The Intern...Again

Growing is often awkward

Somewhere in my mid-thirties my father said to me: “If you’re still waiting tables at 40, you’ve got a really difficult 40 years ahead of you…”

After years of dodging similar messages from both parents, that one landed. I had drifted for years under the guise of being a writer, accumulating no money or marketable skills and was really at kind of a loss about what to do. Dad’s message stung.

Because I could write and advertising looked like my kind of fun, I took a few classes at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. But I also had no real resume, I pursued an (unpaid) internship at Harper’s Magazine (the one that wears spectacles, not the fashion mag), landing the first internship they ever had in the Marketing Department. It was the first year they offered one in marketing, so my duties were somewhat determined seat-of-the-pants style. There was a bit of downtime which I filled with watching the OJ Simpson trial at a deli across Broadway.

As the “oldest unpaid intern in America” I wrote press releases, made pitch calls, and entered data into media databases still running on DOS (this was early days for the internet). Mostly though, I looked for things to do. Down the hall Lewis Lapham, Ellen Rosenbush, Colin Harrison, and Michael Pollan et al. edited the magazine over what sounded like intellectually-thrilling editorial meetings with writers, guest editors, the editorial interns and the like. Michael Lind told me to do something more outrageous, as nobody remembers what the intern did unless it was truly remarkable. I didn’t really execute on that because I didn’t understand the game, but overall I made myself ready to do most anything in the pursuit of learning and earning a legitimate credential for my resume.

Largely, though, the experience was difficult for the reason of there being seemingly little to do or to measure. I was hungry for approval or metrics and ultimately for an endorsement or job offer and knew that any of this would be attained only by actual benchmark, performance, and results. Having been in restaurant work for over 15 years I was more familiar with a highly transactional form of work: do X and you’ll be rewarded with Y ($$). White-collar/office work was a new environment where the concept of Value was defined differently: the pace of performance and results was more spread out and uneven. Here in the office I found that my daily efforts resembled planting cedar saplings in Purgatory’s back forty and waiting for a long-term payoff, leaving me with big questions: what I should be doing? what I am providing? is this meaningful? and so on.

I bring this up because here I am again: in my MFT internship and dealing with a completely different set of ‘deliverables’ from what I’d encountered in the business world. Three days a week I work with teens in their imperfect, messy, emotional, ill-informed, stymied, oppressed, maladjusted, heavily-encumbered (et al, ad nauseam…) lives, doing work where the schedule for success is written in Aramaic at best.

The patience!

The empathy!

The objectivity!

The 50 minutes!

There are so many things to juggle while learning to do this therapist thing. So many competencies to acquire sitting in one’s chair while on the wall the clock unrelentingly ticks against the drama of a human life in some distress. And while the existential weight can deflate one, the opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life—to accompany another on their journey and assist them when there’s a pebble in their shoe—this is the reward that outstrips the clumsy weight of ineffability.

And so we interns lean into our connections and inspiration, our tutelage, integrity, and the perseverance to go on another day, another week, to help others on their journey forward, and upward.

Putting this out there lightens my heart for another day.

KOAN #20

Wear a watch for one day if you don’t; don’t wear your watch for a day if you do.

Something this simple, this elemental and seemingly minor in the grand scheme of things could be truly awkward and upsetting. The gleaning is up to you.

Have fun.