart Check Bounce Gift, which when I was about to overdraw my bank account, I would go to Walmart and get everything that I needed food-wise. And then you could write a check for $20 over the amount, and that would give you $20 back in cash. And so, then I would use that $20 for gas, and then I would get paid. And we would repeat the cycle. It was quite difficult, and I was flailing, and I felt like I was doing a terrible job at my job, the thing that I had really been preparing for and thought I was ready to do. And it was one of the women, Rachel, who was my mentor and also five years older than myself, when she said, “Nobody tells you how hard this year is. Everybody is just excited that you're graduating and congratulating you, and nobody acknowledges if you've been privileged enough that you went from living with your folks to college and sort of being under the care and guardianship of a college, or at least having the structure that it provides... you're literally being told at the beginning of every semester, here's the syllabus, here's what's gonna happen, here's what is expected of you, here's how you do well, and you no longer have that… it's incredibly, incredibly difficult.”

Victoria: So where were your parents while you were making this transition?

I wasn't at home. My family had moved up to Oregon. I'm from Louisiana originally. They moved up to Oregon when I was in high school, so they were up in Oregon, and I was just coming down across the country by myself, and without delving into it, there wasn't a position where I could say, “Hey, can you help me with my rent? Can you send some extra money?”

At the time, it felt very much like I had no safety net. I did ask my dad for money once, and he was able to give me some because my car, which was extremely required for my work because I had to drive about 100 miles a day back and forth between these little towns I was covering as a reporter. My car had a spectacular mechanical meltdown, and the engine was ruined. And so, I did ask for money at that point, but for the most part, I was really, really trying to avoid that.

Victoria: What did living in the moment feel like for you on a day-to-day basis? Did you make the most of it and were you happy every day, or did you find yourself feeling like what you're describing now to be less hopeful about what your future was to bring career-wise?

I think part of the reason that I did feel more okay with my life was that I felt like it was very much on a step to something bigger. And also, I was having such joyful experiences at work connecting with the older reporters and the editors and connecting with humans and getting the opportunity to report in Mississippi post-Katrina. That was really a fascinating and sometimes gutting task. But I mostly felt chaotic. I mostly felt like nothing would ever come together, both externally or internally...

It really was Rachel telling me that you just have to keep going and be here and be chaotic and trust that it is building towards something — that nothing is permanent. This too is a temporary stage toward something.

Victoria: I feel like as young adults, when we first graduate from college, even though we are facing these new circumstances that have us paying in so many different ways, one beacon of hope or source of light is through the career and having that hopefulness that we can eventually be put out of the situation and alleviated from the financial situations through career. So would you think of yourself back then as really ambitious in the career or more so just like, “I’ll just see what happens and what life brings, and I don't really know what's next yet?”

I was very ambitious in terms of my career. But for me, money has never really been interesting to me whatsoever, aside from the fact that I don't want to worry about it too much, which is of course a really privileged thing to say because we all don’t want to worry about money. But yeah, I wasn't particularly interested in the notion that I'm going to take over the world, or I'm going to move to New York and edit a magazine and be on my phone 24/7 or any of that. But I did know that this was the first step in building a career as a reporter, which is really all I ever wanted. And back then, you could either go to the big city and be a fact checker, or you could go to a really small place and kind of do it all... and get that experience. And so that's the choice that I made.

And I make it sound like things were very difficult, which they were. But I also got so much joy out of finally doing the thing that I had wanted to do and connecting with older, wiser reporters and editors. And when you’re a reporter, you go and you are present for people's stories, and you listen to them, and you ask them questions like “what is it like now” or  “what is this” or “what is that?” And so as a sort of terminally, you could say curious or you could say, noisy person... I really enjoyed that.

And I think we always assume that whatever is happening right now, will happen forever. And I use the example of stubbing my toe, where at that moment, I'm just like, “Well, now I'm in excruciating pain forever. This is my new life.” And it's hard to have the perspective that this is all forward movement. This is all only for now, whatever it is, good or bad.

