I Got Shitcanned
A lesson in licking my wounds
My friend Ana often teases me for giving off what she calls “A 5 to 9 Before My 9 to 5” vibe. If Youtube hasn’t also pigeonholed you into its white, femme, millennial, self help algorithm, this is a reference to a trend among influencers where generically cute twenty-somethings film themselves drinking matcha, icing their eyelids, and engaging in other habits you might associate with a wholesome, healthy morning routine. I’m often tempted to film a parody of a typical “5 to 9 before my 9 to 5” video featuring my actual morning routine, which consists of me limping to the bathroom around 7:30 AM in bleached, decades-old underwear and an indigo tee sporting Hawaii’s state fish.
I spend a lot of my time giggling to myself about dumb ideas like this. I tend to find a lot of my life very funny, like when my brother and I impersonate our mom to our mom and she doesn’t notice (fill soy sauce dish with three almonds, stare out kitchen window, clutch almond between pointer finger and thumb, nibble at it slowly while standing and staring), or the fact that I once woke up after a night of heavy drinking to find that I’d desperately searched “saltines” in the app store. I love sharing stories like these, because what’s life if not one long excuse to be a bit of a slapdick?
On the other hand, I am extremely reticent about actual, deep feelings, both IRL and on the internet. This is why I haven’t written anything for a minute. I’ve been busy getting the shit kicked out of me by January ‘24. I have all these three-line pieces started (“Finally was laid off,” “Everything feels fragile”) where I can tell I got tired, trailed off, and probably skulked off to watch Survivor.
In the past couple weeks though, I’ve gotten texts from a handful of friends asking, “where’s my Midnight Snack?” and “I’ve been missing your name popping up in Substack.” Kev offhandedly commented, “I noticed you haven’t published a newsletter in a little bit.” My simpering lil’ ego absolutely ballooned at this, and I realized simultaneously that I was starting to do the somewhat toxic thing these platforms enable us to do: publish only the good shit. So here I am, feeling itchy about posting something that accurately reflects how I am: exhausted and bedraggled. It’s fractured and not particularly cohesive, but it’s real.
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Toward the end of December, I looked down to see my dad calling me. The shortlist of recent topics my family has called one another about include:
My brother going through a heart-shattering breakup
My uncle dying
My mom telling me my brother was missing after a night at BottleRock music festival (he was passed out in a house down the street)
So when I saw my dad calling, I knew one of three things was happening: my parents were getting divorced, there had been an accident, or someone was sick. Sure enough, dad’s mitral valve was damaged and “fluttering,” meaning 30% of the blood his heart was pumping was moving backwards. Other valves were damaged too. They’d probably need to do surgery. Worst case, a full sternotomy, where they cracked his chest wide open. Best case, they’d be able to go in through smaller incisions in his chest. My dad is a doctor and medical educator, so he slays delivering bad news well. The only thing that really alarmed me about this conversation was an offhand comment he’d gotten from a cardiologist: “You may not be able to run marathons anymore. This could be life-changing.”
Post-surgery, let me tell you, full sternotomy or not, heart surgery is fucking gnarly. Even with the “minimally invasive” version, they stop your heart, deflate a lung, and intubate you so a machine can breathe for you. You can lose close to half your blood and, when you come to in the ICU, you have to be fully alert before respiratory therapists can remove the half-inch-wide tube snaking down your throat. This means that when you wake up, you can’t talk and are often choking on the tube that’s helping you breathe. When your care team eventually does extubate you, your mouth and throat feel like the Serengeti but you can’t drink water because your digestive system is still offline. It’s an absolute miracle that the human body can withstand this and eventually, in my dad’s case, come back stronger. “Email me,” his cardiac surgeon told him after surgery, “You’ll probably be able to run farther and faster now that 100% of your blood is moving in the right direction. Let me know how it goes.”
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A week before my dad’s surgery, I’d forced Kev and loves/future siblings-in-law Bri and Anastasia to talk about their rose, thorn, and bud for ‘23/’24. If you’ve never been a camp counselor or don’t have friends who exude tarot vibes, this is an exercise where you share a highlight (rose), low point (thorn), and something you’re excited to keep growing (bud). My expectations were low - both Bri and Nas are Manhattan-polished and similarly reticent about sharing. However, whether due to wine, end-of-year nostalgia, or pure gratitude for one another, the prompt precipitated a half hour of honest introspection and misty eyes. One of my buds for the new year was finding a work situation I was more stimulated by, either by taking on more responsibility in my current job, finding a new job, or doing more freelance work in the evenings. For nearly two years, I’d been asking for more work, manufacturing projects I felt might help my company’s bottom line, and reading hundreds of articles, effectively force feeding myself the learning I wasn’t getting on the job. I was never miserable but constantly languishing, the perfect recipe for inaction.
I talked a lot with Kev about finding something new, but felt somewhat paralyzed by the fact that the tech job market has been aflame for the past two years and that my job was objectively great in a few key ways (coworkers, flexibility, manager). Instead, he and I joked that the right move was “no sudden movements,” especially because I had narrowly avoided two prior rounds of layoffs. I guess I couldn’t outrun the economy forever. Last week I got laid off too, and it felt like the universe replying, bitch, ask and you shall receive.
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I recently read a fascinating article about resilience. The TL;DR is that experiencing stressful events in moderation can build resilience. Too much and your body becomes frayed by the physiological effects of stress hormones. Too little and you’re just a soft little cloud. On a scale of Harry James Potter to soft little cloud, here’s how I index:
I’m extraordinarily lucky not to have experienced much adversity in my life. I’ve never had debt, my family is extraordinarily supportive, I’ve been lucky in love, and aside from being outlandishly allergic to mosquito bites, my physical health is ~chef’s kiss.~ I think I was overdue for some hardship.
I keep thinking about early high school, when my neighborhood was evacuated due to a wildfire that was swallowing up the hillside. I remember my dad saying, “it’s okay, it’s just stuff,” when I asked him whether he was worried about the house. On a contemplative run yesterday, I realized that I finally got what he’d been trying say: that community connection, love, and family are ultimately all that matters when greedy, unpredictable life starts snatching things away. Something about a stopped heart and watching my dad’s face flush with life when they extubated him in the ICU makes losing my job feel less consequential. It’s just stuff.
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My optimism has been imperfect. In the past week I have:
Binge read everything Ifeoma Ozoma has published about how evil Big Tech is
Laugh-sobbed to Kev about how fucked up it is that thousands of smart people are working on shitty HR software when they could be figuring out how to turn ocean water into drinking water
Eaten two large bowls of ragú in bed
Watched Meg 2
Googled “how to spend no money” and “my mental health dog propping up meme”
This month has felt like a painful, clarifying slap in the face. It has been so helpful in reminding me that life is short and somewhat fragile, and that the only real method for living a good life is to drench it in experiences I love with the people I love. I feel wrung out but excited, like this is the first big chance I’ve had to get hit hard, get back up, and excise all the stagnant shit in my life. You know that moment when you read your horoscope and it just deeply resonates on some subatomic level, despite it being vague and unfounded? I got this text from my friend Jeany and every cell in my body just lapped it up:
