Draft Four: You can’t be cool forever (mid-year review)

But you can stay alive.

How’s your inner chatter, the voice that is never pleased?

You know the one, it goes something like this: I shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have done that. I did bad work. I’m a bad person. I’m never going to fix this. I’m never going to be able to do this. Something will go wrong. Everything will go wrong. I am ashamed. I am going to disappoint people. I am a disappointment. Nothing is how it should be. Might as well not try.

I was running, sketching this letter in my head, and listening to an episode of Hidden Brain on the negative self-talk we inflict on ourselves – from rumination, to worry, to chatter that manifests as judge, jury, and executioner. On the downside, it paves the way to mental illness and anguish. On the upside, if you can manage it, it’s an invitation to introspection and learning.

When we fail to manage it, we just let disaster and disappointment reign.

Last week, as we wrapped up our CUNY program and were sharing learnings, one of my colleagues talked about how deficient she felt as a newsroom leader coming in: how much she thought she did wrong, how she punished herself for it, how tough it was to give herself some credit. There was no one in our cohort further from reality than she was, no one more caring of the mission and the staff, no one who worked harder for it, but also no one that judged herself more harshly.

It rang true – part of my work over the past year has been accepting that shutting down a publication doesn’t make me fundamentally deficient as a person and a leader, that failing at something is not the same as being a failure, that errors in strategy are not proof of ill intent, and that we should allow people both the space to be critical of us (which is easy, because we don’t think we’re very good to begin with), but also to admire us, cherish us, and be thankful for what we’re offering them. (Because we are doing that, too, sometimes in more ways than we think).

I told my classmates I was never very good at accepting praise. (I have gotten better at not contradicting those who offer it). Which is why the amount of appreciation I received from them felt a tad overwhelming.

Why am I telling you all this?

I am partly writing for myself, to have a reminder in darker times that it’s never “just dark”. To have proof, when the chatter gets too loud, that I know what I’m doing, and that I can do it, even surrounded by doubt. (“Do it scared” is a phrase I heard recently from a young journalist). That I’m worthy, and if the people that I offered something to in life don’t give back or take that for granted, that’s on them.

But I am also writing this for the 22 year-old newsroom rookie whose confidence is like rare porcelain and every step seems horrifying. For the 30-year-old who wakes up to realize they don’t have all the moves figured out, even if they thought they would. And for the 35-year-old running a team and discovering that leadership can be lonely, and sometimes you can’t find be a place for some of that pain and anguish.

I hear you, I see you, and we’re not alone.

There will always be struggle, it’ll just look and feel different depending on where we are on this journey. It never gets easy, it just gets easier.

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I do my best self-sabotage when I’m busy and tired. And I’m too busy, and too tired.

And probably so are you.

I’ve been pondering this: I’ve always worked hard, and I’ve always worked a lot. I still deeply enjoy most aspects of the things I am working on, but in the past two-three years it’s felt more difficult. Small chores feel like pushing objects in swamp, I can’t seem to do as much, and I have felt more often that I’ve struggled against myself to get it done: writing, editing, teaching, consulting, whatever it may be.

Then, a couple of week ago, I read this story in Aeon, Me versus myself, that added an extra layer to my thinking. The essay is about how we self-sabotage in various ways, from procrastinating, to finding distractions, to giving in to addictions. That part I knew – it’s the human condition – and had made peace with in my fist two decades as an adult. I was even proud of how well I self-managed and regulated: I could coach myself, let myself off the hook, give myself breaks and rewards etc.

But I believe something broke in all of us (mostly during the pandemic years). My strategies no longer work very well, the self-sabotage seems more rampant, and, what’s even more disturbing, is that it seems to happen to almost everyone around. The first scapegoats were overwork and the office, and while they contribute, they were just one of the factors. Then, it was our inability to care for ourselves, and a barrage of self-care and turbo-charging selfishness didn’t do much good either. More recently, it’s social media, and the constant digital noise of content and ads.

It’s all these things. Everything everywhere all at once. Self-sabotage is a natural part of the human condition, but what do you do when an extreme version of it becomes the de facto status quo for so many of us? From the Aeon piece:

If self-sabotage exists on a spectrum, the contemporary world – with its alluring screens and overwork culture – has made it far more prevalent. Forms of self-sabotaging behaviour previously classed as abnormal have become ubiquitous.