Robert: It's funny that you mention physical pain because off camera I was talking to you about how Victoria and I met through tennis when we were in high school. We played a tournament together and kept our friendship alive, and I recently returned to playing tennis, and my shoulder became injured due to an overuse injury. And for a minute there, I felt as though that pain I was experiencing was going to be something that might potentially carry itself throughout the rest of time because that's just the way it feels whenever you're experiencing any type of physical or emotional pain.

Absolutely! And it's funny, we can maybe talk about this later if we want to talk about Easy Crafts for the Insane, but one thing that really highlighted my experience was that I was very physically injured multiple times. And it's interesting because you can't really remember physical pain afterward, but when it's happening, it's all you can perceive. Although I do feel like I can remember what emotional pain felt like. But very much, it's hard to take yourself out of the moment, out of the immediate whatever thing is kind of screaming in your head. 

Victoria: Do you think that could be a reason why so many people, once they reach their 30s, don't really reflect or tell the story of what the aftergrad moment looks like? Because when we were graduating, the reason why we started the podcast in the first place was that when we were experiencing all that was happening in this new phase of life, we were like, “why didn't we know that this feeling was a feeling, or that this is a phase that people go through or why is this so unspoken?” Do you think it's because they go through that pain and then they don't necessarily want to reminisce on it?

Nobody's ever asked me that. That's a really interesting question. So I think of two things. Number one, I do want to address part of what you just said, which is that actually the inspiration for Adulting — there were many inspirations, but one of the bigger ones was one of my older mentors. Her name is Rachel. She was 27 at the time. So even though that doesn't feel like any real gap now, it felt huge at the time. And she said, “people talk glowingly about this time, right? Fresh out of college, but nobody tells you how difficult it's going to be and how hard it is and how much you will feel like you're failing and you're not…” And, I'm here to tell you that you're doing okay. It won't be like this forever. And I remember the feeling of that because everybody talks about it as though it's so thrilling. You're off to take on the world, and then the actual truth is that it's a mess. 

If you've been privileged enough to be supported by your family and then go to college, it's such an enormous, complete reorientation of how you’ve lived because you've been under the guardianship and the guidance of either your family, or in the case of school, a university, that has really laid out a path. These are the classes you need to take in the order you need to take them. And you show up for the first day of class, and you get a syllabus, and here's everything that is expected of you, here is how you do it well, this is how you do it poorly, and then all of a sudden there isn't any of that. There's not that direct, constant feedback of, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong?”

So in terms of why we don't reminisce, I don't know where I heard this, and so I shouldn't present it as fact, but it does seem to be emotionally true that the further we get away from an event, one nice thing about the human brain is the more warmly and positively we tend to remember that event, which I think is actually a mechanism that's probably really healthy for us – that the better parts would stand out and the more difficult parts fade away. I haven't done that because of course, a lot of my career has been centered around really putting myself back into that moment and not just thinking, “Gosh, wasn't it fun? Wasn't it romantic?” Which parts of it really were...

There are amazing things about being 23 that you do not get again at other points in life, but also it's insanely difficult, and you couldn't pay me to redo my 20s. Of course, there are great things about being in your 20s, but there are also some not-so-great things. Wherever you are in your career, you're not probably where you want to be, if that's something that you want. If you're looking for partnership, you probably are running into walls there and have maybe made some not-great relationships. There can be real challenges within your friendships. They can be chaotic and turbulent, and you hold on to people for much longer than you should in a way that maybe you don't need to as you get a little bit older. So I think just giving credence to the fact that yes, this is very difficult. But your difficulty is not about you. Your difficulty is about how this is a hard transition and a hard time in life...

Robert: Well, when you say someone couldn’t pay you to redo your 20s, I really, really feel that. It feels like we’re in the heat of battle when navigating our 20s. And one of the things that I really like about your book Adulting is how you structure it very neatly with subheaders for each chapter where you're talking about family, you're talking about love, domesticity, and I think for me, my favorite chapter is the first one you share with us. And that's “Getting Your Mind Right.” So for us, young folks, who are currently navigating our 20s, what are some things that we can do right now, Kelly, to get our minds right?

