Everything is on fire

Such a serious title and subhed. I promise not to be a downer, don’t worry.

So yes, where to begin this week! First, thank you all for all the gorgeous birthday wishes. I appreciated them and you so much. It was a great birthday, laid back but fun and full of love. A+ would birthday again, and hopefully I will.

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Second, I thought maybe this week I’d write a follow up to the “who gets to have it all” installment, especially since a few friends had some great questions, namely: How do you make peace with just doing ok in a system that doesn’t value just doing ok? (Spoiler: I have no idea, but when has that ever stopped me from rambling about a topic?) I also wanted to write about the tech industry’s unique flaws and failings, but we’re in no rush with that as those flaws and failings certainly aren’t going anywhere.

Then Canada caught fire and NYC got engulfed in smoke, along with much of the northeast, and also I spent five days having a raging anxiety attack. So I thought, ok well maybe let’s write about something different. Let’s save the tech and culture talk for next time, and instead do a little personal noodling. See where we end up!

A few years ago, I wrote a Letter of Recommendations in the New York Times Magazine about killing ants. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, in part because I don’t look back on it and cringe but also because I think it encapsulates me and my voice in a pretty good way: Empathetic, human, still gonna crack a joke even in the hardest times. I also think about how I wrote that 6 1/2 years ago, and while almost everything in my life has changed since then, so much hasn’t. Still sitting here with that horrible feeling in my chest that makes it impossible to breathe (although sometimes that feeling is actually gas – big thanks to my best gal Ash for letting me belch on FaceTime like an absolute beast). Still spending hours spinning and hovering in that stupid space between feeling fine and COMPLETE BREAKDOWN. Like when you see a fly that’s obviously going to die soon, buzzing and wobbling around in weird shaky circles-ish. You anxiety sufferers, you know what I’m talking about.

It’s fascinating to me how so much about a person can change and grow, and so much never does. Not just a person but the world. Why does everything change while everything also stays the same? Unbudgeable. Like getting in your own way and letting fear rule you. When I was younger my mom would sometimes say to me, “It’s like sometimes you get trapped in a little eddy, swirling around while the rest of the stream rushes on by you.” Some days it still feels like that.

About a year and a half ago, I tried microdosing (hi mom! hi pop! aren’t you glad you subscribed). I spent a few months doing it, a very eensy tiny – that’s what micro means, I bet you didn’t know that – dose of mushrooms every three days. I actually did it with the sort-of approval of an actual psychiatrist. He could not officially say “Yes I condone and prescribe tripping balls” (also you don’t actually trip when you microdose, you’d have to take way more to do that). It was an off-the-record sort of approval. Just like with marijuana, there are therapeutic benefits to some psychedelics, but not, you know, officially.

I decided to try microdosing because for a long time, I’d felt well and truly stuck in some fundamental ways. I’d tried just about everything a reasonable person could try to solve this, like therapy, regular medication, moving halfway around the world, yoga, etc. And yes, before you ask, I also tried “not thinking about it” and “getting over it” as well as telling myself “those feelings are stupid, try not having them.” But that fundamental feeling of stuck-ness wasn’t budging. That’s one reason the doctor was amenable to my trying it.

Anyway, there’s a reason I’m telling you this. It’s because I had one or two extraordinary (to me) experiences, and I’m still fascinated by them. Now, if you know me, especially the me of the past 5-10 years, you know that I process data quickly, especially when that data is about human behavior and the world. If it’s about me, I also try to integrate that data back into my understanding of myself and the world as fast as possible so I can activate whatever change I think would help me navigate things better or be less annoying. As I’m writing this out I’m realizing how very cool it makes me sound, how very fun to be around!! But I really do this and I’ve got the process pretty dialed in. I can usually complete the experience/action-response-observation-analysis-insight-reintegration-action loop in under 24 hours. Again, I am fun at parties. But also well primed for something like what I’m about to tell you.

