Amy Writes Words

Amy Isikoff Newell

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Amy Writes Words, the newsletter, only in podcast form so you can listen to it instead of read it. I have not figured out the footnotes situation yet. https://www.amywriteswords.com www.amywriteswords.com

12/18/2022

A few things instead of a whole-ass Essay

Hello folks! It’s been difficult for me to maintain the habit of sending this newsletter regularly. This isn’t surprising, we all know habits are hard to build. Anyways, try, try again. The perfect is the enemy of everything, so here’s an imperfect offering for you. I will always bet against cruelty, not because I think I’ll win that bet, but because I don’t choose every day to go on living so that I can throw in with powerful men who behave badly. Yes, I’m talking about Elon Musk. Also in regard to Elon Musk, as I tweeted yesterday: My problem with him is not that he's a narcissistic baby, although he is that. It's that he is a powerful fascist with a powerful platform who is using that platform to advance fascist interests & at the same time (and relatedly) is shifting the Overton window on how bosses can treat workers. Here’s a Woe I wrote about how current developments driven by Musk made me actually lose my whole mind for a minute, and how I got it back. Here’s a poem I wrote about it too. Don’t forget that there are people who use outrage as a business strategy. Here’s a quote from Ursula Le Guin that I find relevant and hopeful right now We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. Don’t you work at a tech business, Amy? As a … boss? Aren’t you one of the “tech executives”? Shouldn’t you maybe not criticize capitalism since you are very participating in it? No, that’s a spurious argument. I can be part of a particular kind of game (running a business within the larger framework of tech capitalism) while also critiquing it and dreaming of something else. Here’s something I wrote on the topic of being a boss, by the way. It’s about power. If you manage people, I think you should read it. The difference between Grief and Joy is not as large as people think. They meet, often, at their extremes, in an emotional experience that is maybe best described as Awe. Something I’m thinking about from Tiny Habits, as 2023 nears. What’s the tiniest habit I can create that will have the most meaning for me? Not for the person I think I should be, but for me, as I am, in this moment. What do I ACTUALLY care about? I’m not sure yet what my answer is. There’s a lot of things I’ve tried and failed to change in my life because they were too big or too hard, but I have had success with tiny habit changes and, sometimes, with big ones too. This McSweeney’s article about Cookie Monster wondering if he is, indeed, a monster, perfectly encapsulates so many of my internal conversations about myself: am me monster or am me not monster, just regular person? Me monster. That’s the darkness inside me talking, yes, but if it did not speak to me that way I wouldn’t ask myself any difficult questions, would I? I wouldn’t bother to be careful with my power or with my words, because I would never suspect that I might be wrong. Which is certainly a much easier way to live. It’s just not one on offer to me. And for that, honestly, I am grateful. I do not seek the Dunning-Kruger confidence of a chatbot. I seek to grow, not so that I can say I have a growth mindset so as to better succeed in business, but so that I can become as full a human as I can be. At a dinner last month I managed to start an argument about politics even though everyone at the table was a Democrat. The argument was about defunding the police. One diner accused me of forcibly ejecting people from the Democratic party, as if I had that kind of power, as if merely stating my opinion on the matter around a table were an act of aggression. I don’t know much about it, said another diner, but I am sure that we need the police and that defunding them is a terrible idea. Well, I said, I actually do know something about this topic, and, as a result, I am an abolitionist. I would like to abolish the police and to abolish prisons. Will you read a book about it, I asked the person who said they didn’t know much about it. No, that’s not really a priority for me, they said. I didn’t ask them how they could so casually hold an opinion on a topic about which they admitted knowing so little. It was time for dessert. If you too think that abolishing the police is a terrible idea, that they protect us, or maybe you’re not sure what you think but you don’t know much about it, and you’re willing to consider it, allow me to recommend The End of Policing, by Alex Vitale, a well-researched, eye-opening book on the matter. You can get it as an e-book for a mere $6. We Do This Till We Free Us, by Mariame Kaba, is another great read, also available as an ebook for $6. If you aren’t willing to commit to a whole book (understandable), here’s an article instead. Neither of those are easy books, especially for white liberals who largely haven’t had negative interactions with the police and other coercive kinds of state control. Myself, I have been involuntarily committed, which is not the same as having been jailed, but is not entirely different either. As a crazy person, I fear the police. Even going through the TSA line at the airport terrifies me. Because I am a small white woman, I don’t expect to be summarily executed by the police, but I don’t trust them either. Maybe this still seems like it doesn’t have much to do with you personally, so it’s still not a priority. Allow me to suggest otherwise: If you’re worried about fascism, or white supremacy, or anti-semitism, or voter suppression, or violent insurrectionists, or abortion rights, well, all of those worries are intimately and inextricably tied to our system of policing and prisons. It is those systems, already in existence, which will be increasingly turned against you, yes YOU, for being queer, or having an abortion (or a miscarriage), or attending a protest, or, or, or, or. Maybe you think I’m a woke radical social justice warrior with impractical and idealistic notions. Maybe you disagree with my messaging. But maybe, just maybe, if you looked more closely at what the police are actually doing, about how our prisons actually function, you’d be convinced that they’re not such a good idea after all. I know it is easy to dismiss me as crazy but in 2023 I’m going to keep daring you to look with me at uncomfortable things. Ooh! That, it turns out, is the tiniest habit I can cultivate that will have the most meaning for me. Self-promotion area: Office Hours: I am still offering my office hours for women and non-binary engineers, sign up here and please share with folks you think could benefit. My other newsletter: “Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World” and you can subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/woe While irregular, it’s also free, so why the hell not? If you like this post, you could share it on yr social: And I love to hear from my readers so you can always smash that reply button and let me know what you’re thinking. Get full access to Amy Writes Words at www.amywriteswords.com/subscribe

