Nicole: Rethink ambition.

In this episode, Kristin talks with Nicole—a literature PhD, high school teacher, and maker—about what happens when the life you worked toward doesn’t turn out the way you expected.

From growing up in a working-class family where work was about survival, to navigating academia, nonprofits, and ultimately finding her way to teaching, Nicole shares a deeply honest look at ambition, burnout, and redefining success on your own terms.

Together, they explore what it means to step off the “expected” path, build a life rooted in stability and creativity, and embrace moments where you’re not striving for more but simply figuring out what feels good.

A conversation about detours, healing from survival mode, and why it’s okay to not always be climbing.

How to get in touch:

• SexyBeastJewelry on Etsy

Transcript

Kristin 0:03

Welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real, a podcast about careers, detours, and the absurdity of work. Here we explore the twists, the pivots, and the tiny choices that shape our work lives with humor, feminism, and honesty. I'm your host, Kristen. Let's get into it. Hello, and welcome to Everything Counts But Nothing Is Real. Today's guest is a close friend who has a really interesting take on work and careers. I've seen her work hard, achieve a PhD, and then find that the path is not what she expected. But she's one of the smartest people that I know, and I'm really excited to talk to her. Um, Nicole, she her, is a high school teacher, literature PhD, and maker whose life and work challenged the idea that success has to look a certain way. After years in higher education, she ended up in a path that offered more stability, presence, and room for creativity, including making beautiful, one-of-a-kind jewelry by hand. She's someone who reminds us that you can still find meaning in work when your ambitions didn't turn out the way you hoped they would. Nicole, welcome to the show.

Nicole 1:09

Hi, Kristen. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Kristin 1:12

I really am excited about this conversation because I think it's like healthy and important. I think that like the idea of paths is such a flawed idea sometimes. And I think that the everything counts for it is that like everything that we're doing and building, including the things that we're doing and building in our lives, that's what matters. It's like a holistic picture. Anyway, so welcome, welcome. Can you tell us what you do right now?

Nicole 1:35

Right now, I teach English, well, we call it literature. I work for the literature department, but I also teach religion at an independent high school in downtown Manhattan.

Kristin 1:45

Amazing.

Nicole 1:45

This has been how long have you been doing this? This is only my second year.

Kristin 1:49

Okay. So it's still new. And I think you're like, it's been a real interesting experience. It has. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And we also just real fast get it out of the way that, like, it's a fancy school.

Nicole 2:02

It is, yes. Yes. Um, though to be fair, most independent high schools in Manhattan are fancy schools. That is how they make their bread and butter, is by being the alternative to public schools.

Kristin 2:13

And you may or may not be teaching some celebrities' children.

Nicole 2:17

Yes, yes.

Kristin 2:18

That is indeed true that I do teach some celebrities' children.

Nicole 2:21

Technically, I am legally not permitted to discuss which celebrities those are, but that is a reality of teaching in those kinds of private schools.

Kristin 2:29

That's so cool though. I would never ask, but I just like the idea of knowing that like so many of us, you we grew up in like normal places. Yeah, that's true. The idea of like being a kid of a celebrity isn't even like, that's like a crazy concept in and of itself.

Nicole 2:44

Yes, yes, that is true. And I mean, my entire life has been defined by being introduced to new levels of wealth that I did not really truly fathom previously existed before. And so this is another phase in that path.

Kristin 2:55

It's the true New York City experience of just like, wow, that boundless wealth that is around us, but not ours in our pockets. Nope, not even close. Can you tell me what about work or life is like lighting you up right now or giving you hope in any way?

Nicole 3:14

Something I really do love about my job is that I have always enjoyed working with young people, even though, you know, there are plenty of stereotypes about teenagers that are true. Often stereotypes come from somewhere, even if it's a negative place. But the teens that I work with, I really enjoy the fact that the school I landed at has a reputation for being this kind of haven for the children of artists historically. Artists meaning theater people, musicians, actresses. And so something that I have really enjoyed is that that has ended up meaning there is a more formidable population of queer kids than I think I would have assumed when I first interviewed at the place. And I ended up being the faculty advisor of a group called Bycons, which is, it sounds like it's specifically for bisexual students, but it's not. And I myself do not identify as a bisexual, as you know. It is primarily a queer media group that the kids started. And I have really enjoyed getting to know students, especially at this really vulnerable point in their lives, both in that club, but also in my classrooms. I run a lot of creative projects where kids end up sharing the more vulnerable sides of their lives. And so working with queer kids who still honestly have a much harder time of coming out than you think they would in this day and age has been very affirming.

