2025-01-23 02:51:00
Lovely short post from Sara Hendren about choosing: “In middle age, looking back, it is the subtlest shift that shifts everything: from the late adolescent who says I really must choose the best path to the young adult who says I chose the best path, at least for me to, finally, simply: I chose. I chose and it might have been otherwise.” When I talk to my clients about making choices, I am wont to inquire into the reflexive language of making the best or right choice; such adjectives can usually only be applied in hindsight, with all the bias that perspective entails. Better to think about making a choice as a creative act, as an exercise of your agency and will, as a kind of small, brief, bright movement. The outcome of which you will never fully know.
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2025-01-16 20:39:00
IN THE FALL, as the days get shorter and colder, a deciduous tree (deciduous comes from the Latin for falling) will stop producing chlorophyll in its leaves. This brings about all those beautiful autumn colors—the corals and ochres and ambers, the bright, juicy reds. At the same time, the tree produces abscission cells at the base of the leaf, where it connects to the branch. These cells are designed to break apart, and so release the dying leaf to the ground, where it can decompose and fertilize the soil for next year. Sometimes, a tree that ought to produce these cells fails to do so, maybe because the fall was too warm, or because the cold came on all at once, with no warning. You can spot these trees once you know to go looking for them: all winter, they hold on to their dead, dried up leaves, like so many desiccated fists raised to the air.
This is a metaphor about knowing when to quit.
We live in cultures where quitting is fraught. First, there’s the powerful and enduring social stigma that associates quitting with failure. We (wrongly) presume that quitting signifies some lack of skill, some incompetence or fuck up. Even when we consciously know that the truth is likely otherwise, those old stories have a habit of sticking around, of lurking in dark corners and tucking themselves into our quietest thoughts. Second, there’s the appalling lack of support, both emotional and financial, around the act of quitting, especially in the States. If your job is eliminated, you’re (in theory, at least) entitled to both sympathy and help getting back on your feet. But if you quit or are (gasp!) terminated? Most of the time, you’re on your own.
Even now, years after the so-called great resignation, there’s still enormous pressure in the form of social and structural capital that wants to make it as hard as possible for you to quit. This, of course, works to the benefit of corporations, who can wring productivity out of desperately unhappy employees, knowing that the risks of quitting still fall heavier on the other side. That the long term consequences of making it hard for people to leave are well known and terrible doesn’t change the calculus, since for most corporate investors, long term means something like next Tuesday, and anyway, they approach churning through human beings they way they burn through carbon—capriciously, and with no accountability for the damage.
And yet. In any working life, there will inevitably arise both the need and the desire to quit, not just once but several times. And as stressful as it’s likely to be, it’s usually also a moment that brings a great deal of relief and welcome change. To quit is to refuse the dry, narrow path that has been laid out before you; to venture off into the woods where you know there’s water and life. Fortunately, quitting is a skill like any other: you can develop aptitude and experience with it, and get better at it over time. But like all the great movements we make in our lives, you’re going to need companions and some sturdy walking sticks to keep you safe along the way.
As soon as you start to think that quitting is on the table, reach out to your people and talk it out. Steer clear of current colleagues, unless you feel very confident in their discretion; look instead to kin, life friends, and work friends who have experience you can draw from and who can keep you company as you forge a new path. Think of this outreach not as a transaction but as the activation of care, as the engagement (or re-engagement) of a mutual, reciprocal kinship in which you each have each other’s back. They’re going to need to quit someday too, such that their companionship today is your promised future counsel. You’re not asking for charity, but a recognition of interdependence; you’re not reaching out with empty hands but with a full heart and thoughtful, attentive mind.
Second, take some time to do your art, or whatever it is that brings you joy and life and energy. Quitting a job involves processing a lot of intense emotions, making difficult decisions, and likely navigating the entirely unfair and demoralizing process of looking for a new gig. You will need people around you to help you bear the weight of all that, but you also need something that gives you some life and verve along the way, that reminds you of the fullness and wildness of your very best self. Maybe it’s writing or painting or playing music or rock climbing or baking bread, or going to a rave or a march or a game convention—whatever it is that brings you back to yourself, commit to doing it, soon and on the reg. So much of our cultural programming around work tells us that we have to prioritize jobs at all costs, especially when they are scarce or unstable (which is most of the time); but in every case when I’ve walked alongside someone going through a difficult work transition, having an art (or rock climbing, or baking, or etc.) practice was the thing that kept them moving through the inevitable disappointments and difficult days. You can’t keep yourself alive by sacrificing the gifts your life brings to bear.