12 min
10/05/2022

The Book of Life and The Book of Death

CW: suicide. The word death is in the title here, folks, what do you expect from me? Q: You go dark for months and months, Amy and then this is what you come back to us with? MORE DARK? A: yes, apparently that is correct. I have been super busy and all my newsletter activity has fallen by the wayside but today I had a thing to say and this is a venue in which to say it. You could argue that it’s better placed in my other newsletter, Woe, but it’s not exactly a mental health tip, so it’s here. And probably cross-posted there, because I’m messy like that. Never forget, folks: the perfect is the enemy of basically everything, including the good.Q: are you going to keep writing these again now? A: I will try. Today is Yom Kippur. For a long time I understood Yom Kippur to be the day on which we all desperately work to be written in the Book of Life for the next year, rather than the Book of Death. Naturally, this led to a lot of inner conflict, because I was never all that interested in being alive. Instead of doing what I was supposed to do, I rebelled. I dared the Universe to write me into the Book of Death. It's like a joke I told in a standup set once "Crazy people love cigarettes... because we hate living." But the rest of the time, mostly, I continued to show up. I worked. I cared for my children. I made art. I tried to be good. I played the hand I was dealt. I kept a sliver of myself in death’s corner, a slice of self-destruction that I couldn’t quit, like the cigarettes. Yom Kippur would roll around and I’d figure out some way to do exactly the opposite of what I was supposed to do. Work. Eat. Drink. Lie. Cheat. And so on. F**k you and the horse you rode in on, Life, what did you ever do for me? Every so often someone would talk about a miracle cure for what ailed me, but I never got a miracle. I tried all the things but they weren’t miracles. Sometimes it felt like the only thing that kept me going was my acute and personal understanding of the wreckage that I’d leave behind if I chose instead to die. This year is a hard year for me because today, Yom Kippur, falls the day before the 10 year anniversary of a friend’s suicide. That friend killed himself on a day he was supposed to come to my house for dinner. Instead he stopped answering my texts and he died. So here I am, finally. Today is the day on which I have always believed I was expected to beg for a life I could sometimes barely tolerate, let alone find the energy to beg for. And then tomorrow, the day on which the person who taught me — precisely, vividly, endlessly — the wreckage that comes in the wake of a suicide — the day on which he chose to die. A one-two punch. Will you beg to live, woman? asks one day, or will you choose to die like he did? asks the day after that. Because of the way the Jewish calendar works, this conjunction doesn’t happen every year. Like an eclipse, or like all the planets being in retrograde at once (someone told me that is happening, which I didn’t even think it could, but I don’t claim to understand astrology), it’s a rare convergence. In the 10 years since he died, this is the first year those two days have bumped up against each other, and they won’t do so again until 2030, when Yom Kippur will begin on the evening of the day he died. I’ve struggled extra-hard this year because this isn’t a conjunction that matters much to anyone but me. I have spent the last 10 years of my life reckoning with the pain his death caused me, and the ways it resonated with my own despair, called me to wrestle with my own death wish. And reckoning too with the very real consequences of some of the ways I chose to wrestle with that death wish, the harm I caused: harm to me, harm to people I loved, harm to innocent bystanders. But how could I explain what this meant to the people around me, who didn’t experience that death the way I did and don’t know the details of the ways my own death wish has played out in my life? In the end though, it turns out to be pretty simple. I open up the computer and I set down the words. Here is a day, and another day, I say, and here is how they relate to one another in my life, and why that is important. It’s not actually that difficult. What was more difficult for me was to see the connection myself, why that death and this holy day are