Kristin 4:37

That's lovely. Thank you for sharing. I want to go back to the beginning of your life and talk about the things that might have shaped you into who you are now. Things like your family, your birth order, your astrology. Do you have any reflections on those things?

Nicole 4:52

Yeah, definitely. I grew up in a very working-class family, and my entire career trajectory has basically been grounded in the desire not to return to poverty. And so when I was growing up, there were only misanthropic attitudes towards work. One of my parents' mottos was you work and then you die. And that was our everyday life. My mother still has the same job she had when I was growing up and is a job she has never enjoyed. My father actually does really like his job as a tool and die maker because it is a more artistic kind of occupation than you would think would exist for someone who works in machinery. But it is still the case that that kind of job never made much money. And so I grew up in an environment where work was pretty much always associated with survival math. And there wasn't necessarily any kind of vision of work that involved dreams or fantasies or ambitions. The goal was simply to achieve my definition of wealth at the time. And this will give you some context for what I thought wealth meant when I was in high school and had really not been exposed to anywhere near the levels of wealth that I now know exist. But at the time, I thought that if I could buy my groceries at Whole Foods on a regular basis, then I would have achieved the level of wealth that I aspired to.

Kristin 6:15

I think that's so real. Mine was being able to walk around the mall with more than one shopping bag.

Nicole 6:21

Yeah, that makes sense. It's funny, being working class kids, you still spend so much time in malls, even though you can't buy anything because it's just like an indoor place that is fairly safe that you can walk around with your friends and joke around. And so I totally get that. That makes perfect sense to me. And it does mean that it took me a long time for consumerism not to be a defining attribute of my success in life.

Kristin 6:41

That's the tough adjustment for sure. Do you feel attached to birth order astrology? We can sidestep it if you want.

Nicole 6:47

Yeah, I have no attachment to astrology, I'll be honest. I do when it comes to birth order. I was the oldest child, but I was also something that multiple therapists since that early phase of my life have told me is called a parental child, which means that you grew up with parents who were not actually capable of being parents themselves because they were too young and they were not fully developed. And that means that you kind of take on the role of parenting for both your parents and whatever other younger siblings you have if it happens that you're an oldest child. It's a situation that honestly is the most common with what you would find in, say, a first-generation immigrant family or something like that. Someone who is the person who understands how the systems work because you were born into it. And so for me, growing up in Trent, New Jersey, that meant that I was the person who was navigating life for my sister and I when we had parents who most definitely had a lot of mental health issues that they have not redressed to this day. And that definitely caused me to be very independent and autonomous. And even though dreams were not really a thing that were encouraged in my house growing up, I learned how to have my own survival math, which meant getting out. And so phase by phase, I dedicated myself to the actions that would allow me to escape the situation I grew up in. And that started with going to college. I was the first person in my family to go to college, and it was not received well as an idea from my parents at the time. Did your sister go to college? My sister ended up initially dropping out of college. She went to fashion school, actually, for a year or maybe three quarters of a year. But my sister definitely worked hard to get out of my parents' situation as well. But since I had left home first, it definitely meant that she was more vulnerable to their pressures than I was. And so my parents basically encouraged her to drop out because they thought that she couldn't cut it. I believed that she could cut it, but I also could see that she was dealing with some serious mental health issues. And so she ended up leaving college, coming home, having a few tough years, and then going back to finish college through one of those bridge programs in New Jersey where you go to community college and then you go to a state school and you finish your bachelor's.

Kristin 9:20

That's great though, that she did it. I asked because, you know, same. I left for college at 18 and left my sisters behind. And whatever happened in that house after I was gone meant that they did both end up taking kind of non-traditional paths.

Nicole 9:33

Yes. And I mean, I think that is definitely true for my sister. And she has ended up in a place that is objectively so much more successful than the place I ended up in. She owns a house, which was another thing that was beyond reach for us. She and her husband go on plenty of trips. They both work in the corporate world. Well, he now works in government, but had been working in the corporate world. And so, yeah, in our own ways, we have both achieved the escape that we had hoped for.

Kristin 9:56

That's wonderful. So the word escape is my next question. I want to know why literature, and I want to know if that started when you were young.

