Beware the Narrative

I'm still catching up after my vacation/staycation. I never finished the posts about the trip to France,

A picture from the LA trip, representing both balancing acts
and the enduring power of a good story!

and now I have a short trip to LA I'd like to write about, too. I may not get to it. I had the best intentions to write about my last trip to Arizona- I even took pictures to use in a post!- and then I never wrote a post. It is a shame. I don't think my trip story posts are the most popular with readers, but I like to have them to refer back to.

Anyway, I read an article I'd saved by Lisa Miller about why we need older women in the workforce, and I realized that by Miller's definition, I've left. She is looking for women to show the way forward in what I'll call a "regular job"- i.e., one where you go into an office and do your part in a larger organization. I can understand why she wants this. It is hard to navigate your way through office politics and career decisions without role models, and although men can be helpful to a certain extent, they are playing by different rules. I couldn't emulate a former boss' direct and confrontational style, for instance. That would have been career suicide for me, although it worked well for him.

There's been a lot written about why women leave the workforce. People argue about whether it is motherhood, or overwork, or sexism, or something else. I've been thinking a lot about this given my own recent exit from the corporate world. I still consider myself very much in the workforce (and so far at least, still have a paycheck to prove it), but I'll grant that I've left the corporate world. I left at the stereotypical time: mid-career, partway up the ladder but still definitely on a middle rung. I have more than one kid, too, which studies have indicated correlates with a greater likelihood of leaving.

So what made me leave? Here are the possible reasons:

• The company moved and the new commute was making it hard to get a full work week in.
• The culture in which I was working evolved into something I didn't enjoy that much.
• I'd reached my limit on the low key sexist BS that was constant background noise in my career. I have a few jaw-dropping "you have GOT to be kidding me" sexism in the workforce stories, but I honestly think it was the constant low level stuff that did more harm. As I explained to a friend recently, it was like that stuff was just silently accruing, and all of the sudden I'd hit some sort of pre-set BS limit that even I didn't know existed. The men I was working with at the time weren't particularly sexist. They were just the guys in the vicinity when I hit the limit.
• I had other interests I wanted to explore.
• The job I was in had policies that made it very hard to have any sort of side gig- including writing. That was annoying and made me feel overly constrained.
• I wanted to try being completely in charge.

There are probably more reasons that aren't obvious to me right now, but those are the big ones. So which was "the reason" I quit? None of them. All of them. It was a combination of things. Depending on what larger point someone wanted to make, my story could be spun to emphasize some of the factors more than others, but I honestly can't say that any one factor was more important than any other in my thought process the day I quit.

People want there to be a clean answer for why so many women decide to opt out of corporate life, but in my case, there isn't a clean answer. I suspect this is true of most people who decide to leave. Would decreasing the background sexism convince more to stay? I have no doubt that it would. But it would be easy to take a story like mine and argue that women like me leave the corporate world for more positive reasons. It would also probably be easy to go through my work history and find things I'd done wrong, or suboptimal decisions I'd made that led to some of my other frustrations.

In the end, I left because I wanted to explore different things, and my exhaustion with the environment in which I was working made it appealing to go do that.

Or did I leave because I was exhausted by a hostile culture and realized I had other options?

Even I don't really know.

We love narratives and personal stories. On the surface, they make it easier to understand complex issues. By personalizing them, we make the issues more accessible and harder to ignore. But there is a downside, too, because narratives are rarely clean. People's lives are messy. Decisions are made for a confusing mix of reasons. People do less than ideal things, making it easy for people who are looking for reasons not to see a particular problem to dismiss their stories.

We see this playing out in a far more horrifying context in the reaction of some people to the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black men and women who have lost their lives were "no angels." They'd "made mistakes." No one will ever be perfect enough. The protesters will never use the exact "right" tactics. For people who don't want to see the issue, there will always be a reason to dismiss the most recent story.

As much as I love stories, individual stories alone will never allow us to understand what is really happening in our society. Luckily, we have social scientists who have studied how to aggregate our stories and better understand the whole picture. We have historians who can help us see the broader meaning of our individual stories, by placing them in a historical context. Unfortunately, these viewpoints aren't always well represented in our discussions. It is hard to find people who can take an individual story and weave it into the wider context and help us understand what that story really means, but those are the voices I'm seeking out these days. After all, if I can't even understand the narrative my own story in isolation, how can I hope to understand anyone else's?