related. I understand very well the harm that is caused when someone decides to stop showing up for life. I see also the harm that is caused when someone flails around wielding their death wish like an amulet against responsibility. But it’s also true that even when we show up fully to life, are all in, we will still cause harm. The harm is not optional. Yom Kippur is not so much a day that is about begging to be forgiven for the harm, begging for the right to stay here to do better, this year. It’s not about asking at all. It’s about choosing. My friend made a choice to stop showing up. For all the years of my life I’ve made the other choice, even the years I was most sunk into one self-destructive urge or another, I still, basically, chose to show up. Sometimes I would sink into a deep depression and see what ways I was not showing up, what harm I was causing, and then I would do something different. I would try to do better. I don’t need an angry God I don’t exactly believe in to sit in judgment over me deciding whether I deserve to live or die. I’m already exceptionally good at judging myself, thank you much. No, it’s not about asking to live. It’s about choosing to show up, knowing that if I keep showing up I’ll also keep f*****g up, because f*****g up is part of what happens when you show up. Sometimes I’ll f**k up because I made bad choices that I can learn from, sometimes I’ll f**k up because I made the best choice I could and even the best choice you can make might still be a pretty terrible choice, might cause harm. Showing up to live isn’t any guarantee that you won’t cause harm along the way, it’s the opposite. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, for sure. And yet, I still believe the alternative is worse. I have made it a long way in my life showing up to live as best I can, trying to accept responsibility for the harms I’ve caused along the way and make my peace with the psychic pain I cannot cure or flee. I have spent the last several days asking everyone who loves me why I can’t let these things go. How could I? Like Hamlet, I stand always at a grave asking a skull whether I should Be. And yet I continue to be. I keep asking that question, every day I ask myself, and every day I answer yes, I will keep showing up. I am in this, not to win it, because what does that even mean, but because I choose to be. I don’t have to make that choice. No one has to make that choice, it’s not inevitable. He didn’t. One of the last things he told me, in essence, was that he didn’t owe me — or anyone — his life. And that’s true. I don’t owe anyone else my life. For all the pain his death caused me, all that shrapnel, as deeply as I wish he were still here, he didn’t owe me his survival. It is true that I always feel the weight of my responsibility to others: to my children, to the folks I work with, to everyone whose lives I touch in any way. But I don’t choose every day to continue to live because of my obligations to others. I don’t even do it because I feel an obligation to myself, or because I feel an obligation to … Something Else. On Yom Kippur the question is not “what must I do to survive?” and it is not “why must I choose to survive?” neither of which are very compelling to me. It’s this: is my life a gift I am still willing to give to this world? And can I feel it not just as a free-given gift to others, but as a gift to myself? Can I continue this magic trick, bend this darkness so far that it turns into light? Can I make something beautiful, so beautiful even I can enjoy it? Will I try? Yes. I write myself into the Book of Life. “yes I said yes I will Yes.” Here’s one of many poems I wrote about the dead man, and here’s another of them and another. Here’s a thing where I talk about what it means to play the hand you’re dealt, and here’s another thing I wrote about how you can only save your own life. I don’t know which newsletter this particular thing goes in and I don’t know who wants this particular gift besides me. But here, yes, here I am, showing up the only way I know how, with the only thing I have to give, myself, for another day, another year, another decade, another and another and another. Get full access to Amy Writes Words at www.amywriteswords.com/subscribe

10 min
02/16/2022

Three Icebergs, Two Internet Miracles, and One Mint-Condition Set of Sassy Magazines

