We interrupt this broadcast to get self-indulgent

thank you for your patience during these difficult times

Oh boy. I have this whole draft open in another tab, all about friendship and social media, and I keep trying to finish it, but it’s not happening this week. I’m stalling out. Instead of writing or doing anything productive, I’ve been spinning a sticky web of anxiety. As much as I want to write about tech and culture, to be fun and lighthearted or smart and articulate every week, it’s not always possible. I still refuse to let myself lapse into Deep & Meaningful voice, but this week can I ask you for a little patience while I talk this out? I’m going to leave the smart stuff for another time. This will be personal. Thank you in advance.

So far, the most popular installment of this newsletter has been the one about where the name Meets Most came from. I mean, there haven’t been many, but that one’s the clear winner. It’s not surprising to me though. It’s got a quick dive into a type of toxic corporate culture people are either very familiar with or are fascinated by. It’s simultaneously personal and universal, always my favorite. It’s fun and lively but still real. Yes, I am doing a review of my own work, not sorry about it.

That post was born out of my desire to take a challenging experience and make something interesting, funny, and even valuable out of it. For myself, but also for others if possible. That’s my favorite kind of writing, even if I don’t do it every week. I mean, I love the other writing too, the more big scope analytical stuff about tech and culture, and I’ll absolutely keep doing it. But I keep worrying about whether people like what I write, or why it doesn’t get as good a reaction. I want your approval. I want everyone to like me. I want to succeed. I want to make something of this. What if I don’t? What if I fail? What if my entire life falls apart?

Hello, and welcome to the Charybdis of my brain.

charybdis

Fun fact: Did you know that in some versions of her myth, Charybdis was a “voracious woman” before she was turned into a hideous sea monster?

As a little girl, I loved Greek mythology. I still do. Greek mythology is one of my literary comfort foods. Whenever I see Orion’s belt on the horizon I feel strangely comforted. Every summer since I first read it on a Greek beach in 2018, I re-read Circe by Madeline Miller (and judging by this current mood, I think we have reached the point in the summer when it’s time). I have a small gold pendant with Athena on one side and her owl on the other, that I bought on Corfu from a woman named Athina. I’ve even started learning Greek.

Or each time I wish for something, I think of the story of Eos in the D’Aulaires volume I had and treasured as a kid. Eos was the goddess of the dawn, another voracious woman who I like to think of as one of the originators of “be careful what you wish for.” She was cursed by Aphrodite to have an insatiable lust for mortal men, and when she fell in love with a mortal named Tithonus, she asked Zeus to grant him immortality – but she forgot to ask specifically for eternal youth. In D’Aulaires’ version of the myth, he grows so old and wizened he becomes a grasshopper, kept forever in a tiny cage.

circe

Right now, almost everything in my life is up in the air. My work situation, obviously. The job market is falling apart. My health is forever rife with uncertainty, because I have a chronic illness and while I try to manage it, I never know when I’ll get a flare-up or if it will progress. And in June I started having trouble with my apartment and my landlord, which means I’ll need to move out of this apartment I love next year, and have you heard about the rental market in NYC lately?

Work, health, home. All uncertain. No wonder I’m anxious.

Uncertainty makes us crave familiarity and comfort. It also makes me want to react out of panic, to get out of the uncertainty as fast as possible. To fix the problem in any way I can. The past few weeks, I’ve found myself wanting to find a new place to live immediately, even though it’s the height of summer and the worst time to look for an apartment. I’ve found myself wanting to apply to all the jobs, even though I don’t know exactly what I want to do next, and even though I do know that money aside, I probably won’t be happy in most of these jobs.

What I mean is: I know that fixing the problem out of panic is only fixing the surface problem. And I know better than that. It doesn’t fix the root. It doesn’t really fix anything.

This uncertainty is probably why I’m coming back to this mental comfort food. But maybe there’s another reason. All these voracious, insatiable, curious, strong, brilliant, fiery, occasionally cursed goddesses and sorceresses. Lately I’ve felt all of these things, including a little cursed, what with this string of bad luck. So what do I do?

circe the sorceress

A few years ago, I sort of promised myself that my job at Instagram would be my last big user research job, and that by the time I was 50, I would have either moved on to my next act or figured out what my next act was and gotten myself on the path toward it. In my heart, I know if I hadn’t lost my job, I wouldn’t have figured it out. I’d have let that job keep consuming me, keep taking up far too much space in my brain and life. There wouldn’t have been the energy left for whatever Big Thing was next in my life because some weeks I barely had the energy to deal with my current life.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a big job like that comes with major benefits, namely excellent health insurance, a great salary, and daily structure. Don’t pooh-pooh that last one, because some of us need external structure and accountability. Not having those three things guaranteed is terrifying. And yes, I very much realize that even without a job I’m saying this from an extremely privileged position, so obviously keep that caveat in mind as we continue.

Getting laid off, as we know, comes with a bunch of attendant emotions. I’ve been through it now enough times that I know what those feelings are for me. In the early days after a layoff, I tend to experience a mix of relief and shame. There’s also a period in which I get a better sense of just how much having a job, or even having a specific job, defines us. This is especially true in the US. What is my day-to-day identity if I am not “someone who works at Instagram”? I know at least one person who has drastically reduced the number of messages she sends me now that I am not a well-paid person working on a product she uses and regularly needs help with.

But I do not want that to be my identity. Since I am truly terrible at compartmentalizing, I can’t do one of these jobs and only give part of myself, at least not while living in NYC. Even in Stockholm, where I taught myself how to take entire days off to do nothing, and where there was less pressure to turn What You Do into Who You Are, I still struggled to divorce myself from my job. I still cared too much. I still wanted work to approve of me.

