Experienced, Personal Consulting

August 20, 2018

Chloe,

I understand you are in a place where you don’t know what to do with your life.

I am trying to be as loving and helpful as I can while you figure out what path you decide to take. It’s not easy as you start on your own path, but you do need to start on a path even if you decide to change paths later.

You can’t stand at a crossroad, you must keep going forward.

We agreed there was no point in registering for classes at USC last minute just to sign up for any classes left as school is starting.

I don’t want to be the heavy parent, but you need to start working if I am going to keep supporting you while you find your passion to pursue in life.

You said you had applied for some jobs at restaurants, etc, but had not received callbacks. Don’t get me wrong, but working at a restaurant isn’t really a job heading you towards your career unless you want to be in the restaurant or food business. It’s certainly better to start working at a restaurant immediately than having nothing to do everyday. I would accept a restaurant job as a start.

So first, you need to get a job. You need to have a reason to get up everyday and a place you need to go. As I see it, currently your job is to find a job.

To find a job, you need to organize yourself to interview with placement agencies and figure this out and find other ways of getting interviews at companies that will give you a start. You need to show up to placement agencies and interviews looking nice and neat and have a cheerful positive attitude and outlook so people want to help you and want to be around you.

After you have a job, you need to decide what are the careers that would be your dream jobs which you would love doing and be proud and fulfilled to do and tell your family and friends about because you are proud of your accomplishments. I think you need to work on deciding that. For me, it was food, and since I didn’t have support and financing to start a restaurant I can up with a unique idea and started Penguin.

I know you are really good at math so maybe doing something that has to do with accounting or numbers is something you could have a passion for?

All your life I would have guessed you would have done something more in the creative area. You talked about designing/staging sets for a studio. As a kid you would take material and go to the sewing machine and make clothes with no pattern. You knitted, sketched, played with art.

At the same time as you are finding a job you need to start thinking about whether or not you want to go to college. If you want to go to college you need to figure out what is left to finish your first 2 years of undergraduate work. Unless things are substantially different from when I was in college, your first 2 years are mostly core classes and a few electives. So if college is a direction you choose, you need to finish your first 2 years of core classes during the next semester you decide to enroll in school which it appears would be January 2019. If college is not your choice, I respect that as your choice and will support that decision.

I am going to leave it at this for now:

If you want my financial support you need to spend your time first working towards and getting a job and giving me a plan for yourself going forward.

If you don’t want to follow my directive, you are an adult and this is your life which is absolutely your choice, but then I need to stop being the enabler of you not moving forward.

If you don’t want to follow my directive, starting in January, I need to start slowly and lovingly removing your support from me in a reasonable way to give you ample time to easily replace your allowance with working. I will do this by lowering your allowance $100 per month each month so that in approximately 2 years you will have needed to start bringing in enough money that you don’t live on an allowance. After that we will figure out how to move forward on the apartment you rent or if you are moving in a positive healthy direction we can consider if you are ready for me to help you buy your own home or condo.

I only want the best for you, Chloe. I love you very much and am trying to help you with direction to find a healthy positive life instead of enabling you to just do nothing and exist on what I give you.

On a different note, Chloe. You can’t have your rage at me. If you do these things again; flip me off, tell me you hate me, tell me I don’t love you, disrespect me, etc., I am telling you, I will resign myself to the fact that I did the best job I could as your Father, but that I will start lowering your support more rapidly than in the softer loving way that I have described above.

Love, Dad