The good news is I am still alive

The bad news is I forgot to tell you

Well.

This is awkward, isn’t it? Or… maybe it’s not. Honestly I always find it more awkward when someone writes a blog with a big SORRY I HAVEN’T POSTED IN A WHILE post, because it just draws attention to their lack of attention, and also if they do it again, well now you’ll definitely notice. I used to do that when I tried, briefly and mostly unsuccessfully, to have a food blog. In my defense this was 2007 when food blogs were very much the thing. They were not, as it turned out, my thing but I gave it a good try. Such a good name too – Love & Butter. I didn’t deserve you, blog title.

in case you thought I was joking, here is a photo I took of some chocolate covered orange peel that I made for my food blog, in November 2007

Anyway, hello. It really has been a while, a few months at least. I’m not going to look at the dates and please, none of you point them out, because I don’t want to feel additional guilt at this time. It’s weird to me that I feel bad – just kidding, it’s not weird, feeling bad about things is one of my default settings. The other day my therapist said to me, “Are you actually anxious or is anxiety your comfort emotion,” which, RUDE. But fair.

Maybe the funny thing about the bad feelings is that the entire point of this newsletter was to create a space to underachieve. To not do the most. To maybe do the least, or at least to sometimes do things half-assed. And then I went and did all of the above and god did I feel shitty about it. So yes, I am sorry. To you, but even more so to myself, because I need to learn to be nice to myself and to quit with the constant qualifying.

Really what I want to say is that it’s been a year since the layoffs, and as of late I’ve been surprised to find myself somehow feeling bad about it. Talk about a delayed reaction. Like in the past few weeks, I’ve felt worse about getting laid off a year after the fact than I did when it happened. The good news it that I quickly sussed out the reasons I feel bad, and they are 1. the money, which was nice 2. the benefits, which same and 3. the fact that I am not writing enough. There has been a vacuum where “sense of fulfillment” should be, and when confronted with a vacuum, nature will fill it with cat hair and bleak feelings.

Yesterday I talked to my fitness coach. Actually, yesterday I talked to all three people I like to sometimes call “my other therapists”: my fitness coach, my financial advisor, and my agent. Today I am better off for all of those conversations. My fitness coach’s job is technically to help me to get stronger and lose weight, but we all know that health is contextual, so of course I cried during that conversation. In large part because of the context of life, with the state of the world, everything, chronic health issues, etc. but also because, like all of us, I’m aging.

Sorry to get weirdly personal again! I know some of you come here for tech industry talk, but this is actually applicable to you too! Aging is not something that gets discussed often in tech because we love NEW and SHINY and FOREVER YOUNG. Our industry is notoriously full of fresh-faced graduate-to-bootcamp-pipeline engineers who already make more than you do, despite your having 15+ years of experience. We don’t talk much about how our industry treats people over a certain age, how unusual it is to see ICs (individual contributors) over 50, how few older women there are at all in the industry, or how being older puts you at a major disadvantage when it comes to finding a new job. And yet the wild thing is that, unlike many other things we may never personally experience, aging is the one that comes for us all.

One of the weirdest things about aging is that your insides and your outsides do not age at the same rate. I don’t mean your internal organs, although that may also be true, I don’t know, I’m not a biologist or whatever. And I don’t even mean your health metrics and the rest. I’m talking about you, who you are. If you have been a chronically online person for a long time, do you remember a project years ago in which a son photographed his father, who had been a very handsome man in his youth? Maybe it was this one by Stephen DiRado, but I’m not sure – as beautiful as those photos are, they’re not the ones I remember. Anyway, the point is that in this project, the father said something I think about a lot and have heard a lot of people say, which is that when he looks in the mirror he’s shocked to find an old man looking back at him. In his mind he’s still young and handsome. He’s anchored to another age or another version of himself, and that age in no way matches his physical age or how he looks.