Hello and welcome back to Amy Writes Words. It’s been a minute; I’m working on not making excuses for myself and I have been recently bingeing Adele’s new album, so I’ll just say “I don’t have to explain myself to you/I’m a grown woman and I do what I want to do.” I think she was talking about a torrid romance and actually I’m talking about a sick cat, but whatevs. Today I want to talk about impact. I've written before about the challenges of measuring our impact in the world: I trust that when I send words into the world they will move the world. I can’t measure that movement. I see maybe a tiny piece of it, a sliver of analytics. Sometimes years later something I wrote will come back to me and I will catch a glimpse of the part of the iceberg that is submerged, everything that can’t be measured not only because it is hidden but because it is made out of things that are immeasurable. Love. Doubt. Trust. Change. Hope. Solidarity. Today I want to tell you about three different times in my life when I caught a glimpse of the ways in which my words have moved the world. Three times I did a thing and it went out into the world and then, by coincidence or luck or fate I found out later about some part of the impact that it had. Three icebergs. I will start first with the most recent and least mysterious of these: I gave a talk in April of 2019, at a small 1-day tech conference called GetConf, which took place in Omaha, Nebraska. I spoke about my experience with bipolar disorder and what I’d learned through that experience about the value of being able to show up authentically to work. I also spoke about one of the systems of oppression that militate against our truly being able to show up authentically to work -- about patriarchy. At that time, in April 2019, to stand up at a tech conference and say the word patriarchy was actually scarier than talking about my mental illness. I had been talking about my mental illness for a while already, but in part because of that, I didn’t talk much about anything else that might be perceived as Difficult. I spent much of my career making an uneasy peace with the sexism that I experienced as a software engineer — ignoring it or dismissing it or diminishing it or complaining privately about it. But I didn’t feel I had enough power or security, as a mentally ill woman, to mouth off about patriarchy, or basically anything else. I did my best to hire and support other women engineers, but I didn’t do a lot of speaking truth to power. What changed for me in 2018 that enabled me to give this talk in 2019 is that I quit a job and then I went out and got a new job. I had stayed at that previous job for a long time; too long, really, because I believed myself to be damaged goods. Some of the worst years in my life were while I was at that job, and it was then that I began to be open with my coworkers about my mental illness, mostly because it became impossible to hide. But because of that, I believed I might never get another job in tech after that one, and that belief caused me to hang on to the job longer than I should have, and to be careful not to pile “Nasty Woman” on top of “Crazy Lady”. So this talk was a real watershed moment for me. I was genuinely afraid. Still, it was a small 20 minute talk that I gave at a small conference in Omaha, a place I had not realized had anything of a tech industry presence at all, which is a whole other essay topic. In retrospect, GetConf 2019 turned out to be one of the most important conferences I’ve attended. It remains one of the most well-run and inclusive conferences I’ve ever been to, and there were a number of interesting talks, including by Camille Eddy and Stefanie Monge, and meeting such an incredible and diverse group of women in tech, and then following them on Twitter, and then following people they followed — this set me on a path toward greater engagement with the politics of the tech industry, including more engagement not just about patriarchy but white supremacy and colonialism and other significant issues around harm. For example, at that conference I saw Eva Penzey-Moog give a talk about designing for safety, particularly for the safety of folks who are experiencing intimate partner abuse. And that had a massive impact on the way I thought about our responsibilities as engineers in the world, to consider the harm that our work may cause, and to consider it from the position of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. She has a whole book now about this topic and you should definitely check it out. That whole conference was an iceberg of impact with effects that continue to reverberate. And my own little talk was an iceberg too. Several people reached out to me immediately afterward to tell me how it had affected them. But also, all the talks that day were recorded and went up on YouTube after the conference. Several hundred people have watched it since