Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

by Alyssa Mastromonaco

And that’s how this story starts—with the humble goal of seeming competent and not too annoying. Like most women I know, I ultimately want to be likable and trustworthy—as well as glamorous—but it’s important to take baby steps.

I have also acted like a baby and a moron at a few points, even though I am neither.

You should always be prepared to defend your choices, whether just to yourself (sometimes this is the hardest) or to your coworkers, your friends, or your family. The quickest way for people to lose confidence in your ability to ever make a decision is for you to pass the buck, shrug your shoulders, or otherwise wuss out. Learning how to become a decision maker, and how you ultimately justify your choices, can define who you are.

I love a good list. I separate it into three parts: immediate goals, long-term goals, and personal. The immediate category usually includes things like paying bills, buying cat food, making a hair appointment, or picking up a prescription. The long-term list would include things like figuring out how to register my company in New York State, paying off my car (I did it!), planning a vacation, and getting tickets for an upcoming concert. The personal is basically just a list of friends whom, during the business of my life, I don’t want to forget to call, get drinks with, or track down to get our nails done. Something like “write this book” would end up falling in all three categories and listed three times so that I would maybe get the message.

I think you can boil all these kinds of arguments down to the fact that people are no longer chill. They are goal-oriented. They are aware of all the things they could or believe they should have. They are aware of all the things that could go wrong. This awareness makes a lot of things—dating, finding a job, dating a person you meet at your job, planning a trip for the president of the United States—much harder.

It forever formed my opinion on how we should help those in need: humanely and respectfully.

(when people know they’re getting regular updates, they don’t send you random questions constantly, and you can actually focus on what needs to get done in the interim)

One of my main goals in writing this book is to give you the permission to admit to feeling or doing things that are silly; once you do, you can get on with your life.

This was totally disproportionate to the kindness everyone showed me.

Even with all that, I felt like shit. I was totally lost. I had no idea who I was or what I was going to do. On days when I didn’t have plans, I would wake up, eat breakfast, watch TV, and go back to sleep; sometimes I would get dressed right before David came home from work so he wouldn’t know I had been sleeping in the middle of the day. When you go from checking your BlackBerry 500 times a day, needing to be available and responsive 24/7, to being able to sleep until 8:00 AM, wake up, have a leisurely breakfast, and do whatever you want—it sounds awesome, but you also wonder why no one is calling you. Weren’t you invaluable? Irreplaceable?

We are all replaceable. Life goes on, but that doesn’t mean it feels good.

“I’m sure there’s a salary band for the position, and my hope would be to come in at the high end of that.”

Kindness often exists on a smaller scale than the grand gestures popular on social media would have you believe.