Third, remind yourself that in changing jobs, you are also changing yourself. How you see yourself, how you tell your own story, how you talk about yourself, both to yourself and to others—all of that is up for grabs. This is not to say that your work identity can or should be your whole identity; but work is too big a part of our lives to not have an impact on who we are. That change is likely to elicit as much excitement and enthusiasm as it does fear and doubt, and reasonably so. It’s a joy to honor our own capacity and longing for change; but it’s risky too, and it requires a—terrifying! exhilarating!—leap into the unknown. Now is also the time to talk to a trusted counselor—whether therapist, elder, coach, neighbor, or wise friend—who sees you clearly and can help you see yourself clearly, too.
You haven’t yet met the person you’re becoming, and don’t know what they’ll be like when you do. But the actions you make today are the seeds of that new person’s living. Remember also that quitting is a choice and you get to make it. That’s one of the most beautiful and sacred things about quitting—it’s an exercise of your agency and power in the world, and one that no one can take away from you. You are the one who knows what’s best for you and your kin, and you get to decide how to act on that knowledge. Someday, maybe someday soon, that will mean making the choice to quit—and I invite you to honor that choice, as you honor your great and beautiful life. Somedays it will mean sticking things out and using your gifts in other ways. Some kinds of trees intentionally hold on to those dried leaves for the winter, where they give cover to song birds and other critters during the long, cold nights. You will know when it’s time to go, and when it makes sense to hold on and hold together, to keep shelter for yourself and for others around you. Knowing that, when spring comes, there will be new green leaves to catch the light.
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2024-12-16 23:45:00
“My brain couldn’t stop me, so that tiny but mighty intestinal diverticulum did.” Brilliant and important piece from Shannon Mattern about burnout, but more importantly, about how systems of exploitation and abuse are created and recreated. Mattern is writing about academia, but as is so often the case, I think the experiences she describes are likely familiar in many other contexts. The whole thing is worth reading but I’ll call attention to two points: one, that bodies have a way of making decisions for you in those moments when your mind is unable or unwilling to do so. (I’ve written of my own body’s intervention, and I know many others with similar stories.) And two, refusing to care is its own kind of harm. Mattern admits to being short on solutions but I think she hints at one framework for thinking about them: abolition, not as refusal or elimination, but as a practice of cultivating new worlds—one experimental step at a time.
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2024-12-03 05:36:00
“I said at the beginning that culture is the norms and values of a community. Thankfully we’re mostly past the collective delusion that work is family, but a workplace is still made up of people, and it is still a community of relationships. This community can also be a network of care if you let it.” Great talk (with transcript!) from Jenny Zhang about the values of work—not what values work brings to us but what values we bring to work. And also what it means to hold those values in place even as so many other forces and systems—racial, patriarchal capitalism chief among them—attempt to wring them from our hands.
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2024-11-27 21:14:00
Very excited to share that applications are now open for the speculative fiction work/shop! This five-week program is for anyone who feels stuck and unfulfilled in their work and who wants to open up some space to imagine different futures. If your work feels like it’s at a dead end, if you’re struggling to imagine what comes next, if you want space to think both differently and in community—this is for you. If you have any questions about the application process, or the work/shop itself, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
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2024-11-26 20:53:00
MANY READERS will recognize the sinking feeling when you realize that some of the work you’ve undertaken not only won’t earn you any credit but may even hurt your chances of advancement. This is true of people of all genders, but especially so among those on the minoritized end of the gender spectrum, as women, femme, and trans folks are more likely to take on the kind of care work that is both essential to a functioning team and yet routinely derogated and dismissed. Often when I talk to folks, they describe tackling this work with enthusiasm and even gratitude, and only later discover the ways it may come to hurt them; that discovery is itself experienced as a harm, and it feels like it, too, with all the pain, frustration, rage, and sadness that follows.
