It started with a bad performance review.
My boss sat across from me in a glass conference room, with me facing the hallway, and he said, “You’re not going to be happy with this.” My chest tightened, and I realized I had forgotten my tissues. I’d got a two out of five — an adult D — on my performance. He said I hadn’t met the mark in my management; I hadn’t executed ideas the way he thought I should have; and I was overall disappointing, especially for someone who had come in with so much buzz (or something to that effect).
It was my first time getting anything but glowing feedback from a manager. I started sobbing hysterically, tears and snot pouring out of me. It was so embarrassing: Anyone who walked by could see me. I couldn’t get myself out of there fast enough.
I was so upset that I couldn’t go back to my desk. Instead, I went to the bathroom and texted a colleague to bring my sweater and purse to a stall so I could leave the building quietly. I then sat outside in a newly built miniature park for a few hours, convulsing with sobs — the kind of cry that is about much more than the one thing you say you are crying about.
As I sat on this bench in the middle of this weirdly paved, try-too-hard nonpark in downtown NYC, a nice man asked me in a comforting New York accent, “You OK, sweethawt? Can I get you anything? Don’t cry!” He then ran to a nearby pretzel cart, bought me a bottle of water, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Whatever it is, it’ll get better.” I felt so stupid, crying in public like I had lost someone.
I mean, I guess I had: I had lost myself.
I was raised in and brainwashed by hustle culture and external definitions of success. But I had to be, as the child of immigrants, as part of a generation that internalized the “work hard, play hard” ethic and the belief that women are as good as, if not better than, the men around them. I blogged and wrote books on the side while managing completely different careers — teaching, community organizing, and then digital communications. I had been the executive editor at the popular early-aughts feminist blog Feministing, where I would work in my free time, largely unpaid, blogging and mentoring other writers. I didn’t even get a job in journalism until I was thirty-seven, but because I’d had so many side gigs freelance writing and editing for free, I qualified for a senior-level job when I did.
Over the previous ten years, I’d become the poster child for the maxim “fake it till you make it” — a piece of advice I both followed and was quick to dole out to friends, mentees, and colleagues. Add to this that I was never good with boundaries at work: If someone was willing to pay me to work, and especially for something for which I had a passion, I felt like I had to work twice as hard to prove myself.
Need me to work late all week to make that unreasonable deadline? No problem, chief! Did another employee drop the ball on something they should have handled? I’ll cover for them and then maybe do their task myself. Was the boss asking me to take on a workstream that was most definitely not in my job description? I was on it. I could not say no if I tried.
As a Gen X woman, I was fed strong myths about the benefits of working hard, which then made me feel like shit if I wasn’t always working. It helped me beast my career, but it also meant that when I hit forty, I was exhausted.
I somehow went back into the office and got through the rest of the day after that but called in sick for the rest of the week. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t get out of bed; I started to have intense chest pains, and when I wasn’t feeling those, I was imagining myself jumping in front of one of the buses that ran up First Avenue next to my fourth-floor walk-up, or wondering what would happen if I took a whole handful of my Xanax prescription.
That’s when I knew things were bad bad, so I called my best friend, who said we could talk about what happened later but that I needed to hang up and call my doctor right away and tell her everything, too.
I emailed my doctor instead, and she told me to come in right away.
I had struggled with bouts of depression, but it had never been like this, I told her. She switched my medication to something to manage the anxiety and the depression without the risks of suicidal ideation and suggested I take off as much time as possible — one month at the minimum, but I should consider much longer. I said, “There is literally no way,” so we agreed to three weeks.
She wrote me a note, and I was in the clear for a little while: I didn’t have to go in to work and face the reality that the people who were then in charge of me didn’t think I was very good at what I do. I had hit my breaking point, but I wasn’t even aware of it yet; I was still focused on getting better to get back to work.
I went to stay with my parents for a week, but our cozy upstate home had essentially transformed into a medical facility to deal with my father’s end-stage renal disease. My mother suggested I check into a retreat center I’d visited in the past and liked, and so I did, spending the rest of my medical leave lying on the floor in yoga class.
After I returned to the office, things were — not surprisingly — awkward. My job duties were slowly given to a new hire with a stronger background in organizational management. I see now that the writing was already on the wall (and had been even before the performance review). But at the time I didn’t get it. I was on good terms with everyone, including my bosses. I was still working on projects and collaborating with colleagues. I thought that I would just continue on in my job. I’m “the person everyone likes” — that’s my whole thing, my survival skill.
I kept thinking that it was all going to be relatively OK till one day, a few weeks after I returned, the inevitable happened: I was fired.
I mean, technically, I was laid off. Everyone told me it was not about my talent but about a “strategic redirect,” and I was one of several employees whose positions were being eliminated. I was told my departure could be framed to everyone as a “transition,” and I had the option to continue to work for the company on a freelance basis.
Chapters
CHAPTERS
Adapted from The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, which will be published by Random House on June 18, 2024.
Management had tried their best to help me save face, but the damage was done. I was enraged, devastated, and destabilized; I felt gaslit and betrayed. I was also fucked financially because I had just helped my parents relocate to that cozy upstate home and was footing a good bit of the bill. When I got back to my apartment that night after a terrible day, I looked around at my couch, my window — it all looked different.
It was never officially diagnosed as such, but after my bad review I suffered what I now know are the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. I was taking a few different types of medication, drinking too much alcohol, and turning to late-night eating to keep my feelings of abject failure at bay. In the middle of this, I had a book coming out. Instead of spending some time working through whatever was happening (and it was clear to me even then that it wasn’t entirely about losing my job), there was a book tour to go on. Flights around the country. Media appearances. The need for big smiles and polished hair and being “on” in interviews.
