Ep. 001 My Personal Story

Calispresso

Let me start by telling you about myself, where I’ve been, where I’m coming from and share with you some of the changes I have experienced in my life on the cusp of change. I will do my best not to bore you with my younger years but I will tell you I’m the oldest of three children and my mother’s love child so to speak, born of a short lived college romance gone awry, at least that’s how I’ll tell the story. My mother affectionately refers to my biological father as “the sperm donor”. Although he knew about me, where I lived and how I was doing, I didn’t meet him until I was 19. Maybe you have a similar beginning. For the first three years of my life, it was just mom and me and then she met my stepfather, and had my sister and then 2 years later she had my brother. When I was growing up, people would often ask me what I wanted to be when I got older, and I would think about this for a moment and then respond I wanted to do lots of things. Whether this was a lack of interest in any one thing or lack of direction as a child, I’ll never know, but I did do lots of things throughout my life that have brought me to the place I am today. If we fast forward to my college years, I think like many people I went to college just to get my parents off my back. When I first started college, I was as an English major, for no other reason other than I loved to read, I could read all day and night if someone would pay me to. Then I transferred from the JC to the University only to switch majors to Art. I was definitely the creative introvert and at the time, I wasn’t thinking about work or a career, I thought I would meet the man of my dreams, get married, be a stay at home mom and take care of the house and children and have a few hours here and there to paint masterpieces. After college I found work in direct marketing and then in video gaming as operations supervisor and project manager, my career was taking off, I was making 50k a year, I had a new car, a cute little apartment, no relationship and no children, I was living the life. And then the dot com era crashed. I was laid off and the age of 28 the bottom fell out of my high rolling life. I tried to find new work but the offers I received were about 60% my former income level. There was no way I could make it on that. Eventually I relented to giving up my cute apartment and moved back home, and I would have lost my new car if not for my mother’s help. I was devastated and didn’t understand what was happening. After all I had a college education, right. After several months of unemployment, I made the decision to move to Southern California and start life all over again. The way I figured it, I should do whatever I wanted to do now before I was married with children. So I loaded up my gold Corolla with clothes, shoes and my desktop computer, booked a hotel, and with my mom riding shotgun and my 8 year old niece squished between my belongings in the back seat, I hit the road to L.A. I didn’t have a place to stay after the 4 days in the hotel and I didn’t have a job lined up. The only money I had was $750. I was definitely going to L.A. completely on faith. It took me 5 weeks to find a job and 5 weeks later I was laid off because the owner decided to close his business. I was 350 miles from home, and back at square one in just over a month. Depressed and feeling defeated, I’m not even sure what I found next, but I did find work. I also got more training which didn’t help at all. I felt like a huge failure, but didn’t want to admit defeat and move back home so I continued to fight and struggle and sometimes I worked, sometimes I collected unemployment, sometimes I couch surfed. In fact, when I first moved to SoCal, I slept on the floor with blankets in a spare empty bedroom of two girls who attended the same church I attended. I did this until I found work and found a cheap bed for $100. I freelance recruited for a couple of years off and on and then in 2005 a recruiter reached out to...