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today's mad in pursuit

about me

Introduction

What happens when you wake up one day to find you've become a bland middle-aged conformist pouring your talents down the corporate drain? What happens when it's your very prosperity that has you trapped? You get angry, but then what? In this piece, Susan Price explains how she tried to reinvent herself at the age of 50 by keeping an anonymous internet diary -- and the surprising results.

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Turn up your speakers or put on your headphones. 6 minutes, 40 seconds.

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Available for licensing and broadcast from PRX.

Synopsis

At the age of 50 I was a colorless corporate malcontent. I decided to engage the world by keeping an anonymous online diary. No one noticed. The initial dangerous thought turned into a challenge to become more entertaining. The result: I wound up being discovered, not by the colorful world of writers and artists, but by ... my mother.

Review

At PRX, by Cheryl-Anne Millsap, Spokane Public Radio, 12.29.06:

I listened to this piece and then took a minute to think about it. And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. It's just this kind of quirky, strange-but-true story that makes This American Life so fascinating. And the fact that Susan's whole online adventure led to a new life, and a new outlook, makes it more appealing to others. Especially women who might be in the same situation.

Licensed for broadcast

KFAI, a non-commercial FM radio station operating on 90.3 FM in the Minneapolis area and 106.7 FM in the St Paul area.

Transcript

I started keeping an internet journal in 1999. I was in such a bad mood. Obsessed with my job. Angry with my colleagues. Hating it that my best writing went into policy statements and my best designs went into work flow diagrams.
 
It was a risk, going online like that. I was no kid. I was a 50-year-old executive. I was in charge of strategy for a big agency, with decades invested in the job. If I got caught mouthing off by the wrong person, I’d be toast. But, I thought, what the heck…

I had a cover name – Maddie – and Rochester became Cloudhaven. I was very careful. On my home page I wrote these words: “This journal is a progressive work of art. I'm trying to find my voice, not trying to please. If you think you know me, you don't. If you find me, you have to be my friend forever.”

*

Weeks passed. I was afraid of getting caught, but then I got mad because nobody found me. All my homepage hits were me, going to check my hit counter. Hmpf… Here I had gone and done this outrageous thing and no one noticed. I started the project feeling colorless. Now I was invisible.

So, building a container for discontent got me nowhere. Gushing out my feelings might be good therapy but it wasn’t the cosmic awakening I had planned on. And it wasn’t even good therapy. I was still the same boring person griping about work.  If I wanted an audience, I’d have to make myself entertaining.

What was my story? I started digging through old papers and photographs. Before I burned out, who the heck had I been?

*

As Maddie from Cloudhaven, I continued to vent my frustrations in journal entries.

But going through my old papers reminded me, I did have some colorful days – befriending strangers in Pakistan, sub-zero skiing in the Adirondacks, diving on shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. I wrote these stories as memoirs in my diary.

I dug deeper to get this picture: first day in kindergarten 1954. I stood alone in the school yard. How was it that all the kids knew each other already and I didn’t know anybody? No one paid a bit of attention to me. It got me thinking. If the world wasn’t going to rush forward to be my friend, then I would show the world how independent I was.

In second grade, my role model became Nancy Drew – the girl detective. Nancy Drew didn’t need a mother so neither did I. I didn’t need anybody. I wanted mystery. I wanted hard work. I wanted to change the world. And at the age of 19 I flew away from home forever.

To tell the truth I was lucky enough to find a career that offered me all the hard work, mystery and world-changing responsibility I wanted – till, after 20 years, the business turned sour on me and once again I was the misfit standing alone in the school yard wondering why no one wanted to play with me. And here I was online, asserting, in all my anonymous glory, that I didn’t need anybody.
 

My little stories piled up.

*

Then one Sunday in October 2001, I was discovered. A phone call. The voice said: “I just want to let you know that I’ll be your friend forever.”

It was the phrase from my home page: “If you find me you have to be my friend forever.”
I froze. I knew that going on line with my angry private thoughts was a risk no sensible middle-aged person should take – and yet, what a nice introduction: “friend forever.”

It was my mother – a 75-year-old genealogy buff who had done a search on the word Catawissa – the Missouri birthplace of her father. Catawissa. The one name I forgot to disguise. She landed at my site, read a few entries and knew instantly that Maddie was her Susan.

My mother. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” I sputtered something about experimentation and artistic expression.
 
“You can run from your mother,” she said, “but you can’t hide. Wherever you go in this whole wide world, I’m going to be right there behind you.” She really said that. And it was true. I may have wanted to be Nancy Drew, but my own writing told me this: Time after time, tale after tale, my mother had my back. It was she who found me some friends in kindergarten, who built me desks and bookshelves, who protected me from childhood predators, who stayed up all night to type my papers in high school, and who kept me supplied with Nancy Drew books. And it was my mother who taught me not to suffer fools.

I went out onto the internet as “Maddie,” to scream at the universe and then to reinvent myself. And who finds me but the one person I thought I didn’t need – my mother. Her message was this: I didn’t need to hide behind a disguise. Her Susan might be a good girl, but she was silent and far away. This “Maddie” was a complicated woman, who told stories she wanted to hear. So I came out.  

I cleaned out the bitter crybaby trash from my diary and continued it as “Susan” – myself.

It took a couple more years of writing and designing and skillbuilding in my public journal to plot a new direction, but in 2003, when I turned 55, I was finally able to walk away from my job and launch myself into a second career. Did the online journal cure my anger? No. But it let me rediscover the independent girl I used to be, the one who knew how to embrace uncertainty and how to turn discontent into action.

And along the way, I found a friend forever.

5.14.06