Nicole 10:04

I was one of those little kids who grew up with a dream of being a writer. And I, as early as age four, when I couldn't really like actually write, I would create these fake books that just had scribbles all over the insides of them because my sister and I played pretend a lot. There wasn't a lot to do in our four-room house. So um we had a lot of imagination games. And I was reading chapter books, as they call them, by the time I was five. And I really just loved escaping into books, especially since we had a TV in our house, but it was always programmed to whatever my dad was watching. There wasn't a whole lot of opportunity to indulge in your own media. And obviously, this was long before the internet, you know, I, as you did, came of age when Google had only been around for like five years. So I ended up doing better and better in literary-oriented things like writing contests and school in general. And I kept doing it through high school. And when I went to college, I dealt with a lot of shade for the fact that I wanted to study actually creative writing when I went to college. And by the time I got there, because I was self-financing my own college experience, I too decided that creative writing was quote unquote too impractical. And that's how I became the very practical English major that I thought was going to be so much more stable. And that was a ludicrous thought in hindsight. But at the time, it was at least a major that already existed and it did not require me to do another weird independent thing on my own, which is what creative writing would have involved.

Kristin 11:46

Okay, okay. I have an English minor, which is hilarious because famously I'm not that good at finishing a book. Don't judge me as a teacher. But yeah, I thought English sounded practical as hell at the time. Anyway, so speaking of Google, right after college, what did you do?

Nicole 12:03

Uh, I graduated in the second phase of the recession. It was actually my peers who had graduated the year before me who were really in the thick of it. But by 2010, it wasn't that much better. I remember applying to something like 35 jobs, literally all except one that had to do with working in journalism or publishing or teaching English. And none of those worked out except for this one where I had a friend who worked at Google, and she was able to get me a slot with a program that doesn't exist anymore called Google Start because she was my reference. And Google Start basically put really, really, really smart high GPA college students with random majors in positions in advertising. It doesn't exist anymore, I would bet, because it turned out that the vast majority of us were not actually that good at that job. But I was indeed an English major with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of tech. And I remember being in the phone interviews for that job and actively Googling verbs I had never heard before, like monetize, while I was on the interview with the person who was talking to me on the phone. And so yeah, you know, a lot of my success has involved just faking my way through whatever challenge has been posed to me. And I did that to get through the Google Gauntlet. And I was there for only a year. But yes, it actually ended up being a very formative experience in my career trajectory because it was the best year of my life, despite being one of the least appropriate jobs I've ever had.

Kristin 13:41

Was that best year of your life? Was that when you were on the West Coast?

Nicole 13:44

Yes. That was when I left a pretty difficult and honestly domestically abusive relationship situation on the East Coast when I got this job at Google. I basically picked up my dog and restarted my life in San Francisco. I think I thought she went with you. No, no, I broke free on my own and moved 3,000 miles and never looked back.

Kristin 14:04

I'm really proud of you. I had long thought, like around my 41st birthday, which just happened, I would mark the occasion of like having escaped an abusive relationship 10 years ago. And so for a while I was like, I want I might want to do an episode about that and about how that actually can sh also shape your career and the your path and like where you land. And you had come to mind.

Nicole 14:25

Yeah. I mean, I was basically a trad wife, but with lesbians for five years between high school and college. And, you know, at some point I realized just how miserable I was. And I had always been economically dependent on my partner at the time because she was actually one of the first wealthier people I'd ever met. And yeah, as soon as I had a way to be financially solvent, which was getting this job at Google in San Francisco, I broke free.

Kristin 14:49

I'm so proud of you. Did it take a long time to process that trauma as you were sort of a young adult building your career? Oh, definitely.

Nicole 14:56

Yeah, definitely. I would say that I fully repressed that experience until I was actually back in New York, having fully finished one relationship in between and just started a new one. And that was the first time that I started to really think about that trauma. But honestly, I would say that it was the anxiety to succeed so that I would not backslide into financial insecurity that kept my brain pretty occupied for the interim between college and New York.

Kristin 15:27

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so you're in San Francisco, you're at Google for a year. What happened after that?

Nicole 15:34

Well, the reason I was only at Google for a year was because when I was in college, I had gotten this kind of brilliantly structured but very odd scholarship for aspiring PhDs. It was a scholarship that I think still exists, and its purpose was to encourage low-income, PhD-bound students to go back to school by only allowing them to take one gap year and no more. So the idea was that a lot of working class people who might go into higher education fall off the wagon once they graduate because they get a job, they get used to real life, they kind of lose sight of what might be worthwhile to go keep getting educated. But if you had the scholarship, it meant it was a use it or lose it situation where winning it really didn't mean anything if you did not end up going on to a PhD program because you would never see the $30,000 that it involved. So that was my main reason for applying to graduate school the year I was at Google because I knew I would lose that opportunity if I didn't use it, and that meant that my entire year at Google, I knew I was only going to be doing this for the short term, which surely affected my performance at Google.

