30 Days of 30: Sarah Berkowitz

Sarah Berkowitz is another one of those superheroes. Her contributions to the Wooden Shoe as treasurer, zine orderer, among other roles, have invaluably helped to make the collective what it is today. Sarah is one of the smartest and most inspiring activists I have met in Philadelphia. Hopefully one day we’ll carve out some time in both of our busy schedules to finally make that Hole cover band, that we’ve dreamed about for so long, become a reality.

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This weekend I went to the Chicago Zine Fest. I left Philly around 3pm on Thursday and I drove through the night with my partner, Ryan. I’m 29 now. I have been involved in zines for about half my life. Many of the things that were important to me when I was younger are still a big part of my identity. Feminism, anarchism, veganism, social justice, reproductive rights have all been a pretty big part of my life for the past 10 years. These have been my anchors when everything else was in turmoil throughout my 20’s. 

I have been thinking about turning 30 for about a year. It is on my mind a lot. Especially because a lot of the things I am interested in attract younger folks. It feels good to have experience and to feel grounded in that experience. But sometimes I crave more peers my own age that are interested in the same projects I am interested in.

When I was a teenager I never really thought about life after college. I had no specific goals of marriage or a full-time job.  I had little aspirations for life rituals. I spent a lot of my early 20’s crying and feeling sad. Things constantly felt hard- relationships, friendships, and jobs. I stayed in bad situations for too long. When I was 24 I got what I thought could be a dream job. I became manager at a Planned Parenthood surgical center. It was a nightmare. I felt lost. Every full-time job I had had after college wrecked me. I had no idea how to advocate for myself so I stayed miserable in horrible work situations. These patterns were mirrored in a lot of my personal relationships as well.

I spent the second half of my 20s making drastic changes. I quit my job, went to therapy, traveled, spent summers biking around and swimming in fountains. I started staffing at the Wooden Shoe. I took risks, put myself out there and learned a lot of new skills. Eventually I morphed into someone that was pretty sassy and assertive. 

I haven’t had a full-time job in 3 years. I’ve been taking classes to go back to school for nursing and working various part time jobs. I still feel weary about striving for a full-time career. I know that jobs are never going to be satisfying or fulfilling completely. I would choose not to work if I didn’t have to. What satisfies me the most are the projects I don’t get paid for. I like feeling connected to the things I have felt passionate for in my youth. I don’t want to give up my radical ideals. I feel a sense of pride that I am still connected to anarchism and feminism and vegetarianism. I have seen so many people give up on these things over the years. It can be really disheartening. 

When I was 18, someone told me that one of the members of the band Submission Hold got a circle-A tattoo when he turned 30. I thought that was so cool! Everyone gets punk and anarchy tattoos when they first get into it but to get it when you are 30 means that you have sat with these things and let them become a part of your life. You are in it for the long haul.

With that in mind, I have been planning to enter my thirtieth year with an event I have been calling 30 days of 30. I want to plan an event for my 30^th year for 30 days around my actual birthday on Sept 28^th. September tends to be a strange month and personally there have been some major losses around my birthday so I would really like to reclaim this time of year. I expect to use some of those days to get tattoos that I have been talking about getting for 10 years.

When I think about being 30, I finally feel like I am a grown up. I feel ready to buy a house and move in with a partner, to move across the country, and to think about having kids. When I was in college the first time I never cut class or took a lot of risks. I had a lot of insecurities.  I’m an adult now, so I’m confident that cutting class to drive to Chicago for a zine fest to see a Q & A with Aaron Cometbus and Al Burian is the right thing to be doing with my weekend. Cometbus zine also turns 30 this year. It was comforting to hear Aaron Cometbus say, “Some people have kids, I’ve been doing a magazine for 30 years.” It is ok to stick with what you know.

Permission Granted: Mary Tasillo

I met Mary Tasillo through our amazing mutual friend Johanna Marshall. After both growing up on Cape Cod, Johanna and I surprisingly discovered that we had become neighbors in West Philadelphia a couple years ago. I don't know Mary well, but from the various dinner parties we've shared in Johanna's kitchen I can attest that she is a genuinely good person. Mary seems to always have a really cool project going on too. I'm excited about checking out Soapbox, her new independent publishing center.

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I was a pretty early starter on figuring out a direction in life – not that I ever could have pictured present day Mary as 8-year-old Mary, or even 15-year-old Mary. Of course, 15-year-old Mary did not actually think she would make it past 20. She could not envision it at all. Perhaps this has freed me to feel right on target with everything I have been doing surrounding 30, since I had no notions of 30 at such a formative age.

But the pieces of me that encompass creativity, text, image-making, hand crafting, and a life surrounded by books were present early on, and coalesced after a fashion in college (by which point I’d figured out that life got better year after year and that I was definitely going to see life well past twenty). This sent me to graduate school at 24 to get an MFA in Book Arts and Printmaking. In a way this early clarity only delayed the floundering, because to pursue an arts degree is never to pursue any kind of clear career path. Which is how I found myself in and out of various jobs, interspersed with taking time off from working, throughout the latter part of my twenties, while continuing to make art, land the occasional residency, and present at arts conferences. At twenty-eight I landed a day job doing administrative work for an architect. Architects are workaholics. They don’t take any time off, and they don’t like it when you do (even though, as creative types, they like that you are an artist). By twenty-nine, I was plotting my escape from the day job for the architect. Of course, this was right after the economy tanked, and while I was very lucky to still have a job working for an architect, I was going to be hard pressed to get, for example, a job at an arts non-profit.

