Rebecca v Rebecca

Rebecca Fishbein and I met almost three years ago, on a random hill in Prospect Park on the fourth of July. That meeting wasn’t entirely consequential, but we did follow each other on twitter afterwards and begin seeing each other frequently through mutual friends and the New York media world. (And one mutual ex, but that’s a story for another day.) 

We cemented our bond that January when we both happened to be in San Francisco an extra night on separate trips. We did the trifecta of bars (a dive bar, a fancy bar, and tacos,) and talked about our mutual friends, our questionable love lives, and whatever else two women named Rebecca talk about who are about to become lifelong friends. 

I believe that if you read Good Things Happen to People You Hate, you’ll get a sliver of the experience that I’ve had knowing Rebecca. She’s entertaining, wise, and knows how to weave the often shitty random acts of life into stories that tell us something about being not really young but not old yet in America today. It was a pleasure to conduct this interview with one of my closest friends, and to talk about drinking and not drinking, bosses and how we hate them, and downward mobility. 

We did this interview last fall, but the publication didn’t work out. I reread it recently and was amazed by how many of the things we discussed are not just still relevant, but more relevant than ever in the face of the pandemic and quarantine. The death of journalism jobs, precarity, growing up into a world that is far from what we expected. I hope it gives you something to think about, or at least entertains you for the duration of reading it.  

RS: When did you start writing the book?

RF: I started writing essays, separate essays, in December of 2017. I think the first essay I wrote was the one about the sun-in, and then the second one I wrote was the Taylor Swift essay which had just happened. I would recommend giving more breathing room to certain topics, now I would probably rewrite them because I've had even more time to think about...but whatever. Put it in the book! Maybe I'll revisit in ten years. 

RS: You knew it was going to be a book of essays. You knew it wasn't going to be a memoir or a novel. Did you have the overarching theme planned out when you started it, or did that develop as it went along?  

RF: I themed it in terms of stories of bad luck, but as I was writing it, a weird number of things happened, like my grandmother dying, like getting bed bugs again for the 4000th time...I blacked out on somebody's roof at a birthday party, and it was a real come to Jesus moment for me. I don't know if that's the correct usage of Come to Jesus, I'm very Jewish, and I actually have never fully understood what that meant, but it was a real moment where I was like okay something has to change. 

I had already planned to write something about drinking and blacking out but for some reason hadn't considered that maybe it was a problem that I kept blacking out, and then when this roof thing happened I was like okay actually this is a problem, and I didn't solve the problem when I was writing the book, but I will say that I have...I'm drinking right now but I have not had any more nights like that. 

RS: I think for people our age, we're in this place where it's like okay, we know that we can't keep drinking the way that we've been drinking forever, but most people aren't just going to quit cold turkey. Between working at the bar and our friends I've been like okay, how do I want to get a handle on this but I know, especially dating someone who's a bartender,[at the time, RIP] and working at a bar, I'm like well I'm not going to quit but how can I dial back, I think it's a personal thing that people have to figure out.

RF: I am no expert on addiction and I don't know what the answer, but if someone feels that they should quit they absolutely should, there are people who probably don't feel they should quit and should, but for me personally I think I had that moment, that next morning, waking up to multiple text messages from people asking if I was okay. It was so scary, it was the first time that I had really blacked out where I wasn't...it's not that I wasn't with friends, you were there, friends were there, but it was the first time that I had blacked out and I was not with anyone who had seen me like that before and could have been like oh, okay, you need to get in a cab.

RS: Different passages of friendships, these people have seen me blackout before, these people it's different.

RF: But it was also like, I should not be doing this. This is ridiculous. I'm too old for this, I should not be relying on other people to put me in a cab and send me home. Also, I can't be worried that I'm going to go out and this is going to happen and I'm going to be in a position of unsafely. So that changed a lot, actually, and I had to stop drinking for a couple of weeks because I was on some kind of anti-fungal and I felt really really good after those two weeks so I did Drynuary, and I did it for six weeks, and then I slowly eased back into drinking, but I really have kept it pretty minimal. I went to a wedding on Saturday and I had like two glasses of wine for six hours.

The things that I loved about drinking were actually things that were really terrible about drinking. My friend Allegra who does not drink wrote something about how she used to really love bars because it was this space where anything could happen, and I also felt that way about bars, you would go out with your coworkers or your friends and everybody would get drunk and you would go in the bar a different person than you were coming out of it based on what could happen in that space.  