It's interesting because this was kind of a thing when I was young, but really so nascent with social media, whereas now it's everywhere. One of the most important things that I still have to grapple with every day is that comparison is the thief of joy when you look enviously at a very small version of what someone else is purporting themselves to be. I think it’s helpful to remember that the world really doesn't care about you, and that's not a problem because there are people who care deeply about you, so your focus should be on those people and not the world at large. I think remembering that whatever it is, is really only for now, and you're moving through it.

I think one thing that would’ve been really useful for me, and again, it's a luxury to sit here 15 years later and say these are the ways I've learned things the hard way, in ways that really maybe I couldn't have absorbed if you told it to me back then, but I think remembering that even when I come to difficulties or pain, those are things that enlarge me as a human, and I don't have to enjoy it. I don't have to treasure it or be happy it happened, or be grateful for it. You just need the realization of, “okay, this is terrible, and you're probably going to come out of this with something useful. So let's just see what we can do right now. Do that and set aside any feelings about whether this is good or bad, deserved or not deserved – or any of that.”

Robert: I think that's exactly right. And I'm thinking about something that recently happened. Victoria, you and me, we were up for a grant opportunity. There was a chance for us to receive $75000 via a competition, and we had structured our reality to be so fixated on what that would mean for our adulthood and what that would look like professionally – and not necessarily comparing. But unfortunately, we weren't awarded that opportunity. And what I like about what you're saying is that you don't have to be grateful for these tough times, but you just have to accept that that's where you’re at and that's just a matter-of-fact of what happened, and I think that kind of speaks to the necessity of us to lean into finding ways to be resilient, which I know you know so much about based on your story.

Yeah, absolutely! And thinking like, “I don't have to understand this right now.” For me, with my experiences, I have noticed that usually the less I understand something in the moment, the more I end up taking away from it, which is useful.

But this is a small example… Actually, no it's not... It was a major example in my life when I was in a low period. In my postgrad period, I fell in love with someone, my boyfriend of three years. And I had never been so certain about anything in my life than I was that this was the man for me. We're going to get married, we were going to have children. Our goals aligned. This was it. There were so many questions in my life, but I didn't question this. And then, guess what? That ended, and I was bewildered by it because I'd been so sure and so certain that this was it, and it's really only in time that I realized, “if you hadn’t married Adam, then you wouldn't have written your book. If you didn’t marry Adam, you probably would’ve taken a job as a Public Information Officer for a state agency, so he could pursue his political career. If that were the case, then you wouldn’t have been able to have this very fabulous and wonderful and exciting life.”

Things are not going to go according to your plan, whatever that plan is. And you have to accept that maybe there are larger, different plans that you do not understand and can't perceive right now.

Victoria: As you say that, what I'm taking away is don't look to your sides, obviously, but mainly, possibly, just look up to those who are older for insight in this present state in this present moment. And also look up to your truth. And to where we find love and to where we find the joyful moment. So like you said, in your job, that's where you found your passion, and that's what made your day-to-day happy in the midst of the things that you were going through. I have a quote for you. After writing your book, I found on Penguin Random House which stated that “your accomplishments of writing the books mostly made you feel fraudulent.” So as you were riding the wave of what many would consider in this moment now, like your high, what made you feel fraudulent and what were the things that made you feel less fraudulent in that moment? 

I really did feel fraudulent. Although, I don't think I was fraudulent. I had been really clear when I wrote the book that it was a reporting project. It was a thing of, “I don't feel like I know these things of how to keep my house clean or how to ask for a raise at work, or what different health insurance plans are… so I'm going to go find people who do know these things, and I'm going to interview them.” The book has at least 100 interviews in it, and probably more. But people thought I was a lifestyle guru, like Martha Stewart. But it was very much like, “No, I'm writing this because I'm the opposite of a lifestyle guru. I'm writing this because my fridge smells terrible. It has something that used to be celery, and now it's like a slurry.” And it was hard because I didn't want to present myself as this together person. But also, I'm not really a together person. I still wouldn't really call myself a together person. I think there are some people for whom things come a little bit more automatically. I'm someone who has a lot of ADHD and Bipolar 2. So there are some things that make it a little bit harder for me to find that structure, and it was really difficult when I did run into problems because everyone was like, “Didn't you write a book on this?” And it's like, “Yeah, I did. But if I could write a book that would eliminate the pains of life, then I would be a billionaire.” I didn't do that. I wrote a book on things that are helpful to know as you emerge into your own as an adult, whatever that looks like.