(If I could go back and change that, I would. I do miss Stockholm in many ways, even if I also know it was right for me to move to NYC when I did. I’ll be back for you one day, Sverige.)

That external approval is the problem, isn’t it. After I wrote that newsletter about Meets Most, a friend asked me how it’s possible to be satisfied with most when you work or exist in a system that tells you most isn’t enough. That you aren’t enough. I don’t have the answer to that, except to say that I am trying to build my own system. I’m trying to do what I do when I conduct research: Follow the threads that feel compelling. Listen to my spidey sense. Chase what feels good to me. Try to identify what I want to do, not what I think I should do. Remind myself that sitting in this uncertainty may be uncomfortable and anxious, but it’s better than the feeling of being stuck and angry. Of being desperately hungry for the world but unable to satisfy even the tiniest bit of that hunger. Of even being jealous of anyone who seems to be living some sort of satisfying life – regardless of whether that life is only for “the ‘gram.”

I guess that’s one answer to how to be satisfied with most: Teach yourself to game the system. To care less about what other people think. Or even better, if you are lucky enough to have this choice, try to get out of the system as much as possible. You find a way to say no to what’s safe and familiar when it’s unhappy and unhealthy. You follow what lights you up rather than what shuts you down. You ride out the moments of gut-churning, ass-clenching panic for as long as you can, and you find a way to make it work for you.

Honestly? This system has been trying to spit me out for years. I’m the idiot who keeps demanding her way back in.

The other day, a silly app told me that the only one who doubts my abilities is me. This app wasn’t the first place I’d heard that. It wasn’t even the first place I’d heard it that week! I don’t want to do that anymore. A couple of years ago I read a fun tarot card website¹ and learned something that has stuck with me ever since. I’ve told it to so many people, I’ve lost track. The author says:

When we are operating from our conscious minds, we often feel as if events are forced upon us by chance. Life seems to have little purpose, and we suffer because we do not really understand who we are and what we want. When we know how to access our Inner Guide, we experience life differently. We have the certainty and peace that comes from aligning our conscious will with our inner purpose. Our path becomes more joyous, and we see more clearly how we bring together the scattered elements of our lives to fulfill our destinies.

…

You do not really need the tarot to access your Inner Guide. The cards serve the same function as Dumbo's magic feather. In the Disney movie, Dumbo the Elephant really could fly on his own, but he didn't believe it. He placed all his faith on the special feather he held in his trunk. He thought this feather gave him the power to fly, but he found out differently when it blew away, and he was forced to fall back on his own resources.

How long have I been turning this over in my mind without really understanding what it was saying? For years (decades!!!) I felt as if I’d taken a left turn and every day I woke up in the wrong life. I honestly felt trapped, but I mean, I was kind of trapping myself, wasn’t I? I was doing what I thought I should do. I was much too in my “conscious mind,” trying to control some kind of outcome. When I moved to Sweden, I told people I wanted to take the pieces of my life, toss them halfway around the world, and see where they landed. That experience taught me a lot but I still wasn’t ready to really see what happens when the pieces unravel on their own.

Maybe the hidden gift of all this uncertainty is finally understanding on a visceral level that I control almost nothing. No matter how hard I try to do the right thing or be the right person, I can’t control how the the world will react or what it will do or what chaos it will serve up. So all I can do is try to listen more to what feels right to me, care less about how it comes across to anyone else, and follow that. Me and my little feather, just like Dumbo.

magical feather

If I let myself take a flight of fancy for one moment and think “what would a mythological Greek sorceress do,” I’m pretty sure the answer would be “conjure up some magic and whisper an incantation into the ear of the universe” or something along those lines. You, friend, are the ear of my universe. I’ve discovered that when I say something out loud, it has more impact than when I keep it to myself. So I’m going as out loud as possible by telling an entire audience what I want. I invite you to tell me right back (but don’t forget what Eos taught us).

PLEASE NOTE: Before you roll your eyes, you should know I recently manifested a green card for someone (this is not a joke), so why not try this out on my own life.

Herewith, what one voracious woman wants.

What I wish for more than anything right now is to spend the rest of my days feeling like I am in the right life and the right place, on the right path for me. I want to feel a lot more joy, period end of sentence, but in particular joy about the work I do and the life that I live. I want to be surrounded by people I love and who show up for me. Every aspect of my life doesn’t need to be perfect and my work doesn’t need to be fun only. No. But what I want is to feel joy with the path (or paths!!) I’ve chosen, delight in what I’m doing and feeling, so in the moments when things are inevitably hard or uncertain, I am okay. I want to write and perform, to create and build things, and I want these to be things I am proud of and that are meaningful and useful. I don’t want to feel as if value is simply being extracted from me by some larger force that doesn’t value me in return. This is how I want to make a sustainable living. This is what I wish for myself.

Oh, and while I’m sending this message out into the universe, why not go for broke: more than anything, I’d also love the perfect home for me and Lumpy (I’ll leave the specifics to the list I’m writing for my eyes only) to fall into my lap, and maybe a magical human partner to spend my evenings with (ditto).

Ok, your turn.

Lxx

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I feel a little spent from laying it all out on the table up there so no recommendations this week. We will resume next time! And I promise, back to the smart stuff.

1. Important reminder about me: I love all frameworks, whether personality-trait based or “scientific” (lol) or woo-woo or whatever, as long as they give me a new way to look at myself, the world, human behavior. You don’t have to think astrology is real to think it’s fun! Loosen up!!