Imperfect self-expression, not self-sacrifice
Six years ago, I became wary of the ambition in San Francisco. And in the last few months, I’ve been returning to it.
I was at a mental health company, and I needed to design the onboarding experience for people who were suicidal. Someone with an operations background saw the onboarding experience as a legal check box. It was simple: once a person was flagged as suicidal, we could show them a block of text with resources because we couldn’t help them.
No. I couldn’t tolerate this. The people who were most vulnerable would not have the worst experience.
I took my third Adderall dose of the day, and sat in my office with a backdrop of San Francisco sky scrapers. I opened Figma, and tried to create something beautiful.
I put myself in the shoes of someone suicidal. I learned what messaging connects with someone in this state. I drew out a design that respected them. Not a legal checkbox. A meaningful connection.
I was proud of it, but I had just spent hours, again, embodying the experience of someone troubled. I spent easily 60 hours a week on this kind of work.
I had a habit of working in a way that either neglected myself or my coworkers for the sake of the mission. Purpose felt more important than people.
My company also felt like a family on some level to me, and I was giving all my energy to this family. But actually, it wasn’t a family. At the end of the day, it was a company.
I wanted to reserve my maternal energy for myself. Contain it. Use it purposely for the betterment of creating something that was mine, a child.
We were close to being acquired. I saw the acquisition through, and then I left.
I had a vision that my body needed to detox, to become ready to be a sanctuary for children, so I took a break from working.
When I got pregnant, my community house moved from our tight townhouse in the mission to a large house in the Presidio to make room for children.
We moved in February 2020, and lockdowns started on March 17th.
I sat in my bedroom, in the stately house that I shared with 10 housemates looking out over a misty forest.
The once busy highway outside my window, bringing people from Marin to San Francisco, trickled down and then stopped completely. A single sailboat passes on the bay.
I drove through San Francisco to my birth center for a check-up, and it was silent, like a zombie apocalypse had ravaged it. You would expect to see a tumbleweed, but instead might see a graceful plastic bag rolling past.
All I had was walks through misty forests, and looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge twinkling. I was in a permanent meditation retreat.
At our community house, the drum of ambition continued. Constant zoom meetings peppered the common space. There was nowhere to go.
When my baby came, I dropped into a multi-day long MDMA-like trip of love. My husband and I didn’t leave our bedroom for days. Lit by dark purple lights we’d set up, we cooed at our baby. A little girl. So small and thin. Her face wide and open. A miracle.
And everyone else in my house continued as normal. In the living room, I breastfed on the couch while looking out at the misty trees.
My housemate gave a tense performance review call, piercing the air from another room. A hint of violence in his voice that cut through the peace. The violence of forcing an outcome.
I wanted to work from a loving place for myself and others. I tried doing more consulting but I had the same manic energy. Like some part of me was asking “Am I good? Am I useful?”
After a couple years, I wrote my dear friend and told her I was considering stopping work completely to focus on mothering. She agreed that something felt right about this.
I mourned it. It felt like finally giving up a dream I had about ambition. I feared being low-status and lonely, let’s do it.
I left my community house, and moved into my own home that looks like a church. I treated my kitchen as my sanctuary, and cared for myself and my family. I grew tomatoes.
As of the last few months, I’m re-engaging with my ambition in the Bay. I don’t know if I’m “healed” now, but I feel good enough to try.
On Christmas day, I was singing in the church that I grew up in back home in Maryland.
Sitting in the front in a pew, holding a hymn book, turning to page 112 to “the little town of Bethlehem.” The sanctuary is tall and white, with a blue carpet, and a large wooden cross mounted at the front. I stood next to my husband, adding my voice to the dozens of people sitting together in pews.
My voice felt creaky and tense, “For Christ is born of Mary… Above thy deep and dreamless sleep The silent stars go by.” Then I thought, “Yes, it’s tense. Yes, it’s tight. And it’s still good for it to be included.”
The world that includes this voice, loud and proud with its raw sandpaper imperfections I believed was a better world than a world without it.
Like the Bay, I felt both deeply at home, and also alienated at this place. I stopped being a Christian decades ago.
But I believed my imperfect voice was good to be there. I sang. And my voice rang out more open than it had before.