it went up on YouTube, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but at least a few of those people have taken the time to tell me how important it was for them and if there’s one thing I know about icebergs it’s that they are all melting very fast — wait, wrong topic — if there’s one thing I know about putting words out into the world it’s that if you get any signal at all back from even one or two people that your words were useful to them, there’s at least a few more people who felt that way also but didn’t take the extra step to tell you. On to the second iceberg. The further back in time I go the weirder this s**t gets, so get ready. In 2003 I took a mindfulness course at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at UMass-Worcester. This was back before mindfulness was A Thing, and the class was mostly full of terminally ill people. (I talk about this experience in an issue of Woe if you’d like to hear more. Also why not subscribe to Woe?) Anyway, there’s a Rumi poem that is commonly offered to new meditators, called “The Guest House”. I want to briefly call out here that when I say a “Rumi poem” what I mean is a poem that is based on something Rumi wrote but mediated through the man who popularized Rumi here in the US, Coleman Barks, who, it turned out, had, in his renderings of Rumi’s work (not even translations, mind you, because Coleman Barks could not actually translate), drained the Islam out. Rumi was a Sufi mystic, and very, very much grounded in Islam. So it’s important to acknowledge that context, which I didn’t know at the time I was handed a copy of “The Guest House” back in 2003. (I learned about it from a 2017 New Yorker article). Anyway, this poem, “The Guest House”, in its Coleman Barks form, is handed out so frequently to new meditators because whatever its flaws as an accurate representation of Rumi, it is a very nice metaphor for allowing your thoughts and feelings to come hang out without getting too attached to them, this beautiful idea that in mindfulness you sit down and befriend your most upsetting emotions, invite them to your home and serve them tea. I had a lot of upsetting emotions back then (and still do), and I absolutely hated the advice that I should befriend them. So I wrote a poem, which was a response to “The Guest House” and I was like, sure, fine, I will have a guest house, but I'm not gonna make it comfortable. So, you know, my s****y emotions can come in, but it's like, I’m gonna design this house the way inhumane cities design their subway stations, so that homeless people can’t rest in them. I wanted to do something to my brain so that my s****y emotions didn't have a place to rest. So I wrote a poem about that, which you can go read or listen to over at Amy Writes Poems, and I brought the poem to class and I read it out loud there. And then my teacher asked if she could have a copy. So I gave a hard copy to her and she said, well, can I share it with my other meditation groups? And I said sure, okay, fine. Anyway, 12 years later, in 2015, I received an email from a woman who worked at the National Health Service in Scotland requesting that I grant NHS-Scotland the right to use that poem in a meditation app that they were making. And I was shocked. I hadn’t even remembered that I’d written that poem, and I no longer had a copy myself. I asked her, “Where did you even find this thing?” And she said, “Well, it’s all over the internet.” And lo and behold, somehow this poem had traveled far and wide and was up on all kinds of meditation centers’ websites, sometimes attributed to me, sometimes not, sometimes shortened or altered in some way. It was just everywhere and I was absolutely shocked. And I was so grateful that this one woman had actually thought to request permission to use it and had tracked me down, which wasn’t easy because there are a lot of Amy Newells in the world and I myself hadn’t published the poem anywhere — she found one of my Twitter handles where the biography said I was a poet and she figured maybe I was the right Amy Newell. If she hadn’t, I might never have known about this particular iceberg of impact. I told you this was going to get weird. Clearly this poem had touched many people over many years and had spread without my knowledge and it was a real internet miracle that I happened to find out about it from this one very dedicated employee at the NHS Scotland. This third thing is even weirder. It's so, so weird. I've been reading a collection of Rebecca Solnit's essays from the years that Trump was in office. And one of the things that she talks about in one of the essays is how, when Trump came into office, there was so much despair, but also so many people who had previously been not so politically engaged, suddenly leapt into action and so, so many more women jumped into running for office in the wake of Trump's election. And that was true in 2018, and it