Kristin 16:45

I mean, the the point about like potential students losing their motivation, also probably just like getting really used to a paycheck. Yeah.

Nicole 16:54

Like really nice. Getting really used to a paycheck and health benefits. And, you know, one of the funny things about going back into a PhD program is that I did not struggle with one of the main things that many other people struggled with, because generally PhD programs attract people of a certain income and class who would expect to, you know, indulge in this life of the mind for six or seven years. But they really struggled with the fact that many people don't realize that not only do you get paid in a PhD program, but you get paid basically poverty-level wages. But that in itself was not daunting to me because I had already lived under those circumstances for the vast majority of my life.

Kristin 17:32

So tell me about grad school, any moments or stories that come to mind when you think about that time.

Nicole 17:38

Yeah, when I think about graduate school, with the exception of the friends that I made while I was there for whom I am very grateful, and one advisor who turned out to be very supportive. Mostly the experiences that come to mind are all fairly traumatic experiences with people who I'd hoped would be mentors, but turned out to be very classic narcissistic academics. And I think that one major blind spot for me when I thought that my dream was to become a professor, this dream was only planted in my head when I was in college by my professors. And I went to a college where teaching was really valued. It was a liberal arts college, small women's college. And I had an amazing time learning. And I loved my classes. I loved my teachers. They were the ones who encouraged me to apply to these scholarships. And they were the ones also who introduced me to research fellowships that meant I was no longer working at Bed Bath and Beyond or in waitressing. Instead, I was getting paid by the semester to do this fancy research into queer African literature at the time. And so the blind spot I had when I got to Columbia is that I had naively thought that virtually all PhDs shared these same values and that teaching was going to be something that was really emphasized to some degree. And when I got to what we would call a research one university, which means that research really is the main thing that they care about, it became very apparent to me very quickly that that vibe was not here. And while I didn't hate doing research, I definitely loved being in the classroom more. And so a lot of my struggles in grad school were defined by one of two things. One, feeling like an outlier because I was never quote unquote taking my research as seriously as other people were. I was always teaching what I didn't have to be teaching, and I ended up teaching in a bunch of different non-traditional environments, like a carceral education program, a language learning center for recent immigrants. And the second thing that definitely held me back was that I had no idea what I was doing. The vast majority of my peers came from academics. They had professors as parents, or they had aunts and uncles who were in academia. And this was not something that they had just suddenly decided to do two or three years ago. This was a trajectory they saw as their inheritance to some degree. And that meant that every phase of the program, I felt like I figured out how to do something right once the phase was actually over. So I was constantly just keeping my head above water to the degree where now I could tell you exactly how to write a dissertation. I can also tell you that that is not at all the dissertation that I wrote, because I was just trying to get chapter by chapter approved without thinking too hard about what it all meant.

Kristin 20:30

That's very real and honest. And as you were talking, you started to get to one of the questions that I had, which was what does research look like in your specific field of study?

Nicole 20:40

Yeah, that's actually one of the reasons why I found it to be pretty unfulfilling. Research in my field of study basically meant that you were reading primary sources, which for me were novels, um, sometimes poetry, but mostly novels, and you were doing a variety of secondary research, as in articles that academics had written about those novels, or sometimes historical research into the context of the novel. Archival research, if it was the case that you were working on something historical, and unfortunately I wasn't. I did learn at some point that I really enjoyed archival research, but my project was entirely contemporary, so I didn't get to do very much of it outside of this one chapter that was about a contemporary poem reacting to a slave massacre in history. But the other thing, honestly, that I realized belatedly was that I really wish I had gone to a PhD program for something far more interdisciplinary. When I was first applying the PhDs, I really wanted to do something in feminist and gender studies. And in hindsight, I would have also said I wanted to do something in American studies, but American studies didn't really exist in as cohesive a way as it does now. My advisors in college, though, gave me very adamant advice that I should not do an interdisciplinary PhD, because at the time those were so much less likely to land. Jobs since most departments in academia are very conservative. English departments hire English PhDs. And feminist and gender studies departments had one or two professors max as far as who their core faculty were. So I understood the practicality of what my advisors were telling me. But now that I've gone through the whole thing and seen how nearly impossible it is to get a job as a professor anyway, I wish I could go back and do the interdisciplinary thing that I really wanted to do because that might have involved interacting with real people more often, doing field work, looking not just at novels, but also cultures of taste and literacy standards and human rights and other ways. And I wasn't expecting my PhD to be as traditional as it was.

