What my old blocker has to do with your layoff

I’m in one of those moods where I want to write about everything all at once. This post goes in a lot of different directions, so please strap in.

I’m celebrating one year of overcoming my marketing block. If you were on my list those early days, you remember the incredible volume of content that I sent out. In 90 days, I created 55 emails—that’s more than one every other day. I was constipated for so long, it’s natural that I should have diarrhea of the mouth.

Being unblocked has been ecstatic and torturous. There are days where I can’t sleep or focus on anything else except writing. The voice in my head chatters so much that I have to write in order to be free from it.

This is what my process looks like. I will read and talk and think and putter about and let things rattle around in my noggin, and when the voice starts jabbering—sometimes incessantly and always fiercely—I sit down and type it out. I work on a piece for a maximum of three hours and send it out and never look back.

I’m building a newsletter by doing literally whatever I want. I don’t schedule my emails or plan them in advance. I take time away from my work too because I’m human. Last year I didn’t write for a month because I was depressed and another month because I was vacationing in Thailand. I never aimed to write a weekly email because people just do that so that they can say built their business writing an email every week and they will teach you how to do the same. Then you just have a business that just teaches people how to write a weekly email, which is not a very interesting business. I’d rather have a business that teaches people to discover and trust their natural cycles. Also a week is not a natural unit of time. A day is, a month is, a year is. But not a week. What the fuck even is a week?

I have faith that I will always have something to write about. I am composed of equal parts joy and rage, so there will always be something I have an opinion about.

And I should also get into the nitty-gritty of what my block was. In previous emails, I wrote that I feared the judgment of former colleagues who were white, but it’s not as simple as that. I was specifically afraid of being judged by former colleagues who were in positions of power and were vaguely mean to me. They never said anything that bad to me, they never micro-aggressed me. They were just sort shitty. Some of them were people of color and some of them were women, which goes to show that when you give someone a little of power, they will do whatever they need to protect it rather than share it. Our world is full of Uncle Toms.

And when you see the collegiality and respect that those vaguely mean people in power give to each other but not you, you start thinking, damn what do I need to do to get some of that? I was already an Asian woman without a technical degree working in Silicon Valley. Three strikes against me. At least I was tall. At least I was reasonably good looking. I began thinking of how to compensate. If I had a PhD or MBA, I would be treated better, I thought. If only I had done a year at McKinsey. If only I had majored in economics, a wish that ran super deep for me.

I had a really good high school economics teacher and when I started college, I thought maybe I would major in it. But I looked at all the bros interested in it, and quickly concluded, no thanks. Economics is a diverse field with a range of political leanings, but too often, and especially at Stanford, economics is used as a “scientific” justification for the disenfranchisement and exploitation of people for profit.

Plus, I got a B in calculus and you need calc for econ. A “B” is not a bad grade but since it was a Stanford B, my tender, insecure, and deeply entitled heart thought, “Well, I guess I’ll go fuck myself.”

The thing is, I was not bad at math. I got straight A’s in math all through high school. My SAT math score was a 720. I got a B because I didn’t know how to study. Studying is a subset of trying and I just didn’t know how to try in general. Up until that point, new concepts came pretty easily to me and I avoided anything I found difficult because I had no tolerance for discomfort.

Not to mention, I wasn’t encouraged to try again because I was raised by a very sexist stepfather who didn’t think that girls were good at math. As loving and nurturing as he was, he had a ton of fucked up views about my capabilities and would cite some weird studies that demonstrated girls’ math scores dropping after they started menstruating, as if bleeding would break our brains. (You know what actually breaks our brains? Patriarchy and capitalism.) The dude is dead now but I definitely plan on having a long talk with him in the afterlife about this.

Senior spring quarter, I took a statistics class and got an A.

Anyways, back to the the block. You can see that my block is not rational. Nobody’s block is rational. But it doesn’t matter. It’s real, and at the same time, totally made up and therefore not real.

Those vaguely mean former colleagues don’t give a shit about me. I live in Germany now and don’t even work in tech anymore. They will never read my marketing. If they do, I hope they like it! If they don’t like it, that’s fine too! People are allowed to dislike my work.

But you see how we bring our baggage everywhere. I wanted their approval at one point in my life. And that part of me still wanted to be liked by them as I started publishing my work. We are quick to learn and slow to unlearn.

And you can see how multiple complicated threads all wound together to create my block. Pulling on one thread tugs on so many more. Pulling it apart was hard.

It was impossibly uncomfortable to remember these things to start doing the work of unblocking because it brought up shame that I wasn’t “smarter” and more successful. I had to unshame my shame. I didn't do anything wrong. I just existed in a world that thought me that I was less-than.

Along with the shame came a lot of rage at how I was treated. Rage can be a hot and hard thing to hold in your heart. Certain parts of our culture preach forgiveness. I agree that grace is good, but you have to be careful of who you give it to. A lot of the time, people with power who do wrong will seek forgiveness. It is in their interest for you to forgive, and that’s one way our fucked up power structures perpetuate. I will forgive my stepfather for being a bad parent. Pretty much all parents have no idea what they’re doing. But I won’t forgive him for being sexist. Similarly, I will forgive meanies who are disenfranchised, but I won’t forgive meanies who already have power.

Rage is not an easy feeling to sit with, and I think one reason why I didn’t address my block sooner was because I didn’t want to feel this anger. But I’m learning how to use it as a creative force. It has powered my entire coaching business. And frankly, it feels good. Being angry is finally acknowledging what is. There’s no part of me that I’m shoving aside. I’m coming into a congruence with myself. I am so fucking angry and I am so fucking alive.

And what is all this about at the end of the day? All of this is about safety. Wanting to get good grades in math, wanting to be liked by people in power, wanting to have respect in tech, being afraid to market my coaching business—it’s all about safety. And the reality is, I would never have been safe. I would have been laid off, just like hundreds of thousands of people in the past several months.

You’re not safe either. Everyone is getting laid off. Engineers, VPs, people who just recently got a promotion, people who busted their ass for 80 hours a week, people who had committed the past 10 years to their company—poof. Logged out of their email accounts. These are people who majored in economics, had technical degrees and fancy master’s degrees, were nice (and probably also mean) to the right people, made sure they always had good performance reviews, never posted drunk photos on Instagram, and did all the right things. All for the illusion of safety.

What I would have told my old scaredy blocked self, and what I’ll tell you now is this: you will be punished no matter what you do. And rather than try protect yourself more, realize that resistance is futile, and instead, just do whatever the fuck you want.

Trust me as someone who has made that her policy, it feels a lot better.

If you want to work together, please reach out. About me: immigrant, Stanford grad, ex-Silicon Valley, and happy expat living in Berlin. On a mission to help underrepresented folks define and create their own success.

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