The problem is, usually nothing good happened in that space, and you came out a much worse person than you were before going in. The magic of it was really lost to me. I didn't like the fact that I would go into this bar and not really know what was going to happen in it. I didn't know who I was going to become when unleashed. So cutting back on alcohol has been a pretty fun thing actually. I felt really great, I exercise a lot, I saved a lot of money. 

So that essay was probably the most transformative,  in some ways writing this was more therapeutic for me than for anybody else. Apologies to anyone reading it for my free therapy for myself. The drinking was always a problem, but the glass shattered, and writing this essay I was like oh, I see why I keep doing this and I am now aware of when I reach for an extra spiked seltzer...it's because I think that spiked seltzer is going to make something happen. I think it's going to facilitate something for me, but it probably won't. 

RS: It’s the first essay where you talk about getting fired from Gothamist, right? Well, you weren’t fired…

RF: We were technically fired.

RS: But you...it was an explosion.

RF: It was an explosion. 

RS: So that was the kick off of this Year of Bad in a certain way. Can you talk a little bit about the transition of having that job, you talk about how it was so much of your identity, to your development of having an identity outside of that in the past two years?

RF: The best way to describe what happened with Gothamist was being broken up with. It was a very serious heartbreak for me. I really did love that job. Even now, I miss it. 

I had burned out at various points at the job as well, but something about that change and realizing that I had tied my identity to something that wasn't in my control, was very difficult. And yeah it was a job, it was just a job, but to me it was so much more, it was my whole family. I still feel sad that I'm separated from my family. In a way that's a very dangerous thing to think, that a job is family, a job is a job. You shouldn't think that your bosses are an extension of your parents because they don't love you, they're not your parents. 

 RS: Your bosses really don't love you, and your coworkers can love you but your bosses never really will. 

RF: Which is fine...

RS: It's a lesson that we all have to learn. 

RF: You definitely have to learn it, and I think it's a difficult thing...when you come from college and you're like oh, my friends and family are at school and now I'm in the working world and I'm just going to find new friends and family. I had worked in the service industry where yeah your bosses are not your family but the people that you work with really are. In the service industry it is a tight knit bond. 

Then I went to Gothamist where it was a very small staff, and it took a long time for them to hire me which kind of made me feel like I had to earn my way into their love. One of the things that was difficult about being fired or losing that job is that I had always thought to myself, I'm Rebecca Fishbein, I work at Gothamist. That's who I am. 

There have been upsides, I’ve been able to write for a lot of places that I really loved, I blog for Jezebel now, I love Jezebel, so it was so exciting to be able to write for them, but it did require me to get used to the idea that this place that I loved was gone. And I did feel last summer that a lot of people and things that I had loved were suddenly gone very quickly, so I lost Gothamist, my grandmother died very suddenly, my best friend in the city moved away, and then I had a thing with a guy who I was also very close with who...it just did not go well and I felt the need to sever ties which didn't really work, but that's not important. So I had to get used to this idea that these things that I'd felt were really important to me were gone. Which is just a normal part of growing up, but it was difficult to deal with all at once and while I was dealing with having lost my identity from working at this job, the industry that I had decided for some reason to be apart of was falling apart. Every week 400 more people got laid off. I do think that digital media had expanded too much, at some point everybody and their mother had a blog, and there's just no market for that. 

There's only so much content you can consume at once, and I say content very purposefully because at some point it's just the same people making the same joke about Don Jr, but so not only was I suffering my own personal heartbreak, all my friends are losing their jobs, I have no idea if I'm going to get another full time job, I'm running out of money, what is the future going to be like? I do think that that is a very...we're sort of moving out of caring about millennials which is fine because we've had so much...

RS: I would love to not care about myself as much.

RF: We've had so much focus on us that it's like good luck to Gen Z, I think that they're great but I'm happy to not be focused on but I do think that the future that we're facing that we're in, I'm 30 now…we’re supposed to be in a place that we're not, or at least I'm not in the place that I'm supposed to be in and many of my peers are not as well, the future is very frightening.  