23 min
01/04/2022

The Owl of Hope

I’ve been thinking about hope a lot. As the year turned over I found myself beset by difficulties. Of course, there was the arrival of Omicron, making the entire holiday season seem less like a celebration and more like Yeats’ rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Or like waiting for the uninvited guest in The Masque of the Red Death. I’d really rather be Waiting for Godot. Yes, I crammed three literary references into this paragraph. I was almost an English major. Words are important to me. Next, it was the first Christmas I’ve had in several years where we had no particular reason to celebrate; the person who dragged our reluctant Jewish family into Christmas isn’t in our lives anymore, and I feel that loss keenly. I tried to cram myself full of Christmas candy and fatten myself on Egg Nog just the same, but it wasn’t the same. It was sad. There’s the ongoing stress of family medical problems to manage. Some days it seems like all I do is email therapists. Christmas Day itself was a little bit festive, until it wasn’t. In the afternoon I received some unexpected and disheartening news which required me to pivot hard and fast, come up with alternate plans, be creative when I felt my back against the wall. And finally, finally, the cherry on top of all this, our beloved family cat has a kidney that has reached the end of its life, perhaps in solidarity with classic Blackberry devices, also end-of-lifed this week. The other kidney, we’re told, is working as hard as it can. This week we’ll go learn to give the cat subcutaneous fluids, assuming the animal hospital remains staffed. This week I make more phone calls and send more emails and fill out more forms and have more zooms, and try I to remember that all this work I’m doing, this caregiving, is real labor. I am not underemployed, I am busy doing labor that doesn’t count. I work, I am working, I work every day. As far as the economy goes, however, I barely exist. So it’s been tough. Sometimes I just lie down on the floor wherever I am in the apartment and cry, and one of the kids will ask if I’m okay. “I’m tired,” I say. I am just so, so tired. New Year’s Eve was lackluster. For 2021 I had the energy to dress up, at least. I did photo shoots for Instagram all evening, for 2021. For 2022, I did not change out of my cashmere sweatpants. We didn’t even open the champagne. I had a headache and went to bed before midnight. On Sunday the 2nd of January, however, I went owling with my friend Rachel. We went up to Plum Island in hopes of seeing a Snowy Owl. Rachel is a birder and she had read that some Snowy Owls had been spotted on Plum Island, which was unusual. I’m not a birder myself but it seems to me that birders know a thing or two about hope. They travel long distances and wait patiently in any weather on the mere whisper of a hope that they will have a powerful encounter with a bird. We got up far too early for my taste and drove over an hour to meet up with Rachel on Plum Island. On our way in we paid $5 to a man in a tollhouse, and he asked us why we’d come out there on this cold and rainy January morning. “A friend said we might see a Snowy Owl,” I told the man. “Well, you might,” he said. “And you might not.” As it turned out, the owl was already waiting for us. We pulled into the first parking lot and went to the bathroom, and as I came out of the bathroom a woman with a tripod and the longest camera lens I’d ever seen overheard me wondering if we would see an owl and said to me “yes, she’s just sitting on the boardwalk railing up there,” and indeed, she was. We walked up to where the other bird people were watching the owl. She sat on the railing at the top of the sand dune. There was a cold, light rain. We could see the ocean, dark and choppy, and the wet beach, and the dunes, and the moss and the lichen glowing green against the sand and the golden grasses against the gray sky, but most of all we could see the owl. She sat there turning her head around and around in that always-uncanny way owls do, scanning the dunes. She didn’t seem worried about the humans and our extra-long eyepieces. Her own eyes were piercing and her gaze was calm. We were breathless, though, and trembling. You might even say we were overcome with awe. If I were Mary Oliver I would have written a poem about it, and who knows, maybe I still will. Later when we got home I remembered an Emily Dickinson poem, known as “Hope is the thing with feathers (314)”. Since her copyright has run out I can quote it to you in full: “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me. Now, I know hope doesn’t always show up for an appointment the way that owl showed up for us. Sometimes we have to go seek it out. Sometimes