Victoria: I'm sure after writing the book though, a community at large surfaced for you to find others who related to your story of not necessarily knowing how to navigate adulthood.

Oh, absolutely. And I was really lucky. I still receive so many lovely emails that come in where people are like, “This made me feel so much better. This made me feel like I could do it. It's not as hard as it seems. It's not as complicated as it seems,” which was kind of my point. None of it is really rocket science, but if you've never been told and you have never had time to learn to cook or to see what housekeeping looks like, if you've never been in the workplace, then how could you know those things?

Robert: You also have a second book titled Gracious where you're interviewing people, women, and you're talking to these people who at that time were much older than yourself, and it was also a reported piece. And so, Adulting, your first book, was a New York Times bestseller. Was there this expectation for your second book that, internally for yourself, it was going to have similar success?

I was really, really lucky to have a crazy amount of fortune when I published Adulting. Even before it was published, I was someone who was living in a tiny apartment, literally 100 yards from an extremely busy railroad track. It was like the I-5 for railroad tracks. It had, I think, 23 trains per day. So all of a sudden, I would be doing things like talking to Darren Star, who was the producer of Sex and the City about a TV treatment, and I'd be like, “I have to put you on hold really quick.” And I would put him on hold, and then be like, “Yeah, I need to mute you for a second, so you don't think I'm about to be hit by a train.”

The book just made a big splash. I think I really touched on something that resonated with a lot of people, which was this feeling of everyone knows these things, and I don't. And that feeling of being fraudulent, which now there's a lot of discourse around our vulnerabilities, and there are so many things I appreciate about Gen Z in contrast to millennials or Gen X, but the willingness to talk about what it's like and particular difficulties is incredibly refreshing because that dialogue really was not happening very much at all in 2012 and 2013.

So naturally, I was like, “Surely, every time someone writes a book, it gets translated into 14 languages and then there's a fight over who gets to produce it with JJ Abrams winning. That's just a very normal experience of book writing, which it’s not.” There was a lot of pressure for me to do an Adulting 2, and I just really wasn't interested in doing it at that point because I felt like I said what I needed to say on the subject. I don't know that there's a whole secondary chapter, but there's also always a challenge with a sophomore effort. And I felt them with this.

And there were other challenges with that book. First off, it was published in May 2017. And there was a certain election that happened in November 2016 that made me feel like I wanted to cancel the book – that civility and graciousness were no longer the most important thing. The most important thing was fighting.

Also what was happening at the same time, right before the book came out, I broke both of my arms in separate incidents, three weeks apart. I broke my elbow and then fractured and dislocated my shoulder, so I didn't have any arms, which made promotion difficult. And it really came out when I was sliding into the low place that I would later chronicle in Easy Crafts for the Insane.

Robert: And I feel like your narrative, the one that you portray in this particular book with all of those events that you're mentioning now, there were even more things that happened right? Your father was diagnosed with cancer, you broke multiple limbs in unrelated incidences, and obviously, this book is very personal. Your first two books are reported pieces, and this one was a memoir. And here you are on our show. You were somehow able to make it through those tumultuous periods of your life. So I'm curious, what did that recovery phase look like and how were you able to get through it?

I don't want to make it too dark on the podcast, but I had a really, really, really difficult 16 months. In addition to the two arms thing, when I thought I was finally emerging, I broke my ankle and couldn't walk for 2 months. I got divorced. Trump was elected. My grandmother died. My cat died. My dad was diagnosed with cancer. I was in a really toxic relationship that was very bad for both of us, and I was also sort of in some really toxic friendships. I was really depressed. I wasn't leaving my house. I wasn't working. I wasn't doing anything. I was just sitting on my couch watching Bob's Burgers and having a lot of dog hair on me, and then ordered Jimmy John's. And it really came to a head when I was put on an antidepressant that didn't work well for me, and it sent me into a really dangerous state, like a mixed manic state, where you have features of both depression but also impulsivity and recklessness. 

So anyway, it all ended with what I called my Victorian Rescue, which is what I call being in the psychiatric hospital. You’ve got to make it a little more glamorous. I was rescuing for four days, and then when I emerged from that, it was really the ruins of my life. The relationship was over, I had experienced what was described as catastrophic loss of chosen family, which was quite accurate. I didn't have a job. I didn't have any sense of continuity from my former self who had been kind of this bright shining star. And then, I undertook a real deliberate and long period of rebuilding. It took about three years altogether, I would say. And a lot of it was really hard mental health work of like, “What do I need? What are the issues here? How do we work on them?”

It took a long time to get here, but I finally had the realization that writing books just does not make me happy at all. Writing books made me really miserable, and it looked glamorous from the outside to people, and it was glamorous sometimes. But mostly, it was just me being in my house being stressed out, having a big job, not having people to talk to and interact with, and I'm a very outgoing person who thrives in a conversation or in a relationship. And so, I'm won’t say never, but my phase of like, “I'm a personality, I'm Kelly incorporated,” that was really bankrupting to me. I don't want that. I want something where I feel like I'm working for something that's larger than myself than a personal brand.

Victoria: Can you explain to us what grace looks like to you? After writing Adulting and giving us basically a rule book on more mature decisions we can make that kind of define what an adult looks like, but also understanding and revealing to us the new and not-so-convenient things that are happening to us knowing that we need to be more lenient with ourselves and within the subset of rules that you have covered in the book. So what does grace look like to you now?

Grace is a really old term, and it shares roots with the word charisma. There's a lot of divine implication to it – that when we show grace, we are reflecting a sort of divinity to others. In a simple way, when I think of someone who is really gracious, I think about somebody who could be really intimidating or scary, but when you're with them, you feel like you're being brought up to where they are. And that bringing up of others is sort of where I see that as being gracious.

In addition to grace to others, there's grace to ourselves, and there's grace to acceptance, to forgiveness, to trying really hard not to be either in the past or the future – both of which are unchangeable. But just working to be right here and really present for the people that you're with in that moment.

Robert: A moment ago, you talked about no longer wanting to present yourself to be this personality or this personal brand because you can find out to be incredibly bankrupting. But being this person that has written 3 books, and you eventually came to realize that you don't like writing books as much as you thought you did, what's next for you in your personal adulting journey? In your bio, we mentioned that you're now working as a Media Manager at Linfield University.

So I love my job more than I have loved any job since being a reporter, which being a newspaper reporter isn't really an option anymore. And it took me a while to find it. I took about six to eight months on my job search, and I really thought through all the implications of like, “I do not want to work for a capitalist enterprise.” Like I said at the beginning, I’m not interested in money. I need to make around $75,000 to $80,000 a year to be able to afford my mortgage and do the essential things. That is all the money I'm interested in and nothing more than that. I want to work in a place with good people, with people who are thoughtful and motivated and open and aware. Life is too short to work for assholes, as my mentor Lee once told me. And I wanted to be a part of something that I really believe in. And it's hard with institutions. They are always going to let you down because they're people. They're made up of people, and they're mostly good people, but then there are some bad people in there.

But Linfield as a school reminds me a lot of the school I went to, which was just a really transformative and important place for me. And I would not say that college is the best years of my life, but it was a really transformational time in my life. It's when I sort of became the person I am today in a way that I really didn't in high school. 

I've never been a morning person. I don't think anything should happen before 10:00 AM except for sex and reading things on your phone, but I get up out of bed at 6:00 AM, and I'm commuting, and I'm working late and doing extra, and I would have never thought that I would have found satisfaction in this… but I really do. So for me, it's about listening to yourself and thinking about not what other people find cool, or what looks impressive when you post it, but what in the day-in and day-out feels resonant and is making you into the better version of yourself.