I think about this all the time lately. It’s hard to match who I am on the inside with who the rest of the world might see. It’s not always the same person. I don’t mean that I look “old” – and I don’t need the reassurance that I look young, because this whole concept of “you don’t look your age” is part of what makes this all so messy. It’s more that there’s a disconnect and I don’t entirely know how to reconcile it. I forget sometimes how old I am, or what that might mean. I don’t have a lot of the normal markers of someone my age, like kids for example, so sometimes it’s also a disconnect from my peers. In a way I like that, because I don’t feel the pressure to be a certain way or do a certain thing – which is what causes the disconnect for a lot of people, like “why am I not X by Y age.” But in other ways I think it adds to my own personal disconnect because: What is my age supposed to be like? What does it mean to feel like multiple ages at once? And because I work in tech, I’m again surrounded by people who are mostly younger than I am, although not entirely. So that anchors me too. It’s like that gross guy, you know the one “who keeps getting older while his girlfriends stay the same age,” except it’s my coworkers.

There’s another anchoring I think about, a deeply sad and sobering one. If you’ve never seen the Nick Cave documentary One More Time With Feeling, I recommend it. You don’t need to be a Nick Cave fan to watch it, although you do need to be prepared to cry. The documentary was originally about the making of the album Skeleton Tree, but really it’s a documentary about grief, the creative process, and the search for meaning and answers in the face of unfathomable loss: Midway through the recording of the album, one of Nick Cave’s twin 15-year-old sons died after falling from a cliff, a horrific accident. At one point in the film, Cave talks about how grief isn’t linear, how we don’t move forward in some sort of straight line, away from the experience toward something easier or better. Instead he describes how certain experiences, particularly certain traumas, anchor us. As we go through our lives, trundling along through space and time, we are brought back to these anchored moments over and over.

a photo I took in SF in 2010

Sorry! This got unexpectedly heavy! I did not come into this even thinking about that documentary but it popped into my head and I wanted to share. To lighten things up, let us say that, while time does appear to be linear, in some ways both time and life really do move in a Jeremy Bearimy.

The point of all of this is to say that there is almost always a disconnect in our lives. Right now I think people are feeling A LOT of disconnect, at least the people I talk to. I mean this in addition to the much bigger issues that are adding to an overall feeling of overwhelm + disconnect + stress + fear + anger + [your choice here], which I think we’re all acutely aware of. I also hear a lot of personal fear and disconnect. How we perceive ourselves and our lives, or where we think we are vs. where we think we should be. Lots of things like “I need to find a new job but the market is terrible and finding a new job is so much work and it makes me feel depressed, so I end up shopping to make myself feel better, but then that makes me more depressed” etc.

So when I was talking to my fitness guy, I thought about my old yoga practice, which I still miss very much. I thought about how, after a few years, I finally found myself as an advanced student. What made me advanced was not that I was extra bendy and could do all those Instagram yoga poses in beautiful exotic locales. No, what made me a senior (lol senior, thanks for the reminder) student was that I was willing to meet my body wherever it was and however it needed to show up to the mat. That’s the mark of a truly advanced student. What can your body do today? What does your body need today? Not where was your body yesterday, or what poses could your body do a week ago, or where do you think your body is supposed to be, or what are you hoping your body will do tomorrow. Where is it right now and how can you be ok with that? How can you support it? The advanced student will actually downlevel a pose – like, they will make the pose itself less advanced. Maybe they’ll put their hand on a block if the hand can’t get to the floor, or put a knee down when the leg is meant to be straight, or just not go all the way into a twist or whatever. Being advanced is not about moving forward in a relentless linear way, constantly improving, constantly striving toward some ideal perfection. I mean, maybe it is to a guy like David Goggins, and maybe that’s your vibe, which is fine! Personally, my experience is that nothing in life is linear. Some days, the most you can do is most.

And despite the fact that I made this whole dumb newsletter to remind myself of that, I still forgot. Maybe I’m not so advanced after all. Maybe I have a lot more growing to do. And maybe the feeling of “being grown up” that we’re looking for is the feeling of acceptance: Of the disconnect; of non-linearity; of realizing most of life won’t actually make sense, be fair, or be in our control; of never one single self but instead being all of our many selves at many points, anchored and pulled back and pushed forward, all at once.

Anyway, hi. I’m back. I’m working on a book proposal, so that’s got the bulk of my attention, but I think I’ll keep doing some noodling here. I have no idea what that will look like but I hope you’ll stick around. Thanks for your patience while I went away, got some contract work, moved into a new apartment, and basically tried to reconstruct my life after the sledgehammer that was 2023. Let’s see where it goes.

xx

L