Kristin 22:49

That's also so real. And I think the advice of academics, I mean, when you're in it, you're like, yeah, these are my, I mean, these are the people I aspire to be like, and I want their career and I admire them so much. And then you like, you get older and you see their flaws and you think back to like, yeah, like the job market is bullshit anyway.

Nicole 23:05

Well, and the other problem was that the entire time I was in my PhD, I was still in that working class, labor-minded mode. Like I was thinking of it as a means to an end. It had never occurred to me that a PhD was something you could do because you wanted to do it to enjoy it. Like getting paid to read books is a privilege, getting to teach students at Columbia University is a privilege. And at the time, I was just so stuck on the idea of making the career work that I didn't really spend as much time indulging in the freedoms and the privileges of that kind of job. And that meant that I understood how hyper practical my beloved advisors and my college were being, my undergraduate college. But now I think that even they would admit that they wouldn't give that same advice anymore, given how much the market spiraled. And you see it in the news all the time: the retraction of entire departments and academia now. People weren't getting hired at a regular rate before, and they're certainly not getting hired now.

Kristin 24:06

For sure. I mean, no one could have seen the moment we're in right the second. Yeah. Where like higher education is vilified in this way at this scale. I just I wouldn't have seen that coming. Even in all the ways that like you could like try to game out your career and what you do, like just we would just would never have seen this.

Nicole 24:23

Right. And honestly, I think about that a lot because I do have friends who manage to find a foothold and are professors right now somewhere, whether they are in tenure track positions, which is the ideal, or just more flexible full-time positions. And, you know, academia is not a fun place to be right now. So as far as living in the present goes, I count myself lucky to be free of all those politics and all that stress. But for the long term, I do sometimes still yearn for the kind of life I had imagined that I would have, especially the freedom to write and the time to think that you definitely do not have when you work in a 40-hour-a-week job.

Kristin 25:02

When you were done with your PhD, you had, well, you had a couple of fellowships. Can you talk about those years? Yeah.

Nicole 25:09

So when I graduated my PhD, it was supposedly a really good sign that I had landed this postdoc at this historic women's studies center at Brown University. It was only a one-year position, but at the time it was so difficult to get any positions whatsoever, especially at very elite colleges, that this was supposed to be a game changer in a lot of ways. For personal reasons, that year went very differently than it might have gone for somebody else. Suffice it to say that I ended up unexpectedly splitting my time between two cities because I still had a partner and a dog. Well, I guess a couple of dogs at that point. One dog came with me because she was my dog. But I still had a partner and another dog in New York City. And that partner decided not to move to Providence with me after all. And so I ended up driving back and forth a lot. If I could do it over, honestly, I would put my foot down and say, I'm moving. You decide what you want to do. Because driving back and forth, essentially managing an Airbnb for the place where I was living in Providence when I wasn't there, all of that cut into the time that I should have been using to do research, produce articles. I did produce one article that year. It ended up like not being enough of a foothold to move further into other fellowships of a strictly academic variety. One other problem was that I was always tailoring my search for geography. And in academia, that's essentially something you just cannot do. You have to be open-minded, you have to be willing to go to a place you've never heard of in Louisiana, and you have to understand it's only going to be for one or two years. But because of the relationship that I was in, that was not going to be tenable. And so I ended up getting a fellowship, but it was something called an alternative academic fellowship, which meant that it was not actually located at a university. Instead, it existed to basically bring PhDs into workforces where their talents might be relevant. And that is how I ended up at a pretty well-known writers organization in New York City, where I was slated to curate their annual international literature festival. And so that fellowship lasted for two years. It was through the Mellon Foundation and a society called the American Council of Learned Societies. I did that for two years. I decided the nonprofit world was not the place for me. And I applied to jobs again, almost got my dream job at UCLA in the pandemic. And directly after they offered me the job in feminist studies, they retracted it three days later. And that broke me. So then I applied to a job I knew I would get, which was teaching the same program that I had taught when I was back at Columbia. And I decided that that was the best I could mentally do. Return to Columbia with a job that I knew I enjoyed because I really enjoyed the curriculum and teaching first-year students.