And then, four months later, I got an email inviting me to interview for the executive editor job at Teen Vogue. I took the job but hadn’t fully recovered from the layoff. I still had bad work-life boundaries; I was emotionally unstable and hadn’t processed anything that had happened. Most people didn’t see this part of it — they saw me coming off a successful book tour and starting a fabulous new job. I was commended for my grit, hard work, and ability to build myself up from being an indie blogger to a major player in New York media.
I was on a short-term high: One place didn’t want me, but another much more desirable, cool, and successful place did. I started the job like you start a rebound relationship when you aren’t over your ex: I hit the ground running, posting nonstop selfies with my Drybar blowout and gifted plus-size fashion outfits, bragging about all the exciting and awesome things that were happening around me. I was the girl who had made it, sitting front row at New York Fashion Week.
I spent a lot of time shuttling around the city in cabs — feet pinched in uncomfortable shoes, body stuffed into Spanx, jumping between the office, events, bars, and restaurants. A typical day started at eight a.m. — when I’d roll over to grab my phone to open Slack and the Google News app to see what fresh hell the day had in store — and usually ended well after eight p.m., either because I worked late or because I had an event or was seeing friends, or sometimes just because I wasn’t even sure what I’d do at home in my studio apartment. (I didn’t have time to date — I was busy.) The lifestyle was exhausting me, but I wasn’t conscious of that — I was doing important work, which was what mattered. This is the price of success, I told myself. You feel like shit all the time!
I never acknowledged how much the failure at my previous job still rankled me or that I was deeply tired and depressed. But even though I didn’t acknowledge my feelings, my body tried to make them visible to me: I gained weight, I was chronically tired, and I had huge dark circles under my eyes.
What’s inescapable to me now is how thoroughly I had bought into certain myths about what it means to be a woman who is “getting ahead at work.” I told myself I was loving it. I was like a coach who couldn’t stop giving pep talks: “This is awesome” or “I’m so happy to be here.” And sometimes it was even true. If work meant sacrificing everything, then I’d sacrifice.
Then the pandemic hit. And as scared as I was in that first pandemic month, isolated in my apartment, I started to notice some changes. My joints hurt less. The bags under my eyes had started to fade, as did the constant feeling of dread I’d had every night before going to bed. I noticed that in the Zoom window my face looked brighter. My body was communicating that it liked the forced break from hustling. I began to wonder if there was more to life than this career I had fought to build, this job I had killed myself to get.
I moved upstate to live with my mother. What I thought would be a few weeks turned into five months of living in the woods of Putnam County. As New York City, and then the country, were hit with tragedy after tragedy — the endless loss of human life, our lives disrupted, our politics altered — I was going for walks in the woods and working at my job with a view of trees instead of skyscrapers. I was eventually forced to reckon with what a true path to a better life could be. I realized how much I had been aiming for other people’s goalposts — regularly overexerting myself to meet obligations to my job, my friends, and my family.
I hadn’t ever really given myself the space I needed to adjust to high-powered, high-stress jobs. I’d started practicing “fake it till you make it” back in my twenties, and on some level, I was still faking it twenty years later. And I didn’t even realize it, because I was pushing myself so hard all the time.
Years after I’d sat weeping by the hot dog cart, I kept obsessively going over the day when I got fired, again and again. In therapy, I’d be raging, blaming everyone for what happened — and then I gradually started to see the complexity of the situation. I started to see what I couldn’t see then: I had also not been thriving in the position. And that was OK.
Still, that rage was important. It uncovered something much deeper that I’d been tap-dancing around for years, which was that, at my core, I doubted that I even had a right to a job like that in the first place.
In the beginning, working from home had the energy of a snow day, but the work quickly started to feel more intense: from endless Zoom meetings to new tasks and check-ins. There was a lot of anxiety about layoffs, and many of us were feeling the pull to overperform even while the world was falling apart. Days would go by when it’d be dark outside, and I’d realize I hadn’t eaten that day or even brushed my teeth. I was severely burned out and crumbling under the pressure of being a leader in a moment of such transition.
In March 2021, I quit my Teen Vogue job. I was fortunate to get space during the pandemic to reflect on what would make me happy — and it turned out it wasn’t a fancy, big-shot full-time job. Despite the glossy exterior of working at a magazine, I was frustrated with the rat race and wanted to spend more time being creative and less managing an increasingly unhappy staff in the face of budget cuts, constant turnover, and living life during a time of endless turbulence.
A lot of people have asked me why I’d leave such a dream job (“What actually happened?” many well-intentioned but extremely nosy friends and family members have asked), and I’ve told them that I knew it was a dream job… for someone other than me.
I’ve still struggled to figure out how to live life on my own terms while sustaining myself. Even now, I very rarely take a day off. The hustle for money or the right gig is constant. Making ends meet and ensuring I have health insurance has been challenging. I don’t have a lot of savings, and with an increased cost of living and the additional financial responsibilities I now shoulder, I’ve had to take several gigs just for the money. And even in those jobs that are supposed to be “just for the money,” I find it extremely challenging to disconnect from the work or not get upset if it’s going poorly. Work can’t make you happy, sure, but when it makes you actively unhappy, it is awful.
“Making it” is a myth to me not because I didn’t make it. I did make it, and I’m still making it; I’m still on the hamster wheel. I still work too much. I still have a hard time doing all the things that need to get done, let alone being able to think about the bigger picture. I have long been in a prison of my own ambition, stuck without a narrative for moving forward. I’m slowly starting to find my way out. But it means accepting that success looks different than I thought it would.
From the book THE MYTH OF MAKING IT: A Workplace Reckoning by Samhita Mukhopadhyay. Copyright © 2024 by Samhita Mukhopadhyay. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
