This is What I'm Looking at after 2016

The epithet wasn’t reserved solely for teachers. Many employers reflexively perceive individuals who struggle with invisible disabilities as lazy or incompetent. Even the father of one ex-girlfriend used to regularly yell at me with the line, “I’m tired of hearing about autism! Just learn how to do some hard work!” Like a lot of people I know who aren’t neurologically privileged, I reacted to this by pushing myself extra-hard to prove my value. My co-workers, girlfriend, friends and family like to joke that I’m a workaholic, but it really isn’t as simple as that. I’m just terrified that one day all of the progress I’ve made will count for nothing and that damnable l-word will be applied to me again.

I’d been an anxious person since childhood, but I never thought so much could be “wrong” with me.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, life is full of these little choices. Competing in the job market, keeping up with your social circle, and pursuing relationships or a family all incur massive costs in small increments over time. While hardcore frugalites will tell you that you don’t have to buy everything that your peers do (and they’re right), those sacrifices often come with social costs. I mentioned in a previous article how I bought a smartphone on credit when I was broke, which is a terrible decision. On the other hand, without it I wouldn’t have been able to start writing about Android, which is what kickstarted my career. Whether we like to admit it or not, having more stuff can give you more opportunity.

When you’ve stopped buying 30 brands of the same shade of lipstick or spending $40 a day on juice, your financial willpower begins to awaken and wield itself in powerfully effective ways. You can afford to invest. You can buy a house. You can take real vacations. But first, you need to be okay with less. That’s the deal.

The severe sleep-deprivation period I went through for about three weeks last year as a combined byproduct of my anxiety disorder and a time of extreme outside stress (mostly financial, but also logistical, when it came time to move totally unexpectedly in fucking Manhattan). Basically it resulted in me hallucinating through half of my days because I was running on 45 minutes total of sleep, and screaming at several people I love to the point that they had to distance themselves from me, something that makes me feel humiliated and heartbroken even now when I remember it.

The Protestants who celebrated work so heartily did not celebrate women’s work. Who is most likely to come up with an idea without spending years working on it? Women. Because they don’t have time to fail and fail and fail again. Women can work full speed ahead until 30, then they have to start having kids. So women can’t risk having five businesses before one takes off. There is no time. And women who can’t be sheep in the workplace because the paths the sheep take to food and water are for men. For men, time is linear. They head toward a goal and how they function each day defines them: what do you do? is the ubiquitous workplace question. And flow is the ultimate goal: how much do you love your work? How engaged are you?

The silence and awkwardness wasn’t for lack of caring. Among Facebook’s employees, Sandberg is largely revered. One day shortly after her husband passed, employees organized a gathering in Facebook’s internal courtyard, Hacker Square, for an extended moment of silence. Yet up close, people were tongue-tied around her, not knowing how to help. Lori Goler, who runs human resources, recounts driving by Sandberg’s house, unsure of whether to stop and go in. The isolation felt unbearable. “Three weeks sounds short unless you’re living this,” Sandberg said, adding that early on, “living through a day felt like an eternity.” To cope, she wrote in her journal, filling up pages with reflections, letters to her husband or her kids, or things she wanted to tell the other parents at their school.

So look: I know you are being supportive by trying to seem supportive, but for the sake of me not having to unpack the history of why I don't drink or take particular brands of cough syrup/cold medicine/sleep aids anymore, stop. Just assume that I am always not drinking. Because when you ask if it's "still a thing" it trivializes it. And when you follow-up with a congratulations, I don't really know how to respond, because you just trivialized it.

Sometimes to go up a tax bracket, you have to make a lateral move. That may mean switching companies or even industries. Sure, there’s a chance that your entry-level desk job will allow you to slowly climb the ladder to upper management. But there’s more of a chance you’ll strike it rich if you take chances, get out of your comfort zone and expand your network. That doesn’t mean you have to show up at countless corny networking conferences. It just means your hidden skill or hobby might open huge doors for you if you dust it off and show it to the world. You just need to have the confidence to believe – you really are good enough to succeed at whatever it is you truly want to do. Once you open that door, opportunities will crawl out of the woodwork, I promise.

It took me months to make the decision. until it finally dawned on me. I don’t need to justify buying something I want if I can afford it. Even writing that sentence feels like treason. Even so, I realized that I was paying my bills, saving for the future, and paying down debt. There will always be something better I could do with my money, but I finally had the option of buying something solely because I wanted it, and not because I found some external reason to prove that it was a good decision.

Not only do we worry we’ll fail but, in a world in which the word ‘success’ is practically interchangeable with ‘career’, we worry that failing to become successful means we’ll lose our right to be respected.

Cuffing season is what happens when temperatures drop in the fall and winter months and the number of engagements, relationships, and casual hookups in your social circles rise tenfold. This phenomenon is mostly social—as Fusion’s consultations with experts note, the cultural pressure to be in a relationship around the holidays is more to blame than biology—but the impulse to rush into a relationship does have a biochemical root in loneliness. When you’re lonely, you miss out on the dopamine that’s produced when you’re physically close to another person. That lack of “warmth” will leave you cold and craving, and so you might rush into a codependent, less-than-stable connection, in the absence of something more timely and sturdy.

Resilience stresses tear at the social structure of a city, but so quietly, like termites gnawing at the woodwork, that you don't notice until your city is falling down around your ears. Stresses make you fearful; over time, they can make you hate where you live.

Marginalized communities do not suffer from a lack of creativity but rather a lack of resources. It is important to recognize that community members already know what they need and are working towards solutions that work for them. Working with communities rather than for requires a shift in mindset for many designers, who are trained as creative experts who solve problems for clients. Design justice, on the other hand, recognizes that everyone is an expert in their own experiences, and that addressing injustice through design means elevating the voices of people most affected by the issues and working collaboratively towards solutions. Start by asking yourself: How close am I to the issue at hand? Does this community want me to work on this project? Am I the appropriate person to work on this project? How can I step back and facilitate the design of solutions by the community? Collaborative design can be difficult, messy, and time consuming, but is ultimately more truthful and more effective at empowering marginalized communities.

The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.

None of this was easy. None of this was as glamorous as scrubbing toilets in a tropical paradise. I’ve sat beside the mailbox waiting for the mailman, so I can snatch my freelance checks from his hands and deposit them immediately because I maxed out a credit card while I waited to be paid. I go to therapy and take Zoloft to manage depression, because even though my life is one that I am happy with and proud of, it's still life, and it's still hard.