Robert: It's interesting to hear you say that because back in 2021, when we were in the middle of the pandemic, I quit my job, Victoria quit her job, and we were embarking on this journey of starting The Aftergrad Podcast. And you mentioned the reasons why you're not wanting to be this personal brand yourself and why you find it bankrupting. For me, it just resonates very deeply because I'm kind of in this bind, in this moment where I want to continue to move forward in my career, but as you were mentioning earlier with the difference between maybe a Gen Z and Gen X or a Gen Z and a millennial, we really aren't interested in negotiating on certain values. And for me, one thing I see so clearly with a lot of these corporations is how they choose the bottom line over their human capital – people that make the business run – and it's very depressing and unfortunate to see people being laid off and not being cared for by these big brands that have millions and billions in their bank account. So from your experience or just guidance, what should we young people be thinking about when juggling the balance of making sure that we're financially sustainable from a personal standpoint, but also not sacrificing some of the values that we hold near and dear to our hearts? Obviously, there are bills to pay. There are responsibilities that we're beholden to. We might have family members that we're supporting.

That's a great question, and I wish I had a really clear answer for you than what I'm going to give, but this is what I would say. It's a luxury that I am 15 years into my career, and I have the ability to sort of do a little bit of a slower job search and try to find just the right thing for me. It was certainly not the case when I was freshly out of school. Like you said, there are very real reasons that one might need to make money, that one probably does need to make money. And so, I think in those situations, there can be a compromise. There can be a compromise of like, “I really don't like what this company is doing, but for now, I need to be able to take care of my mom, and so I'm going to take this for now, and do this for now, and then ideally get to a place where I can do something else.”

I also recommend, and the pay is never going to be good, but thinking about non-profits that you can work for. Are there educational organizations that you can work for? Are there things that align with my values that I can do? And one thing that I'm hopeful for about the future is that as more and more millennials and Gen Z come into power, they choose to create those spaces for each other where we can engage in something that looks more like mutual aid rather than shareholder dividends.

Robert: I do think that Gen Z, at least some of the communities that I'm a part of, there's so many new technologies and communities like Web 3 and DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, that are presenting different opportunities for people from our generation to build community for ourselves. And I’d like to reminisce for a moment on the fact that you've written three books, and one thing that I really want people to get from this conversation is the fact that I think regardless of where you might be in your career, writing books or doing anything really takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. So I'm curious, both with your books but then also with various moments in your career as well, what have been some of the sacrifices that you've had to make along the way and do you regret any of them?

I think regret is hard to talk about. I try very hard not to dwell in regret because there's no point. The best you can do is think, “Okay. What’d I learn there? What would I want to do differently next time? That's just what happened, and I have to accept that.” There's no way to alter the past. I think probably if I went back in time and made choices where I sort of stayed in more structured environments, then that would have been a lot better for me. This is not saying for anyone else, because everybody is different. 

As you get to know yourself, I tell people, “Don't think about what you do want, think about what you don't want, and avoid the things you don't want while keeping a really wide field of opportunity or possibility in front of you, because there are lots of things that can make any of us happy.” I did make a lot of sacrifices, and I think a lot of the sacrifices were sort of to my own personal happiness in thinking that this was something that clearly other people thought was impressive and other people wanted for me, and so I would do it rather than sort of thinking about what circumstances actually made me happy. That said, I am deeply satisfied with where my life has brought me, and so I really wouldn't want to change any of it because that would compromise where I am today, or it would be different now.

I think that the realization that something may sound really cool, but it might not be for you was a good one for me to have. And it's not to say that people shouldn't write books because obviously, they should. But it didn't bring me joy, and it didn't bring me fulfillment. And it happened at the expense of my relationships and mental health and sort of just day-in, day-out satisfaction.

Robert: Which is so interesting to hear you say because at least from the research we did and the fact that you’ve written 3 books, it seemed like writing books kind of might be something that brought you at least a little bit of joy.