we have to work for it. Sometimes we have to wait, hoping for hope. Sometimes we need other people to lend us some of their hope. But I do believe, as Dickinson writes, that hope never stops singing, and if we keep showing up for it, if we keep listening, we will find it always shows up for us. Hope shows up as a sparrow or a starling, as a robin or an owl. It shows up when someone drops off 100 N95 masks for the teachers at their child’s public school, and when someone volunteers at the food bank and when a friend drops by with a spare pulse oximeter and when a veterinarian takes 45 minutes at 7pm on New Year’s Eve to call you up and talk to you about your cat’s kidneys. You can find hope in books, in music, in your favorite webcomic and sometimes even on your least favorite social media site. Sometimes strangers shine with it. Sometimes it’s that one lone striker in the pouring rain holding down the picket line for their coworkers. You might hear hope in prayer or meditation or in gospel music or in the psalms, you might find it when someone sends you a thank you note at exactly the moment you most need some thanks, or you might find it when you are hiding from your family in your closet on a zoom call with a friend, just breathing together. I think that breathing together with other people is a wonderful way to nurture hope. Probably that’s part of why singing together feels so good. The upshot of this line of thinking is that the future must include a lot of karaoke. Look, like I said last week, we have here a world that is too hard to live in, even for the most privileged among us. We have to change. We have to change because the climate crisis is here, because the gospel of perpetual growth is suicidal, because this world we have is wearing us all down and grinding us up and it’s doing the same thing to our children. I have two teenage children and it is absolutely clear to me that the most important thing I can do for them right now is teach them how to hope. We have to teach our children how to hope, and we do it by listening hard for hope ourselves, by lighting it and tending it and sharing it with one another. On the way home from the encounter with the owl my phone buzzed me to record my mood. I felt Good, I noticed. I hardly ever feel good. In all of 2021 I recorded 1003 individual mood scores, averaging 3 a day. Only 122 (12%) of those were Good. But I went on a cold wet morning with people I love and a sliver of hope that I would see something miraculous, and I walked on the earth and I was quiet and I did see something miraculous, and it made me feel good, it brought me joy, it filled me up, and I know that I need to do this again, and again, and again. We all do. In 2022, let’s listen together for the song of the hope that perches in our souls. And when we hear it, let’s sing it. I don’t just mean sing. I mean live in the world like singing. Borrow the song if you have to, share it if you can. There’s a whole lot of hard right now and a whole lot of hard coming, and we need all that stuff some folks seem to think belongs only to the religious, or only to a certain religion, or only to people who live in the country or only to people who don’t do drugs or only to people who lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, only to a certain kind of person — but it doesn’t. Hope belongs to every single one of us, including all of us who have been running ourselves ragged for years for our Families and our Careers and hardly know anymore if we have anything left that isn’t all of that. Anything left that isn’t just Operational, that isn’t Exhaustion, that isn’t Complicity or Security or our desperate late-night Consumption as Self-Care. We do have something else. We have hope. Hope is not Annual Recurring Revenue and it’s not Stock Options and it’s not a Series C and it’s not an IPO and it’s not RSUs and it’s not TC: 400k. It’s not Ritalin or Concerta, it’s not Lexapro or Abilify. You can’t mint it as an NFT or mine it like crypto. You can’t earn it. It’s not VP. It’s not CTO. It’s not a Competency Matrix or a Performance Review or a QBR or an OKR. It’s not Observability or ChatOps. It is not a new Team Collaboration Tool, now with Kanban View. It is not a new at-home blood test or a chatbot that teaches you CBT. It is not any kind of business thing at all. Hope, like Soylent Green, is mostly made of People. And also, sometimes, Owls. Let’s all sing more of it this year. Did you like this newsletter? Why not share it? or subscribe to it? Subscribing, especially with money, is a great way to sing hope my direction. You could also just hit reply and tell me something about what you read and what it meant to you. I like that too. Also, if you like my writing why not che

