I Just Figured Out Why I'm Triggered by the Star Card in Tarot Readings

Early in my career, when I was working for my first ad agency in Nashville, a friend of my parents from Connecticut--we'll call him Big Don--came to town and offered to take Larry and me out to dinner. Big Don was a big whig on Wall Street, powerful, well connected, and very, very, rich, and he had put in a good word for me at Vanderbilt when I applied for undergraduate admission with a B-ish grade point average and slightly better than mediocre standardized test scores. I can say with near certainty that Vanderbilt would have rejected me without Big Don's recommendation, though I don't think I recognized it at the time. Letters of recommendation from people in high places were par for the (white, privileged) course, as far as I was concerned, and because I was perfectly capable of doing the work at Vanderbilt, it never occurred to me to feel unworthy of my place there.

By the time this dinner with Big Don rolled around I had my bachelor's degree well in hand and was settling into a career and life as a newlywed. I was proud to pick the restaurant--a new Asian Fusion hotspot owned by a friend of ours. This dinner would be my first time connecting with Big Don as a "fully launched" adult, and I wanted him to know that I was happy and in a good place.

What I had yet to learn is that where I come from, you don't necessarily get to be the judge of whether you're in a good place. There are people who believe they're better qualified to make that assessment for you. And if you don't have a lot of money--spoiler alert: you're not in a good place.

Big Don didn't like the restaurant. The bartender couldn't make a gin and tonic "to save his life", so Big Don sent it back. When the waitress checked back to see how he was liking the revised edition, Big Don deemed it barely acceptable, at which point I started to accept that this dinner was not shaping up to be the feel-good event of my year.

Big Don sipped his gin and tonic, distracted and irritable, while we waited for our food to arrive and disappoint him. He grilled me about my salary and expenses, but beyond that he showed little interest in me or Larry as human beings, which made me wonder why we were even there. Meeting for dinner certainly hadn't been my idea.

When Big Don raised the subject of my work, he didn't ask any of the questions I would have liked to answer:

Are you happy?

Do you enjoy the work?

What do you like about it?

What parts do you hate?

Tell me about your coworkers. Are they good people?

What do you hope comes next?

He wanted to know one thing: "Are you a star?"

I remember how the question felt when it landed. Like a softball, it sounded like something that should be easy to catch and toss back, but in reality it was bigger and heavier and harder than that. Intuitively, I understood that asking "Are you a star?" was not the same as asking "Are you good at what you do?" It was code for, "Are you special and does everyone know it?" which was code for, "Could you kick ass doing what you do in New York?"

I think I lied and said that I was a star. Or maybe I felt like I was telling the truth? I'm not sure. But a truer truth was that we didn't think in terms of stars where I worked. We were a fun team, and we did good work most of the time, and some days we went out for Mexican food or, if our CEO got his way, the nearby Indian buffet. He'd sashay around the cubicles at 11:30, saying,"Anyone craving the sub-continent? The train is leaving. Last call."

Big Don was bored. He'd never heard of the agency I worked for. He wasn't familiar with any of our clients. In an attempt to engage him on a subject he was familiar with, I asked if he thought it would be worthwhile for me to pursue an MBA at some point. The thought of me going to business school is next-level laughable to me now, but at 25, I was somehow able to lob it out there with a straight face. Big Don suggested I shouldn't bother. Unless you go to one of the top five business schools, he said, there's really no point. Not because you wouldn't learn anything--but because no one (who mattered) would care.

To think I took his advice at face value, and not as evidence of Wall Street's deep seated provincialism, doesn't surprise me. Despite the fact that I was happy with my life in Nashville, years of conditioning and growing up in a suburb of Manhattan had taught me that making it in New York was the ultimate--and perhaps only--way to prove your personal and professional mettle. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And if you can't , why are we even still talking about you? You're boring.

Maybe that was the point of the dinner? To let me know I was teetering dangerously close to becoming uninteresting? Not to mention failing to deliver a return on investment. My parents had sent me to Vanderbilt and now they wanted me back in New York where I "belonged." Clearly, like them, Big Don believed that by staying in Nashville I had consigned myself to a second string existence and a JV career at best.

Are you a star? was a trick question. Or at least a rhetorical one. Even if I wanted to be a star, and could somehow manage to qualify, it would never happen in a place like Nashville, where the bartenders could barely construct a gin and tonic. That was the message I received loud and clear that night (and on many occasions later). And it took me years to unlearn it.

While I like to think I've reckoned with the inferiority, nothing sends me into orbit faster than the implication that something or someone is less legitimate because some asshole with money has never heard of it.

What area of Nashville do you live in? ... Huh. I've never heard of it.

What agency did you say you work for? ... Huh. Never heard of it.

You're a writer? Have you published anything I've heard of?

It takes some serious sequin-covered balls to believe that somewhere inside your brain is the benchmark for ... anything. Seriously. Please explain.

As our old creative director used to say, "Who died and made you King Shit of Fuck Mountain?"

Why do you get to be the supreme commander and sole arbiter of What Counts?

Are you a star?

Cover Photo by Viva Luna Studios on Unsplash