The Not Quite a Vacation Not Quite a Links Post

I don't have a real links post today. I am on vacation. Sort of. We decided we couldn't afford a real family vacation this year after our "just the grown ups" vacation in France, but we took this week off, planning a "staycation" here in San Diego. Then we decided to spend a couple of days in LA. Then we (note: actually just my husband) decided to start painting the new room this week.

At this point, I'm thinking I should have just considered the LA trip a vacation and worked during the days here in San Diego, because I do not consider painting a vacation activity. (Petunia does, though- she says she loves painting.)

However, I did't work, and I mostly stayed off the internet, so... no links. Sorry! If you're bereft without links to read, try these:

Nicole and Maggie usually have some good links- they'll post them Saturday morning.

Revanche over at A Gai Shan Life recently had a links post.

Here's one link about college admissions and how out of control the process has gotten, which I read before vacation really started.

And now I'm off to "vacation" some more.

Weekend Reading: The Heavy Things Edition

There has been a lot of death and suffering in the my Twitter feed lately. Perhaps I need a break. Maybe next week, I will look for only lighter things to share, but for this week, I have mostly heavy things. I am sorry, but the world is heavy these days.

Roxane Gay wrote about Cecil the Lion and Samuel DuBose, and the pain of the difference in our reaction to these two deaths.

Tressie McMillan Cottom's personal story of being arrested as part of a minor traffic stop is,,, I don't know what to say here. Wonderful seems inappropriate given the subject matter. Compelling? Important. Whatever, go read it. Personally, I read just about anything she posts, so I read her second piece at the Atlantic about Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, too. This one is about the stories not told in that book, and it is definitely worth your time.

Sally Kohn's piece about reading the book as a white woman- and why we should read it, even though it will be hard- is also worth your time. I confess to feeling a little bit of optimism upon finding a piece like this in a publication like Elle.

Elle, incidentally, also published a powerful piece by Ashley Ford about not reporting a sexual assault.

I also read an old post from Patrick Blanchfield about... boy, about a lot. The title is Sandy Hook, "White on White Crime" and How Privilege Kills and that is probably as good a summary as any I can come up with. It was was written after the report from the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate released its report about the Sandy Hook shootings. It covers a lot of ground, and I found it very, very disturbing, not least of all because if I'm honest with myself, I cannot be completely sure I would have responded to the challenge of raising a child like Adam Lanza better than Nancy Lanza did. I cannot be sure I would not have used- no, misused- my privilege just as she did. That is a really disturbing thing to think about.

I give her the benefit of the doubt, and think she believed she was doing what was best for a child she loved and wanted to protect. And she did some really, really wrong things, and was able to avoid the help other, more impartial people thought her child needed because she had the money and social standing to do so. 

I can be sure that I wouldn't have provided access to guns, so I guess there's that.

Anyway, go read that post, but be prepared for it to hurt a little.

Hey, let's talk about happier things! Like how the lack of women in tech is NOT a pipeline problem. And how we shouldn't be training women to fit in to the "alpha male" culture at work, but trying to change the culture to be more inclusive of everyone. And hey, why are all the people who consider it their job to think about the shape of the future white men?

OK, here's some actual good news: Merck and WHO ran a trial of an Ebola vaccine in West Africa, and the results were very, very encouraging. I hope that further studies bear this finding out.

And this isn't good news or bad news, it is just interesting: a dot map of every job in the US, color-coded by industry segment.

In "I like to make money" news, I gave the Run Better Meetings seminar, and it went well. I've decided to make the recording available for purchase via GumRoad. Details here.

I also finalized the formatting for Unspotted and uploaded the final files. Let the countdown to release day (August 12!) begin. You, of course, can get a jumpstart on that by pre-ordering.

Let's end on a genuinely fun note: my husband tried his hand at making a crappy thing to stop a child from whining, and was successful. Behold, the crappy pom-poms!

Also, how cool is this drawing?

Ariel the Chemist drawn for me by: Emily Sasaki (@sassysassaki on instagram & http://t.co/RtAVLaCdmz) #realtimechem pic.twitter.com/2HmNRXwpm6

— Debbie Mitchell (@heydebigale) July 30, 2015

Wisdom Practice

I love to read, so it is probably not surprising that I keep buying books in search of wisdom.