We have unstable job markets, we're facing another recession, it feels like even...it feels stupid to even bring up Trump now because he's just colored everything at this point, but it's true, we have this leader who...who knows what's happening? Who even knows what the world will look like in two months. What's happening with the climate is...it feels cliche to be like it's so frightening, but we just don't know what the world is going to look like in fifteen years.  

I grew up upper middle class in Manhattan, and I assumed I would stay that way forever, and I've certainly hit a downward mobility shift, which is fine, I think it's okay to not be constantly striving for the top tier, but everybody seems to be falling apart except for a very select group of people. 

RS: It's pretty much everybody except for the people in the weird feudalism tech class who work at places where they live there and the grocery store is in Google and everything, I feel like everyone else is like falling apart.

RF: I will say that an upside of this downward shift in mobility is that people who maybe would have been blind to struggle are like oh, no, this is a real thing. I might have gone on and gotten a perfectly well paying white collar job and had decent health insurance my whole life and produced a whole slew of children who also thought that they were entitled to all of this, and I'm like oh no, it doesn't work like that, it's not just about working hard and getting where you're supposed to go, the system is set up for people to fail. So that's an upside. We're really getting the bandana pulled off. 

I knew deciding to be a writer that I wasn't going to be making a ton of money, but I don't think that I factored health insurance in. I think there were things I just didn't think about because I was 21 and excited that somebody was paying me to write and I was on my mom's health insurance, so I think there was also this myth that jobs would be linear. That you would get a job and once you got that job you would stay on that track. You'd get promoted, you'd go to another company, things would just keep moving up.  

When I started, I was an intern at Time Out New York, and actually I ended up coming back maybe the next year after I was an intern to do some fact checking or fill in for somebody and a woman who had been my editor there was leaving, she was leaving journalism, and she took me to lunch. I was already working at Gothamist a few days a week, and she was like I think Gothamist is doing well but I just want you to know that these things are not sustainable. Keep that in mind, these jobs are not sustainable. And I didn't really think about it at the time, I was like well, whatever, I'll be fine, but she was right, they’re not.

RS: I completely agree, I think about it all the time, will there be a new model that will be sustainable or will there just not be? I'm not a business person, I'm not an investor, I have no idea. It seems like there might just not be a sustainable model at this point in time. 

RF: I went to private school in New York City for high school, I went to school with some really smart and great people but I think we entered into this world being like alright, we're going to go to an Ivy League school, and we're going to get a great job and we're going to do really well and we're going to make make money and have children who will go to these private schools, and it's just the cycle will continue. 

I'm pretty glad that that didn't work out for me in a lot of ways, I think that that was a pretty dangerous. You really do believe that you've earned everything that you've gotten when you didn't. You absolutely did not. It's not to say that you don't deserve good things, but you don't deserve good things anymore than anyone else, you didn't actually work harder. 

My dad is a court appointed attorney, I wasn't coming from Goldman Sachs money, so to me, I was like wow, I'm really struggling here. I'm much poorer than everyone else here, but honestly, I still lived in Manhattan and was totally fine. I think it skewed my idea of what the rest of the world looks like. And that's a pretty dangerous thing, I think there are a lot of people who walk through this world being like I earned everything that I have. Everybody else should work just as hard as me and then they'll do as well, if they're not working as hard then they're lazy.  

I got into an argument with somebody at a bachelorette recently which is maybe not the place to talk politics but I whatever, we were talking about the election and we were talking about...somebody said I don't believe in medicare for all. And I think that was the moment that I lost it a little bit, talking about the economics of medicare for all aside, how it would work, her theory was that if you don't have health insurance from your job, you should either get a job, or do COBRA, or be on medicaid, I was trying to explain in my agitated bachelorette state that...I'm a freelance journalist, I work in an industry where there just aren't a lot of jobs, and even jobs outside of the industry but are at least have something to do with my skills are difficult for me to get, and I'm like service jobs I'm not going to get health insurance, so I explained that point, and then I mean...COBRA is 700 dollars, I don't know, 500 dollars, a month when I was looking at it when we got laid off, and had I been like oh I'll be unemployed for two months, and then I'll get a job, maybe that would have been a choice, but being indefinitely unemployed, I can't pay for that. And you have to make under $17000 a year to qualify for Medicaid.  

So I was really upset about this and this is somebody who, she's perfectly nice, no problem, but she went to private school, she went to a good college, she works in finance, you don't think about these things.