Kristin 28:08

Yeah. I mean, that was a ride. And also a lot of it happened around the pandemic, too. Like that was a lot. And I know that it took a lot to kind of land where you are now, where you're like, I'm gonna be a teacher here in New York City and I'm gonna build a life outside of that. I would love for you to tell me about some of the stuff that you have done and do on the side. I know for a while you were volunteering. You had like a mentee, I believe.

Nicole 28:34

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I volunteered at a variety of different organizations in the literary arts community that were meant for underserved populations. And for several years, I was at an organization called Girls Right Now where I was matched with teenage mentees who had their own literary aspirations. So I ended up having three mentees through that program over the course of several years. And I also volunteered at Word Up Community Bookshop uptown.

Kristin 29:00

What about your other creative side projects like making jewelry? What does that give you?

Nicole 29:06

That's something I started doing again during the pandemic just because I needed a hobby. I had made jewelry when I was in high school. And actually, when I was at Brynmar, I had this one really embarrassing situation where there was a Christmas maker's market. And I thought that it was for anyone to volunteer to sell their things, and technically it was. But when I got to the makers market, it became clear that I was literally the only student in the entire school who was trying to sell anything that they had made. And all of the other makers were fancy mainline West Philadelphia New York City artisans. And I remember feeling really embarrassed because I felt like it put on full display just how poor I was, that I was hustling to make a couple bucks on bracelets and earrings when everybody else was shopping. But that was the last time I sold my jewelry in a more classically professional sense. And then the pandemic came and I really just needed a creative task. And so I picked up a lot of my jewelry supplies from my grandmother's house and I just started making things again. Initially, I sent them in care packages to friends and family. I make I mostly make earrings and I sent them in care packages during the pandemic. Then I just kept making them for fun. And then eventually I had a surplus of like 70 pairs of earrings, which I still have and I'm trying to sell. You know, it became basically that if I was going to have an excuse to keep making things, then I had to find a way to move things. So that was when I started an Etsy shop. And because I don't pay for ads, I don't get a crazy amount of foot traffic. I think I am the proud owner of an Etsy shop that gets five out of five stars and has 70 sales total. That's a lot.

Kristin 30:48

For some Etsy shops, it's like zero.

Nicole 30:52

I mean, yeah, I know. I think that the stuff I really care the most about selling online is um I have a few lines of jewelry that are specifically using queer flags of various kinds, like the trans flag and the rainbow and a non-binary flag. And, you know, I do get some pleasure whenever somebody from Arkansas buys a pair of trans earrings. And I'm like, okay, I hope that this is going to like someone who will feel seen for it. If I could replicate that all the time, that would be great. There is one really wonderful organization that has a holiday market every year. It's called Dave's Lesbian Bar. And every November or December, they run a holiday market.

Kristin 31:34

I love that you do it. I love that you have it as a creative outlet. And I I love the story about like just thinking about someone buying a pair of queer earrings is somewhere that they might need to be more visible. Let's transition to the lightning round. Okay. What was your very first job? And what did it teach you about work?

Nicole 31:54

My very first job would have been teaching tap dancing to five-year-olds. Cute. Yes. I did that when I was in the eighth and ninth grade, I think. And it was a situation that my dance studio instructor had come up with because it meant that basically she gave me free dance classes in exchange for teaching the five-year-olds because I really wanted to be at dance four nights a week, but my parents, as we have already discussed, were not super keen about funding such a thing. So this transaction that my studio teacher came up with meant that I would spend Saturday mornings teaching little kids. And then I would be at the studio four nights a week without having to worry about finances. And as far as what it taught me about work, I mean, it taught me definitely not to take work too seriously. Obviously, that did not stick in terms of how seriously I proceeded to take work directly after that into high school and college. But, you know, like when your job is just to keep five-year-olds from breaking their tailbones or teeth, and five-year-olds in tap shoes are especially slippery. It really does put into perspective, like, wow, you know, like this is silly. And it should be silly. It's it's not actually like hard work, and aren't I lucky that it's not hard work? That sounds adorable.

Kristin 33:18

It was super cute. And hard. Littles are so hard.

Nicole 33:20

Honestly, that one was not actually that hard because like they were just so pleased with themselves that they could stand up without falling. So yeah, it was, and they were all just really cheerful little girls.

Kristin 33:31

What is the best or worst piece of advice you've ever received?

Nicole 33:35

The best piece of advice I've ever received is do less.