There has been a 400 per cent increase in the number of British adults seeking a diagnosis for ADHD since 2020, according to Tony Lloyd of the ADHD Foundation. And, according to Steel, about 95 per cent of people admit to procrastinating at least some of the time. A growing number of young people ask for extenuating circumstances to complete the coursework for a degree they may ostensibly really enjoy. Universities are dealing with an entire system on the brink of logical absurdity and administrative collapse. Faced with collective self-sabotage in the form of climate change and an ever-more competitive jobs market, many young people appear to be turning the anxiety upon themselves, inducing a kind of paralysis.

We should exercise caution when we link mental illness to ambient conditions such as geopolitics or the dominance of screens. But it’s also worth considering why self-sabotage is such a feature of modern life.

In the face of such an onslaught, personal boundaries and strategies are largely failing – though I know people who resist and seem clearer headed and free. I used to recharge by taking weeklong breaks that were mostly reading marathons (often somewhere by the water). I felt exhilarated when they ended, some 10 books later. In the past three-four years, even when I had time at my disposal to read or travel, I would self-interrupt, or self-sabotage, or doom scroll, or binge. I would drop what I knew brought me joy (reading) but required effort, and replaced it with the instant dopamine hit of Insta stories (which rarely make me happy).

Thus I don’t rest, and I go back to work frustrated, thus I’m inefficient, and the chatter starts, and I take on more to quiet the doubt and… you can see where this is going.

Again, from the Aeon piece:

So we seem to be fighting a double battle: the contemporary world offers readily available opportunities for self-sabotage and it raises our perfectionist expectations, making distraction and addiction more tempting. (…) This state of mind is “performance wrecking”, says Cohen: “you lose conviction and confidence in yourself. The more you’re aware of falling behind, of not quite being at the level you’re supposed to be, the more it does something to your capacity to seamlessly produce.”

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This is why I decided to set a mid-year review in writing.

If we met over coffee and you asked how 2024 was going, I would mumble something about being “in between lives” as an explanation for “not having done too much”, when in fact I have done a lot, but I am just as prone to self-sabotage as the next person.

So here are some projects I was on since the beginning of the year, some of which are ongoing:

• A series on sexual harassment at the University of Bucharest’s journalism school. Together with my former colleague Carla Lunguți we published three pieces, two investigations and an explainer, and uncovered a pattern of abuse of power and sexual harassment going back almost two decades. As a result of the stories and the ensuing investigations, the professor in question, Horea-Mihai Bădău, quit the University, and now lives in France, where I can only hope that the schools he aims to teach at will be more careful about who they hire.

• Chaired the preliminary judging of the 2024 European Press Prize. Together with my 20+ prep com colleagues we narrowed more than 700 entries down to five finalists in each category, a feat of reading and negotiating that we’re all proud of (it takes a good chuck of our time from January to mid-March every year).

• Consulting and training with newsrooms large and small, mostly in Romania and Moldova. I spend on average a day a week with Recorder, consulting with them on organizational development, strategy and fundraising, but also do work on storytelling and editorial processes with others. One of the highlights was having a session on Recorder accepted at the Journalism Festival in Perugia.

• Uplift is the umbrella of work I have begun doing with colleagues from Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria – we all believe Central and Eastern Europe needs stronger media leaders to tackle the changes in our field, from revenue diversification, to innovation in the face of technological upheaval, to building healthier newsrooms. We’ve started with a series of Zoom conversations – more than 160 news leaders from around the region showed up! – and we’re working towards new initiatives. (Want to fund our work?)

• Jurnalism2030 (or Journalism2030) is a collective/network of early to mid-career journalists that came together through a series of dinners we hosted. This allowed for some needs-assessment, which then turned into a few training sessions, including conversations local media is not having – such as trauma-informed reporting (thank you, Oana!), and the emotional labor of journalists (thank you, Victoria!). Our first public-facing project is this public database (still in development) of freelance rates in Romania (they are abysmal).

• CUNY. This was a wonderful program to be a part of since last September, and it’s taken up on average a day a week since the beginning of the year. I’ve written a lot about my work on the capstone, and the following next Sundays I’ll be sharing it in its (current) entirety in these letters.