This is my dirty secret. I love having written something, but I hate writing. I didn't even keep a journal when I was growing up. I just happen to be good at writing. For someone with ADHD and someone who is really an extrovert and who thrives on a structure where for example, “Now is the time when we wake up and now is a time where we put on clothes and leave our house.” I can only see now, in retrospect, the difference that I feel from putting myself in a really unstructured, lonely environment for all those years.

But that's just me, and humans are deeply different, and we want different lives, and different things make us happy or unhappy. And I think more than anything, I recommend just listening to yourself and trusting yourself when you're getting those messages of like, “This is right for you. This is wrong for me. And not trying to judge it by the external rubrics.”

Robert: Earlier you mentioned comparison being the thief of joy. I think that especially with our access to other people's lives, it seems like so consistently we are doing damage to our mental health by looking at what everyone else’s definition of success instead of trying to define that for ourselves. And you're at this moment now, 10 years removed from you writing and then publishing Adulting and few other books. For the young Gen Z folks, the young adults coming of age, specifically the ones graduating this upcoming May, what would be some of those lessons, new or in the past, that you would impart on that particular generation, with all the experience that you've learned over the years?

Avoiding what you don't want. Rather than trying to say, “This is the one thing that will make me happy. This is where I'm going, and if I don't get there, I'm going to be a failure.” Because for all of us, there's so much that we could do that would fulfill us. I could have been a therapist. I would have loved working in HR. There is any number of relationship-based things that I also would have loved. I think realizing that you're in for a hard time, and then when those hard times come accepting that it’s going to be a hard time and that it’s natural to experience hard things, so it’s not a huge shocker. But remember that you’re going to move through it. You don't see growth in the moment. Usually, it's only in retrospect. So I would say know that even though you're not getting the feedback of like, “I got an A, so I did this well,” you’re still absorbing, and you’re still growing. You are becoming bigger and more capable even when it really doesn't feel like it.

And remember that you’re not going to be good at everything. I'm still not a very clean person. I really wish I was a tidy person, but I'm not. And that’s okay because there are a lot of great things about me. And so, if I can just figure out what the minimum level is required here and then try to do that, then I won’t get twisted about how I’m not a different person than myself.

Robert: As you promote in your book, it's about showing yourself grace and just being at peace with the fact that you were put on this Earth in a particular type of way. Sure, there are certain things that we can come to change about ourselves over time, but ultimately, I don't have to be good at everything. Nor should I want to be. Lastly, I was reading in an article that you were in the process of applying to a grad school program at Lewis and Clark for mental health counseling. Did you actually enroll in that program?

Unfortunately, I didn't, which was a disappointment. And that was hard because I really thought that maybe being a therapist was kind of going to be my second life. Then I realized that like most master’s degrees, this was going to take three and a half years, and I wouldn’t be able to work a steady job throughout the program given the changing hours, so I made the decision to defer. I thought, “Okay, well... maybe in the future. But clearly, right now, it's not going to work.” And I tend to be someone who when doors open, I walk through them. But when doors seem to slam shut, I try to accept that. 

Grad school is a great idea for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It's not a good idea if you're just like, “I don't know what to do, so I'm going to spend $80,000 on something. That's not a good idea.

Robert: And so many people do that. They go down that path.

I know, and it's like, “That's a really expensive way to put off trying to figure things out. And you'll have to figure things out afterward, so may as well try to do it now.” So I'm sad that's not going to happen now, but I am also aware that if I've learned nothing, it is that the future is big. It contains possibilities that we never can predict or see from where we are. It contains exciting and joyful and bountiful things. And maybe there's a time when it's right for me to go back to school and become a therapist, and I'm going to do that. But for right now, I feel really good where I am, and I'm finding the joy in existing where I am. And that's a challenge for all of us. But the more I do it, the more I get from it. 

Robert: Thank you so much, Kelly, for joining us on The Aftergrad Podcast. It means a lot to me and Victoria to be able to talk to you and for you to share your story with our community.

Well, thank you so much! I really enjoyed being here.