I am not aging as gracefully as I thought I would. I am too short-tempered and not patient enough. I am overwhelmed by the horribleness in our world sometimes. I get caught up in other people's ideas of success and question my own choices. I get anxious. And so on.

I go looking for books to help me do better, and be the person I want to be. Most recently, I bought The Gifts of Imperfection,by Brene Brown. It was a pretty good book, and I don't regret reading it.

At some point in the book, when it was talking about engaging in a purposeful practice of some sort, I realized that I already have as much wisdom as I need.

I just need to practice it.

One of my kids enjoying life.

When I talk to people about getting better at using their time, I emphasize that there really is no "one cool trick" that will make it easy. It is about looking honestly at what you're doing now, thinking about how you could do better, doing the work to make it happen, and then keeping with it until the new way becomes your habit.  It isn't a quick fix, and it isn't necessarily easy, but it is effective.

And that's what I need to do with the aspects of my life that send me looking for wisdom.

I enjoy reading books about building a better, happier life, so I will probably keep reading them every now and then. But I don't need to read any more books. I've already read enough to know what I need to do to feel better. I need to get my yoga practice established again. I need to get my exercise routines going again. I need to remind myself of both my incredible good fortune and my resilience. I need to pick one thing and make it better. I need to count to four when I'm angry. (OK, that last one came from Daniel Tiger, but hey, take your wisdom where you find it.)

In short, I need to practice the wisdom I already have.

I'm not going to find "one cool trick" that makes this easy. It doesn't work like that. I know that, just as I know- from experience- how much better I feel when I have a strong "wisdom practice." I've been there before, and I can get there again. It is time to stop making excuses for why I'm not doing the things I know make my life better and start working on my wisdom practice. I'll let you know how it goes.

Book Review: My First Plane Trip

My kids both flew before they were old enough to really understand that this was anything more momentous that the other random outings we took them on, and we've flown enough with them over the years to have (luckily) avoided any travel worries from them.

So, we're not really the target audience for My First Plane Trip, a short picture book by Kim Jenkins. Still, I like to try to help authors out when I can, so I agreed to take a review copy. And then proceeded to get really busy, so it has been over a month and I'm only now posting the review.

I read the book and Pumpkin (who is eight) read the book. I think Petunia (who will be six in a few months) might be more in the target age range for the book, but she was basically a walking meltdown tonight due to an unfortunate incident at camp with some sunscreen and her eye, so I didn't think it was worth asking her opinion. All of her opinions tonight degenerated rather quickly into tears.

The book is a straight-forward explanation of the things a child is likely to see and experience when taking a trip on an airplane. There is also a list of "People You Might Meet" and a glossary, which I think may have been Pumpkin's favorite parts.

Both Pumpkin and I rated this book as "fine." We both thought it did a solid job of explaining the air travel process to a child who wasn't familiar with it. The book is illustrated with photos, which might be a nice feature in terms of helping kids recognize what they're seeing on the day of the trip. Some of the pictures are clearly stock photos, but there was only one case where that bothered me: the photo illustrating baggage loading shows bundled freight being loaded. 

There is some humor provided by funny cat photos and the incongruous appearance of a porcupine. This humor worked better for me than it did for Pumpkin- she took it  too literally and said "no one would travel with a porcupine!" (I decided not to explain to her that was sort of the point of the use of the porcupine.) I think this is a case where a younger child who is in a less literal humor stage would enjoy the humor more than Pumpkin did. Pumpkin is solidly in the scatological humor phase, so probably would only have laughed if the porcupine had farted.

I had one other content concern: there was a page about the airport stores, which might be a bad thing if you were hoping to avoid shopping in the stores during your time in the airport. We usually buy an overpriced snack in one of the airport stores to take the edge of waiting, but I know some parents try to avoid them.

I had a PDF version, so I can't comment on the ebook layout, but the text was well-edited, age appropriate, and easy to read. 

All in all, I think the ebook version of this book would be a good investment if you have a child under the age of six or so who is about to take their first airplane ride. I'm not sure I think the cost of the print version would be justified for most kids, but if I had a child who was fearful of the new experience, I'd give it a try.

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I occasionally accept a review copy of a book to review. My review policy is explained on my page about book reviews. A PDF version of the book in this post was sent to me by the author.