It's Me, I'm a Karen Too

I am obsessively curious if there is a real life Karen behind all the memes. Somewhere there is this woman named Karen, Karen Memes perhaps too, and she has been the target of a lot of what not to do messaging through memes based on her own life story. Who is this original Karen because quite honestly I want to meet her. I sincerely hope she is getting paid for hits to her memes. Seriously some of them are quite mean. At times I want to hug Karen, whoever she is, for fumbling through life much like I do myself. She seems like a nice enough person who however lacks any true friends and is just trying to do the best she can some days. I can relate to Karen on a lot of levels through her memes, perhaps that makes me a Karen too?

The first Karen meme I saw was a 3 block comic strip setup calling out this person named Karen for doing something rather dumb; in the creator’s mind at least. This was quickly followed by a slew of Karen memes with everyone jumping on this poor woman’s back for not doing much of anything right it seemed. From being someone who sells products as a distributor to driving slow in the fast lane, it was not the time to name your newborn Karen for sure. This particular name seemed destined for the names least likely to succeed in life based on the memes that kept coming about how much Karen wasn’t liked. Most of us would laugh at these and move on with some small amount of pity for whoever Karen was. I however, stuck around looking for her. The real her because I had questions about how this had come to happen to her.

As I read these, some were funny as in we all do that kind of thing and it was calling us out. Like we all forget the laundry and have to rewash it sometimes right? Surely Karen isn’t the only one who was too tired to do that and just dried and put away her smelly towels. I related to some of these memes because well that is life some days. We all do dumb things at times and it is not so much they are dumb at all. Given the high amount of stress some of us are under every day, mistakes happen and quite simply we cannot keep up with everything so they appear haphazard and even well dumb. If that makes me a Karen well then so be it because I have too many other things on my plate to worry about what someone thinks about my lifestyle. Laundry can always be rewashed.

It really hit home for me when Karen became the target of other memes though related to her work selling products. There was a fresh slaughtering of memes aimed at Karen selling things or doing things in her work that others didn’t agree was right. Here too, Karen was the butt of the joke and living example of what not to do for success. My heart really went out to her because I saw myself and many others being like Karen. Is this what our friends truly thought of us? Wow, were they writing these memes to indirectly tell me I sucked at what I was doing? It started to hit home how much Karen and I needed each other to cover each other’s back.

Maybe Karen was a bit overzealous or doing what someone had guided her on but people were all about hating on her as a result of it. This was most likely not one of those situations where it worked out in her favor and she could sell a ton as a result of the bad press either. As a distributor of products I really felt for Karen and reflected on my business approach for I and a lot of other reps were taught to sell things the way Karen was. Karen wasn’t the only one being hit negatively from these memes in our business. We were all seeing the hit from it and I actually became a little timid about telling people what I did for while as a result. That message was loud and clear from people that this was very unpopular and a double whammy if you were also named Karen.

Reflecting on this I felt like I was back in high school with the cool kids picking on the underdog. Karen was just the latest target getting her books knocked out of her hands and laughed at as she walked down