Kristin 33:37

Love it. Who gave you that advice?

Nicole 33:40

Uh, it was in one of my more recent transitions to new schools as a teacher. And I think that this advice of like doing less is totally ethical if you're already a person who does too much. Like I wouldn't say to someone, do less if you already do nothing. But um, for me, I've always gone too far uh in the direction of doing everything I possibly can to be the best teacher I can be. And I was super stressed out with adjusting to this new context and working 40 hours a week, teaching so many more classes. I was perpetually overwhelmed and just, you know, all of the work-life balance I had achieved in my years uh in academia went out the window. And, you know, I was talking to one of my inveterate colleagues. He was the one who just said to me, do less. And he was just very matter-of-fact about it in a way that was really refreshing and gave me permission, honestly. Because I think, especially as a woman, you often feel as if you have to be doing the max, especially to get respect, honestly, as a teacher in a high school environment, because the Dead Poet Society vibe is still reserved for men, despite the fact that there are not that many men who are teaching the humanities per se. So his advice helped me to feel less insecure about whether or not I'd be doing enough. And that did help me to be a little bit less fixated and obsessed with whether I was killing this job or not.

Kristin 35:05

I love it. I think it's important advice, especially to women. Yeah. So excellent. What's your most embarrassing work story?

Nicole 35:11

That would definitely be the very, very, very brief stint I served as a waitress at a family restaurant in college. I had heard that waitresses make crazy money on tips, and I had been working in retail. Working in retail was fine, but it was little more than minimum wage at the time. This was before I ended up getting those research fellowships that allowed me to redirect my time and resources during the school year. And so I tried working at this family restaurant, and I did not realize that working at a family restaurant was definitely not the same thing as working at the Capitol Grill. Mostly you had extremely stressed-out families who were very frustrated if the littlest thing went wrong because this was their outing for the week. And so the embarrassing story, there are two of them. One was that one of my first days on the job when I was still in training, I spilled some green goddess salad dressing down the back of my work t-shirt. And I did not have another work t-shirt. I had been propping the um serving tray on top of my shoulder the way I was supposed to, and I spilled it. And so that meant that I went around smelling like garlic for the rest of the day because there was not another t-shirt for them to get me. It was the only one that was allotted to me. Um, and the worst one was probably when I spilled a mudslide on a customer because it was in a martini glass, and it was a table of 10 people. It was the largest table I'd had so far. And I was having trouble memorizing what I was meant to give everyone. And in the midst of my stress, I fumbled the glass and spilled it all over a guy. And he was not gracious about it. I lasted in that job the whole of three weeks, and I never picked up my final paycheck, and that was that. Wow.

Kristin 36:57

Respect. Every time someone tells an embarrassing story, though, it unlocks a new one for me. So just want you to know you're not alone. I did stick my thumb through a sonic 44-ounce cup once on top of someone. So anyway, thank you for sharing. What is your socially acceptable work vice?

Nicole 37:15

Gossip, which I don't know is socially acceptable, but like I participate it all the time. And so, you know, I am in an office with two other people and a door that closes. And so we have a lot of fun on a daily basis just chatting up whatever crazy thing it is that the kids have done or whatever's happening with the administration. And yeah, I don't feel guilty about it at all.

Kristin 37:36

That's an amazing answer. Like a hundred percent. What is something about your job that sounds impressive, but actually isn't that glamorous?

Nicole 37:43

Oh, it would definitely be the teaching the children of celebrities. People think that, you know, this means I have some sort of proximity to celebrities. And I guess like technically I do, in the sense that I'm sometimes in the same room with them, but generally it's not that serious, and the kids themselves are kids like anybody else would be. You would also hardly ever know that they were the children of that kind of experience. I still remember when I learned that a student I was teaching last year was the child of a well-known celebrity, and I was so surprised because this student was just so humble and somewhat introverted and serious. And I realized that meant I have my own stereotypes in my head about what you would expect a famous child to be like. And while I do enjoy getting that kind of gossip since I enjoy gossip, as I just said, on the day-to-day, it's still the same unglamorous work of teaching someone how to tell the difference between a linking verb and an active verb. So that's fair.

Kristin 38:45

Kids are just weird no matter what. No matter where they come from, they're just weirdos. Yeah, they are. In the best way. Do you fix typos in casual communication?

