Draft Four: On becoming
I’m unemployed. And some thoughts on self-compassion.
I won’t lie. This has been a rough week.
Tuesday was my last day as a formal employee of DoR, and on the payroll of the NGO through which we ran our projects. This last official month was peppered with many little closings that followed the large editorial shutdown at the end of December: paying the last installment to the printer, finishing up grant reports, closing recurring contracts, stopping online services, shutting down the store.
How does it feel? Many have asked this over the last few weeks.
I’m not quite sure, I replied. Foggy. Disorienting. Painful, I want to add, but often stop short. Some words are tough to unpack. Because it’s not painful in a debilitating way. It’s not painful in an “I wish this never happened” way. It’s not painful as in “I need something to make this disappear.”
It’s painful as in heavy. As in the pain of a phantom limb, something that’s not there, but that still hurts, or, in my case, still weighs heavy.
A couple of days ago I was submitting recommendations for Romanian women journalists we should celebrate, and I didn’t know how to fill out the form. What organization am I representing? Am I a freelancer? What’s my job title? These seem like silly trivial questions, and, in a way, they are. But answering them is complicated, because we are all a sum of identities, some tied to communities, to places, to organizations, to groups, some tied to who we are, who we identify as, what we believe in.
In life, we’ll shift categories, definitions, labels – hopefully as many as possible. But every little shift hurts. And one reason they hurt is that we’re often shifting away from a choice we made previously – sometimes years ago. And when we make choices, one way we work up the courage to do so is by committing to the change: “This is it! The choices that came before it were wrong! Finally: this is the right job, city, career, partner, country, color, ideology!”
But it’s often not the right answer. It’s simply the right answer for who you have become. The person who made the previous choices did the best they could. Integrating former selves into your narrative is essential, even though the integration is tougher.
Last fall I spent many hours with Patrick Brăila, a man I deeply admire for his courage to face his contradictions and make peace with them. We talked about how naïve he was when he began administering himself testosterone to align his body with his transgender male self. All problems will go away once I will be seen as a man, he thought. Of course, it wasn’t so. He hoped to continue developing as an artist, but life had other plans and he became more of a full-time activist. One who started questioning whether in times of crisis for his community, art is really the right focus. He talked movingly about the girl he once was, and the sacrifices she made for him to come into his own. How today, as opposed to years ago, he doesn’t want to pretend she didn’t exist, but be grateful for what she endured.
It would be less painful moving on if we just discarded previous choices: youthful ones, rushed ones, stubborn ones, borne out of trauma or fear or both. But we are what we did, we’ll become what we do. Embracing that whole past is heavy, and yes, there’s pain in that.
We rush into self-definition because there is comfort in knowing how to answer questions on a form: What do you do? Where are you from? What’s you title? Where’s home? Where do you work? Who are you?
But how often have those answers changed over the years?
Exactly. And they might keep changing.
***
What I struggle to talk about is less the ideas above, but the confusion and discomfort that comes with my management/leadership identity. It’s something I’ve discussed often in therapy over the past couple of years. It’s not that I am embarrassed to articulate my thoughts publicly: I have often told my colleagues about being tired, clueless, and lonely. I wrote about it. I don’t think it makes us look weak. I don’t think it’s untoward. I don’t believe in not showing up vulnerable. Courage is letting yourself be seen, after all.
Yet, we’ve lived in a constant crisis for almost three years now. Throughout this time, I started to feel I made a trade I wasn’t aware of: I traded the benefits of connection and empathy, for power. In recent months I’ve talked to people in many organizations who’ve experienced this: when the pandemic hit, their participative leadership models (some stronger, some weaker) switched to a more classic, directive model. Participating and sharing responsibility for the well-being of a group is difficult when a crisis upends your life, and the lives of many loved ones. You prioritize. You choose. Sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally, you step away from participating, often with good reason.
I don’t remember the moment I realized I had become a “boss”. A colleague is someone you comfort and empathize with, you reach out to, and try to help. As boss, not really; at most they’re supposed to reward the work fairly, keep things running, and deal with it, whatever “it” is. Realizing that choosing to lead in a more directive manner (“let’s go this way”) in times of crisis turned me into a boss was heartbreaking. Apparently I had power, but it felt I had forfeited the option to also be cared for as a colleague.
It was also a moment when I realized that the only way I’m useful to the world as a leader is as part of a participatory system. I don’t have the right answers, I have too many doubts, and I love creating alongside allies who are also all in. When this crystalized last summer, it was arguably too late, and we were all too tired.
I argued many nights with this boss version of me. It’s one that seems to have failed more than previous incarnations, but still one that needs to be folded in to the totality of who I am.
***
I write this now because I just sent in a fellowship application to the Reuters Institute.
I sent one last year, too, right around this time, and the person who wrote it is the boss I’ve just talked about. Reading through the 2022 motivation letter, I sense the desperation, the shame, the wish to find a solution: “I learned to lead, while editing and fundraising”, I wrote. “I didn’t scale myself, nor built new leaders. Plus, Romania is not hotbed for media talent; especially from outside our profession. The truth is, I’m now convinced this is insufficient leadership. A strong team, working to create change, deserves better. Better systems, better processes, better guidance. My vision and drive aren’t enough anymore.”
Objectively, I was right. But I was also ruthless, and I want to give the early 2022 version of me a hug. That guy meant well, fought hard, and did all he could. He was lonely, hurting, and felt it was untoward to express all this publicly.
I didn’t get the fellowship last year, and it hurt. Re-reading my journal from last year though, this fact only got one sentence in an April entry, while I was in Madrid, on holiday. Back then, their email came as proof I deserved a rejection, that the committee saw through me, saw an imposter posing as a journalist worth giving a shot at thinking big thoughts.
***
Patrick said something very smart when we talked last year. I thought I loved myself, he told me. I thought so, too. But being kind on myself has never been something that came naturally. I’ve always been more understanding and lenient of others, and I believe in generosity. As Adam Grant put it: “A sign of character is consistently choosing to be kinder than necessary”.
But extending generosity to myself is an ongoing struggle. These weekly letters are part of that. (Which is why it’s scary to put them out into the world.)
I received two letters of recommendation for this year’s Reuters application that made me cry. As someone who has been struggling to integrate more recent selves into a coherent life narrative, reading about things I did, and started, and challenged 5-10-15 years ago was a gift. I recognize that person, too, lights, shadows, and all. And I like him.
So yes, I’m officially unemployed. And still something of an editor. Still a co-founder. Still someone who believes in journalism as a calling and a force for good. Still naïve. Still curious. Still believing that stories are what makes us feel less alone.
SIDE DISHES:
„Lives are long, and hard to see”, writes Joshua Rothman in this beautiful essay about the different ways we tell the stories of our lives to ourselves. „What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are?”
Anil Seth is a neuroscientist studying consciousness, and the self. He says that the brain is responsible for hallucinating the reality we believe we live in.
“Although of course you end up becoming yourself”, said writer David Foster Wallace in this five-day road trip with a journalist, which became this book (and then a movie). There’s a Wallace speech I re-read every year to ground myself, and it’s about the (boring) task of living as an adult, and the struggle to stay curios and open to the world. The freedom conferred by education, he says in This is Water, is „to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t”.
This beautiful book on losing and finding, by New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz: “One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost – and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there.”
Many things explode as Death Cab for Cutie sing in this awesome video to Roman Candles. (They’re on tour; I plan to see them in Antwerp in March).
BONUS: I’m reading amazing stories these days in my role chairing the European Press Prize preparatory committee. Some of the members will be in Bucharest and we’ll have a morning of talks and inspiration. Sign up; it’s free.