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These were the bigger things. I also did some others: consulted on a documentary on Gen Z by Gen Z journalists (it hasn’t come out because it’s stuck in the bureaucracy of the newsroom that commissioned it), edited some final projects of J-School grads, still editing the first draft of a fantastic book that will come out by the end of the year and that will blow your mind, plotting some live shows under the Oamenii Dreptății umbrella (coming to Sibiu and Brașov this October), writing this weekly letter, and so on.

I know: too much. Apart from everything mentioned above, there are two other factors that have led to this. The first is that freelance work has two major downsides. When I ran a newsroom everything – from doing the dishes, to signing contracts, to editing stories, to fundraising – came together at the end of the day/week/month. I always understood and enjoyed both the boring and tedious work, as well as the creative one because they added up to the same mission-driven pursuit.

In freelancing you will consult in a newsroom today, edit for a different project tomorrow, do some training the next day, and so on. Different people, different missions, different types of organizations – you are the only thing tying them together. Which is why I sometimes misjudge mission fit or even my own capacity. Plus, freelancing is a financially unstable pursuit: May and June were terrible for me, as my cashflow was hurting (I asked my brother for a loan), and new payments weren’t due until July. It is only this week that I was able to drop the weight of financial strain and repay the loan.

Other people are better at both: managing their cashflow, as well as their workload. For someone of my temperament and nature – whose personal mission is around being of service – the inherent risks are higher.

For fun (or for an end-of-the-year review session) I also started in mid-March to do a daily grading of three indicators: mood, body (how I feel about it), and finances (how confident and stable I feel). The data isn’t great – but it proves self-sabotage – especially when it comes to the latter two. Anyway, mood averages 3+ out of 5, but both body and finances average less than 1.5. As you can see in the graph below, it’s only in the past two weeks that confidence in my financial situation has increased.

A note: This is a layman’s version of a superb project by the late artists Ioana Nemeș: Monthly evaluations. Ioana graded the following states: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, plus the luck factor, and combined them with quotes – in exhibitions they are turned into huge physical blocks, giving each day a monumental feel.

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One last thing in the review: I still play Football Manager now and again. I’m still coaching CSC Dumbrăvița, which is a real club in the second tier of Romanian football. In the game we’re entering 2034 and we’ve been winning the Romanian league and the Romanian cup for 6-7 seasons now. We even went deep into the Champions League (but it remains elusive). For my birthday my colleague Carla got me the most amazing gift: a number 8 shirt (worn!) signed by the whole team. It came with a note about training hard, playing hard and having fun.

I hope the same for you.

*

There is plenty of advice about how to deal with the things mentioned above: from the obvious ones of seeking therapy and coaching, to ways and frameworks to better self-manage or lead and so on (some of which are amazing). I’ve shared some in the past, too.

But the intention was simpler: to name the struggles and take a breather as we look at them.

There’s this fun song I found a few days ago. It’s about giving up on the idea that you can keep being cool as you age. Or, to translate it to this letter: to give up the idea that you’ll get it together as you age. Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, less so. And it’s particularly hard these days for many of us. So, for inspiration, the chorus: “You can’t be cool forever / But you can learn to stay alive.”

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SIDE DISHES

1. A book. Nothing was more touching to be this year than A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, an on the ground account of what Palestinian life is under Israeli occupation.

2. A podcast. I’m biased toward this interview with Simon Sinek, as I agree with many of the things he says about all of us needing to perform more acts of service, earning the right to complain, and asking ourself, when we go out on stage, if we are there to get or to give?

3. A movie. I cried my eyes out at Everything Everywhere All at Once. I was on a plane and it’s easier to cry on planes (so they say), but I don’t think that’s the only reason. Just watch it.

4. A series. The Bear season 3 is out. I have a fondness for this series because kitchens are good approximations of newsroom life, and Carmy, the talented but erratic chef, is many of us.

5. An album. The Decemberists, for a long time one of my favorite bands, put out this amazing record. This is the full YouTube playlist of it.

6. A story. An older story, but I only recently got to it. The title says is all: To Run My Best Marathon at Age 44, I Had to Outrun My Past.

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