Nicole 38:53

Oh, I feel like you already know the answer to this one, which is most definitely. I mean, I am an English teacher. So, you know, the second that I I type something wrong, it's it's just impulse. Like it's literally, you know, like uh the doctor taps your knee and it moves. Like that's that's the way I you I feel like I don't even know if I've ever seen you have a typo. So I feel like you're all right. I think that's part of the reason why I'm so fixated on when they do happen is that I'm like, oh no. Conscientious of it. Yes. And it's very convenient that now like you can just edit a text message. I used to like have to make changes after having sent it, which was always kind of weird and unnecessary just to, you know, have an asterisk and be like, this was the right word.

Kristin 39:33

I know. My one of my most common typos is a question mark instead of an exclamation mark. And when you used to just have to be like, exclamation? Yeah. I swear that's the question. Oh, good times. I have two final questions for you. One, what would your advice be to someone who feels off track right now?

Nicole 39:50

My advice to someone who was feeling off track would honestly be to explore Buddhism. Like, that's really helped me. I think it mostly happened because I was a religion teacher. And, you know, it this sounds like really weird advice, but there are so many principles in Buddhism that are so good for someone who is feeling lost. One of them, for example, is this idea of impermanence. Whatever you're going through now is not going to last forever. And so you should just let it happen because it's temporary, because life is suffering and all life ends. That's like the fundamental idea behind Buddhism. Another one uh that has been really useful to me is this idea of beginner's mind, which is that whenever you experience something, you should experience it as if it's for the first time. And it doesn't feel great to experience failure for the first time every time it happens, but it also means that, you know, when you do have that win that feels so rare, you should like really indulge in it because you can treat it as if it's the first time that this has happened to you. And so I think that there are ways in which I definitely would not say that I am a Buddhist. There are plenty of things that I would never be able to come around to, like giving up on the desire for really good food. But some of the core principles have helped me to feel like, okay, this isn't great right now, but it might not be forever. And I can live with that. I think that's excellent advice.

Kristin 41:12

The last question: do you have anything you want to promote?

Nicole 41:15

I mean, I hesitate to promote my jewelry shop just because it has a name, which I will now say anyway. It's called Sexy Beast Jewelry. I love it. And that is a name that, you know, for me it's a humorous name. It reminds me of my late dog because we joked that she was a sexy beast since she was a hairless dog, then that meant she was always naked. And so that's where the name for the jewelry shop originally came from, because all of the pieces are based on these animal figurines that are like these mini good luck figurines that I've converted into findings for jewelry. So yeah, so if you go to Etsy, you can find sexybeastjewelry.etsy.com. That exists.

Kristin 41:51

Thank you. Um, thank you for doing this with me. This was really fun. Yeah, thank you. Okay, but something about Nicole's story that has stuck with me since our conversation, since before our conversation, as we even sort of talked about having her on as a guest, she kept telling me, I don't have career ambition. I don't know that I'm who you want to talk to. And I insisted that a hundred percent that makes it even more important that we have that conversation. Because I don't think that it's a requirement in life to have career ambition. One, two, I don't necessarily know if that's true. I think she has tons of career ambition and is like in a moment where she's sort of healing from survival mode. But growing up, work was about survival. Then she achieved so much. She achieved her dreams. And now she's in a transition period where work is about figuring out what stability looks like, figuring out what community looks like, and like what does creative space feel like? So I think it's important that we have that conversation in this moment of her life and of her career because I think that we've all either been there or will be there one day. I think that it is inspiring to be honest about those moments in our life when we don't necessarily feel like we're climbing anything meaningful. And that's okay because our life is meaningful. It's not about work always. This podcast isn't even a hundred percent about work. This podcast is about the way that our work and our lives intersect and what we do in those moments, how we use both of those things to build the other. And so her work allows her to have the life that she wants. And she has like a really happy, good life. But anyway, I don't want to belabor the point other than to say, I actually hope that so many people felt seen by this conversation because I think it's so worthy to say out loud that we're not feeling ambitious in a given moment. And that is okay. The conversation. And her take on work feels really grounding to me and it felt important. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, thank you, thank you for being here, for listening. This was episode 10 of a 12-episode season. So we are coming to the end of season two, which means go back in time, catch up, find us on all the places, come visit our website at everythingcountspod.com, leave us a review. It really does help. The algorithm helps other people find us. I am so grateful. I love that you're here. Until next time. Thanks for listening to everything counts, but nothing is real. Remember, even when nothing feels real, everything you do counts. Capitalism may be absurd, but so are we. And on that note, well, it's been real. Don't forget to subscribe. I'm Kristen. See you next time.