A few months into microdosing, I had a job interview. More of a screener with a hiring manager. I was still at IG then but taking calls when they piqued my curiosity, so I decided to talk to this company. The conversation with the hiring manager was over video and was scheduled for 30 minutes. About midway through the call, it was apparent – like on a visceral level, I could feel it through Zoom – that not only was I not the candidate for this job, this woman did not like me. Not one little bit. She ended the call so quickly at exactly 30 minutes it was almost comical.

Going into the call, I hadn’t been like “oh wow this is my dream job, gosh I hope I get it.” I was curious and the job sounded interesting enough. But what was more interesting was that, as soon as I got off the call, a classic Leah response kicked in: Oh no, she didn’t like me and I won’t get the job and now I really want it. Should I email her? Should I fix this? This is a response and set of behaviors I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Luckily it was a Friday evening, so there wasn’t much I could do except ruminate and talk to friends – including one who told me no candidate should ever get off a call feeling as I did. True!

And then, about an hour after I got off the call, as I was sitting there fretting, the absolute wildest thing happened. It was like I was in a little car driving down the same dark little neural highway toward the same dark little destination, a destination I know and hate and would love to avoid. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a light flicker, and I thought to myself, “Is that an off-ramp?” My little car swerved hard and took that off-ramp and you’ll never guess what the destination was: A town I like to call “Why on earth would I want a job in which I have to work for someone who doesn’t like me? And why do I even care if she likes me? I didn’t like her!” Sitting in that town, I thought about all the times in my life my response to someone had been, “Oh, you don’t like me? WELL I’M GONNA MAKE YOU LOVE ME,” and how that response had, without fail, led me to make some of the worst decisions I could make, whether professionally or personally. I decided I liked this new destination way, way more than the other one.

So when I got the expected recruiter email on Tuesday telling me we wouldn’t move forward, I calmly responded by telling the recruiter about my very bad experience with this person and how I felt it was a mutual “not a good fit.” I thanked the recruiter for being lovely and I signed off feeling… great. Not rejected in the slightest. Not like chasing someone down to make them like me, and not like going for a job that was obviously, from the start, a forest of red flags.

Then a few weeks later I was walking along 5th Avenue in the sun, thinking about a close friend and how I hadn’t heard from him in a little while, and then having this almost visual realization that I was not the center of the world. That no one is the center of the world. That we may feel as if we are the center of our own worlds, because we are only able to know our own experiences, but we are all part of a vast network of humans, all of whom are connected to other humans, most of whom are centralizing and prioritizing their own needs and experiences, just as we are.

It’s a little like this thing I have repeated over and over again at every tech job: The only people thinking about the app you’re building to the degree that you think about it are the people you work with. Your users are thinking about it only rarely – it’s like priority #1743 on a list of things they have going on. Ok yes, hopefully my good friend cares about me more than a user cares about an app, but the point is that my center is not the same as your center. I am connected to you and you are connected to all of your people and we’re all part of delicate, wild interconnected and interdependent constellations, like those incredible Tomás Saraceno installations of different spiderwebs in plexiglass boxes. (He is one of my absolute favorite artists, click on those if you’ve never heard of him, or even if you have.)

Isn’t it fun to think that’s basically what mushrooms are? A vast interconnected symbiotic network? If that’s scientifically wrong don’t tell me because I want to enjoy this parallel.

I did not expect this installment to end up here! What a fun journey we’ve had through my brain today. For the record, the realization I wrote about were also not what I’d had in mind when I said I wanted to get unstuck. But I loved them anyway, and they were wildly valuable. I think maybe even in moving me gently toward unstuckness.

I could wrap this up with a big “ah yes, a lesson for life” bow but I need to leave it untied. Right now everything is so uncertain and anxious, and as with everything, I have to wait and see where this journey ends up.

See you next time!

Lxx

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Three recommendations from me, if recommendations are your thing:

1. Wearing more orange. Like tangerine orange nail polish. Orange is such an underrated color.
2. Watching my personal favorite clip from the Blues Brothers and dancing along.
3. Buying a membership to your favorite museum (I have a membership to the Met) so you have fun experiences like skipping long lines, seeing exhibits when they’re less crowded, and lucking out with member preview days for major exhibits when you least expect it.

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