The work I’m referring to here is sometimes called “glue” work for the ways it holds a team together, but I’m going to go with calling it “care work” as I think at the end of the day that’s what it does: care work cares for the people on the team, and seeks to meet their needs so that they can do good work. Care work in the workplace includes things like organizing team lunches, mentoring less experienced colleagues, and coordinating informal consensus-based decisions. It also includes making and updating documentation, facilitating healthy conflict (and diffusing the unhealthy kind), and advising a colleague about the tricks for navigating a fraught HR process. Critically, it also includes things like initiating conversations about a union, modeling how to step back when you need a break, or organizing your peers to protest an unethical business contract.
Look over that list and you will immediately see why this work rarely appears on any career ladder, why it’s never part of a promotion packet, and why it often barely goes acknowledged. Care work supports the team, of course—we have decades of data to show that teams that care about each other are going to outperform teams that don’t, one hundred percent of the time. But that’s just the thing—care work supports the team, it serves the people. It acknowledges that the work is only possible with the consent and care of the people doing the work. Alas, very few organizations are brave enough to reflect that fact in their career ladders, as doing so would be to acknowledge workers’ own power.
Where does that leave the people who do this work? Many times I’ve listened as someone says they realize the work they’re doing to support the team not only isn’t going to be rewarded, but may actively work against them. “My manager says I’m great at keeping the team together, but I haven’t delivered as much as my peers this quarter,” is a common refrain. Of course, such a tale fails to take into account that her peers were able to ship so much because of the efforts she made to help them understand each other—efforts that may not have been reciprocated. But that’s not one of the ten criteria her manager is required to mark, so it doesn’t count towards a promotion. The conversation at this point often winds around to the possibility that she has to stop doing this work because it’s hurting her career.
To which, I have two questions: the first is, what’s the cost of stopping? Maybe she took up this work reflexively, without really thinking on it, and now she can see that she doesn’t really want to be doing it, or that it’s not really worth the effort. In which case, by all means, she should stop. Likewise, maybe this is energy better spent in other venues—in her community or neighborhood, where the work will be welcomed rather than challenged. But more often than not when I ask this question, I hear a sigh or see someone’s shoulders drop, as they feel the effect of letting it go. As the realization that not doing this work would cut themselves off from something that matters to them, would inflict another kind of harm, one even less legible to the system but just as painful to the heart.
There’s a kind of pathologizing of care at work here, an effort to define care—the regular acts of kindness, outreach, and support, alongside the effort to work across differences—as unhealthy, inefficient, not aligned with business goals. The reverse is true, of course; teams without care inevitably falter. But the systems most of us operate in are designed to isolate us, to make us fearful of our own power, to keep us narrowly focused on our own careers instead of imagining what’s possible when we’re all in on things together.
What if we didn’t allow our need to care for each other to be pathologized and diminished? What if we saw that care as a source of power and possibility? What if caring for each other is the most important work that we do, every day?
The second question I like to ask is: who else can do this with you? Care work needs good workers, not martyrs. And good workers work together. If you’re doing this work alone, who can you invite in to work alongside you? And if you’re not doing this work—if you’re merely benefiting from it—where can you join in? It’s certainly the case that some people will not take up this work, even if you ask them to. They’ve been taught that doing this work is beneath them and they haven’t interrogated that teaching; or they are too overburdened as it is, and just don’t have the spoons. But in my experience, most people want to be in a position to care for others, want to be useful, and not only in career-ladder legible ways.
I’ve seen it argued that we ought not to care for our colleagues, ought not to make friends at work, because it exposes us to harm. We’ve all learned, some of us the hard way, that organizations will exploit the friendship and camaraderie that develops on a team, given the chance. But again, what’s the cost of not caring? And what if the story of exploitation is only the half of it? Caring for your colleagues—caring for anyone—makes you vulnerable. But it also makes you human, and alive, and aware of your own collective power, capable of not only standing up to that harm but of building new worlds. And at the end of the day, the only path to a better world is the one we make together.
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