Oct 28, 2022 | Weekly Roundup
The Woman Tax (and paying yourself first); 5 Min Mindfulness: Gratitude practice; Halloween costumes
Welcome to the new subscribers who I saw at my 15 year reunion, in NYC this week and at the party where I saw Sergei Brin! #siliconvalleythingsthathappen #Ididn’tsayhi
Skip to the bottom for this week’s book rec and for a new section, “5 Minute Mindfulness” where I share a micro-habit I’ve started to be a more mindful person.
Things I’ve launched this week
Three Halloween costumes, which is a new personal record! Saturday, the 22nd, I was a pirate (which is my backup costume that I’ve had for 7+ years), and this weekend, I was Cleopatra (inspired by my recent short haircut) and a cat (classic). While I didn’t celebrate Halloween growing up, I’ve embraced it in adulthood: it’s one of the few times a year that adults get to pretend - and for a moment, feel the freedom and permission to play.
I also spent the week in NYC visiting family and seeing business school and high school friends that I haven’t seen in 20+ years, which meant I spent less time writing!
Things I’m working on
My course syllabus is due 11/15, so I’m working on that this week!
I’ve committed to launching my guide to self-directed silent retreats this month, so more on that next week!
I’m continuing to work on a startup idea with a college friend: we both put ourselves at 20% confidence in mid-October that a real customer would ever have their data in our database, and now, with 7+ user conversations under our belt, we’re both feeling directionally positive!
Things I’m thinking about
The woman tax, pay yourself first, and the balance of the Yin/Yang
Over the last 7 days, I’ve had an unexpected set of conversations with women; strangers, long-time acquaintances and current friends; about what it is to be a woman, have a career, and to lead as women in male-dominated industries.
These are talented and smart women (Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Yale) from diverse industries: software, finance, medicine, engineering, and there are a couple unifying themes: the trap of perfection/the good girl, the emotional weight of subtle sexism/unconscious bias/objectification, and the exhaustion/burnout from trying to do it all. Collectively, I call this “the woman tax” as in, “a cognitive (and sometimes monetary) tax that women unconsciously pay for being a woman in modern society.”
I have a draft of a much longer essay on this, but for now, I wanted to capture recent insights from these conversations that answer, “What can I do in the face of these things?”
The only way forward is to know yourself deeply
What do you need? What do you want? And what isn’t working for you? Ask for those things. And if you can’t answer those 3 questions, step back from your life and make space to answer them.
Prioritize YOUR values/goals and only say “yes” to actions that are in line with your values/goals.
There are so many adages: “In pleasing everyone, you please no one.” “Put your own oxygen mask on first” and the well-intentioned but ambiguous “Practice self-care.” All these are true - and what has helped me bridge the gap from theory to action is to write down my own values/what I want, and then do things that align with those values. Even if it disappoints other people. Even if it’s scary and there’s no precedent. Even when I’m tempted to say “yes” just because I was asked to help.
(Side note: this may seem “selfish” or “very individualistic” - but what it means is that when I DO say yes to being helpful/sacrificial/communal, I’m doing so from a place of intentionality instead of resentment.)
Take breaks. Say no.
I’m obviously biased because I’m in a sabbatical season, which is pretty much a resounding “no” to many things, but in the normal hectic pace of life, it’s hard to change habits, difficult to even hear yourself think or even ask, “What do I want?”
In my experience, it’s hard to have this space unless you carve it out by literally saying no to something else. (I used to use my quarterly silent retreats to do this deeper work.) It’s not unlike exercise - if you want to be healthier, you have to make time to exercise. If you want a life aligned with your values, you need the space to reflect, to think, and to prioritize.
Start with an hour at the coffeeshop on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Leave your house, put your phone in airplane mode, and write. Or make a list. Or just think. If you can, take a weekend. If you can afford it, take a month off.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
The world changes incrementally. 100 years ago, women didn’t have the right to vote in America. 72 years ago, Harvard Law admitted its first class of women in 1950. In 1974, or 48 years ago, women couldn’t get a mortgage or a credit card without a male co-signer, either a father or a husband. In 1999, Carly Fiorina was the first woman CEO of a Fortune 50 company.
Societal change is happening - but it’s on the timespan of decades, not months. So take breaks. Live intentionally over many years. Because changing societal expectations of men and women is a lifelong marathon, not a sprint.
Note: If you’re not a woman and reading this, all this still applies to you too. And I’m not an advocate for women over men; the goal is not to replace men in power with women in power - men working in the fashion world or marketing or nursing can attest that the majority will always oppress the minority - it’s to achieve equality of opportunity, parity in access and to have the balance of the yin-yang.
In the world of personal finance, they refer to saving as “paying yourself first”. If I had to summarize this whole article, I would say, “Pay yourself first with how you spend your time.”
Everyone will ask from you - your work, your relationships, your family; it’s ok (and necessary) to say yes to others - especially if you’re a parent. But, make sure you’re putting aside time for you, first.
5 Min Mindfulness
Listing “5 things I’m grateful for”
Since deconstructing from Christianity, I’ve had to reconstruct a list of practices that I need to feel centered. One is having a weekly day of rest; another is having a gratitude practice! Every so often, I’ll text my friend group a list of 5 things I’m grateful for right now. Sometimes, it’s as mundane as “shelter” and “food”, but other times the list is specific - and goes longer than 5 things! But I’ve found this to be a critical practice to be content, humble, kind, and centered. And it shifts me out of whatever funk I may be in. And sometimes, it inspires my friends to do the same!
If you’re looking for a super simple thing to change in your life, I’d recommend this! It can be a note on your phone if you don’t feel comfortable sending it to friends.
Things I’m reading/listening/doing:
Book Rec | A Memory called Empire by Arkady Martinez. Amusingly, I downloaded this book to my Kindle years ago - and kept getting stuck in the first chapter because of the hard-to-remember names of planets and people. However, on my plane flight to NY, I persevered and I LOVED this book. It’s a mystery with stunning worldbuilding; an action/adventure book with emotional depth; satisfying political intrigue and insightful social commentary, and a really interesting premise: In the world of intergalactic space travel, where the human lifespan is a fraction of the time it takes to traverse the galaxy, what if you could capture the neural-endocrine print or “imago” of a person and implant it in another person, so that no knowledge is lost? And if so, what is the self? Highly recommend for fans of scifi/fantasy/complex fiction: 5 out of 5 ttengs. :)