I’ve never been one to set practical goals. If I were, where would I be? You have to think about where you’d like to be and point yourself towards it. Thus, while working forty hours a week at a desk, and juggling occasional teaching gigs besides, I set a goal that at 30 I would make a transition into teaching and freelancing. Also, sitting at my desk one August day, I decided to start a community print space and zine library. I’d been talking around the idea with various folks for several years now, but had lost the conviction I’d had straight out of graduate school that I could be involved in making this a reality. I’m not sure what shifted that day in the late afternoon sun, but I decided that goddammit, I was going to make it happen, however that might look.

Low and behold, a few months later I met someone else who shared the vision of the community space. “Well,” we each thought, “I’m about to turn thirty so it seems like I can do something like this.” Permission granted. Permission granted to do big things and be taken seriously about it.

So at thirty, we bought a house together and started creating the groundwork for a community space on the first floor.

That same summer, at thirty, I landed enough teaching work to launch me out of the office job into the world of adjuncting and freelance. Maybe this is backwards, in certain circles, to be leaving stability and health insurance for something more piecemeal and unfinished, a choice of process over product. But in my view, the ability to keep the support under one’s feet while walking this path is a thing of beauty (if awkward at moments). Permission granted.

Thus, still early in Year 31, I find myself winding down after the inaugural event, a zine library opening and reading, for The Soapbox: Philadelphia’s Independent Publishing Center. Not even two years after that decision one August afternoon, the community print space is a reality – even if we are not yet 100% set up for community printing. My jobs consist of a combination of editorial work, teaching, book conservation, and art cataloging. And it is not the wisdom, but the permission of 30, that allowed all this to happen. (Sure, plus some leg work I put in through my twenties. The work, experimentation, and exploration I did created momentum.) Rather than serving as a benchmark, 30 has allowed me to let go of any notions of being finished, in terms of life planning and choosing a path. What a miracle to find life still getting better year after year, when 15-year-old Mary, who was finding life as an adolescent to be more difficult each year, could not envision life past 20.

Taking the Long Way Around: Colette Hall Vander Plas (formerly Ryder-Hall)

Colette Ryder-Hall was the first person I met in high school that did a zine. I'm pretty sure I didn't know what a zine was until I met her actually. One early issue of Looks Yellow, Taste Red featured a positive review of my sloppy 9th grade punk band PME, generously comparing us to my favorite band Dead Kennedys. Colette was also the first person I knew who dropped out of school on political/ethical grounds and, through her zine, taught me about Grace Llewellyn's classic The Teenage Liberation Handbook. This made Colette a mentor of sorts and definitely an inspiration, whether she knew it or not.

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First, I dropped out of high school. A year later, bored and frightened of enduring another Cape Cod winter, I went to college. After 5 years of enlightening but rather aimless higher education, at the ripe old age of 23, I graduated with a BA. I felt like a prisoner being let out of prison. I was terrified and I wanted back in. So I opted for a MA in creative writing. This involved moving to the middle of the country, discovering I hated teaching freshman comp and taking a job at a natural foods coop to cover the unexpected expenses of being a grad student (steep bar tabs and pricey plane tickets back home for major holidays, mainly). At the age of 25, I graduated again. I stayed at the coop job until I went insane at the age of 28 and realized I had to find a meaningful path in life (which did not involve the retail and merchandising of organic produce), or die trying. I quit my job and drove around the country in a blue Toyota Tercel for awhile, then returned to Iowa, where I went back to school (again) and got married. This is why now, at the age of 31, I find myself in the position of many 22-year-olds: about to graduate, broke and waiting on a Peace Corps application that has been in medical review for several months already.

I do feel old sometimes now. First, while most people assume I'm still in my early 20's when they meet me, I'm pretty sure they're not looking closely. I have collected a lot of white hairs in the past ten years. And I have officially moved past the time when wearing mini-skirts is a good idea. Second, it seems that in the Midwest people tend to get married and have families younger than was the norm on the East Coast. I got married at the age of 29 and while we plan on having a family, it's going to be a while. Being surrounded by people in their twenties who are far more "settled down" than me is weird and it fills me with irrational fear that I've wasted my most fertile years already.

Mostly, I am grateful to have entered my thirties. While the intense emotion and creative energy of my teenage years and early twenties made for a lot of excitement and productivity, it was hard. Everything was louder, brighter and potentially emotionally devastating. At the age of 31, I don't care as much and that's okay. I may not be producing a zine every five minutes or hand-crafting bizarre objects in my bedroom while listening to loud, angry music. I may not be routinely having intense heart-to-heart conversations with random people late into the night. I may not be full of righteous anger and a burning desire to assert myself at all times. Instead, I have an inner stability. I don't constantly wonder if I'm crazy. I don't blame everything on myself. I can rest assured that things generally work out, regardless of how much or how little I worry about them. I am becoming more comfortable with myself all the time.

So maybe my situation is a blessing - a chance to experience my early years of adulthood all over again, with the added bonuses of experience, confidence and inner balance.