18 min
12/28/2021

Area Woman Reveals Shocking Secret: Admitting you need help not, in fact, the hardest part

Like my most recent newsletter, about how to be creative when your back’s against the wall, this is another shared issue between woe and amy writes words. I’m doing this for two reasons. First, I’m guessing there are folks subscribed to amy writes words but not to woe because they don’t identify as mentally ill, but actually two years into the mass trauma that has been the pandemic, we are well into the epidemic of mental illness that the public health experts have been raising alarms about since the beginning. By which I mean: whether or not you have a diagnosed mental illness, at this point you are very likely to be, in technical terms, losing your s**t. So, maybe you also want to subscribe to woe, which is explicitly focused on living through losing your s**t. At least check out the archives and see if there’s anything there that looks useful. Second, one newsletter issue a week is easier than two and, well, I’m pretty pressed right now, so here’s the one newsletter. If you subscribe to both woe and amywriteswords, then this week I give you the special double-subscriber bonus that I have sent you only one newsletter you do not have the time or attention span to read. (Yeah, the newsletter is too long. I need to edit better but I’m too damn tired and I guess I’d rather give you too many words some of which might be helpful and some repetitive vs. no words at all, which is the other option. I’m tired. I follow proudly in Blaise Pascal’s footsteps on this one.) Now for the tip: Admitting you need help is not, in fact, the hardest part. Sorry to be a bummer but for most of us it is simply not true that the hardest part of mental illness is the part where you admit you need help. This is a Hollywood storyline that makes great after-school specials and dramatic moments in gritty dramas, but it is not how things work in real life. I know this because I have admitted I needed help about seven thousand times in my life and all of those times were easier than about seven million other things that have come with my mental illness. The time I lost a dear friend because I was absolutely bonkers nuts in their direction. The time I was involuntarily committed. Waiting two months for ketamine infusions through a fog of suicidal depression while working full time as a director of engineering, and then when I finally got around to the part where I paid six thousand dollars and got the damn infusions they helped, but they weren’t any kind of miracle, just like the ECT helped but it wasn’t any kind of miracle, just like all the meds have sometimes helped and never been any goddamn miracle, just like meditation helped and has never been a miracle and praying fervently helped but it did not bring about a f*****g miracle. Admitting you need help is not some kind of f*****g miracle. On TeeVee, when someone realizes they haven’t left the bed for two months and admits they need help, there’s a simple and easy trajectory to wellness or recovery or whatever kind of sappy end-state the TeeVee writers are aiming for. Admitting you need help really is the hardest part on TeeVee because therapists are easy to find, everyone has health insurance, the first med you try works like magic and never stops working and doesn’t have any terrible side effects, and there are no external factors influencing your level of stress or ability to cope in life. In real life the other day my younger child rushed into my bedroom wailing “I need help!” and sat down on the bed in desperation, and the only thing I had to offer them was a joke. I knew they needed help. They’ve been almost continuously depressed and suffering from crippling anxiety for the entirety of the pandemic, and they’d been on meds for a year or so prior to that. I knew they needed help because they’d already been through a partial hospitalization program and they were failing all their classes and they could hardly make it through a single school day without escaping to the social worker’s office. I knew they needed help because we’d spoken several times about whether and when inpatient hospitalization would be something for us to consider, and because we were in the middle of getting them an IEP, and because many afternoons when I picked them up from school they got into the car sobbing with exhaustion. “Oh,” I said, “now that you’ve asked for the help, finally, let me just pull the real help out from under the bed here.” Reader, they laughed, because we do a lot of dark humor in this household. Everyone needs humor, and a lot of the time dark is all we’ve got, so dark humor it is. I first asked for help from my third-grade teacher. Later, my first year of college, I asked for help from my university health services and then later I asked for help specifically from university mental health services in the form of medication and then two weeks after I started the medication I went to the health services urgent care again asking for help because I’d started cutting myself with an exacto knife, and then when I graduated from college and lost my health insurance and my doctors and my meds, about two months in to lying in bed surrounded by half-empty coke cans and dirty clothes and cigarette butts I finally called the man who I later married and asked for help finding a psychiatrist and then I asked my parents for help paying for the psychiatrist. Later I asked for help from a manager filing for a medical leave and then I did it another time and then I went searching for other kinds of help and I asked for help from coworkers and from friends and from babysitters, and even from my dental hygienist, who has for over a decade never cleaned my teeth in December without quietly comforting me while I cry for no reason at all, except that it’s December. I suppose you could maybe make a case that the hardest thing is asking for help like that again, and again, and again. But I don’t think that it’s exactly the asking that is the hard part there. The actual asking gets easier the more you do it. Never easy, because nothing about this is easy, but easier. I think what remains hard is maintaining faith that there is help, especially when you know through long and bitter experience that none of it, none of it, will be a miracle. Generally speaking when I have believed some treatment to be a miracle I wasn’t cured, I was just manic. This is supposed to be a tip and instead I feel like I’m just being a downer. I dunno, maybe you got a miracle. Sometimes you read about a guy who had some kind of weird amino acid deficiency and they just take one supplement and they are all better and then they are like “THANK GOD I WASN’T ACTUALLY MENTALLY ILL! IT WAS JUST A SIMPLE NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY!” and those people can go f**k themselves acting like their easy-to-fix deficiency puts them safely in the “sane people” category. The people who are all “it’s just a simple neurotransmitter problem and Lexapro fixed it all, it’s not my fault!” are not quite as annoying since they don’t quite claim that this puts them squarely in the “sane” category. But, if you’re still insisting on firm boundaries between “sane normal person” and “lost their f*****g mind” well, that’s adorable and quaint, I guess, but not at all how brains work, and also annoying, and also not sure you noticed but the combination of the ongoing pandemic, the climate crisis, and encroaching fascism is causing all the sane people to jump the sanity shark and then guess what, those of us who already know how to lose our minds are now the experts you need to be listening to. Folks, I already owned a pulse oximeter. I already owned a pulse oximeter because I have been inventing apocalypses for myself for my entire life, and a pulse oximeter is one of the many tools I use to determine whether or not a particular health-related apocalypse is real. For example, I once believed a pill I swallowed had punctured my lung and I was slowly asphyxiating to death, and I spent an entire night in an ER with absolutely nothing wrong with me being convinced I was dying and composing last texts to my loved ones. The most hilarious thing about that was the pill was a Klonopin and the creepiest thing about it was that it turned out to be the same night a friend asphyxiated himself to death, and no it wasn’t a sex thing. He did it on purpose. Anyway I could have saved myself that entire ER trip (although not the aftermath of the suicide) if I’d had a pulse oximeter then, because if you’ve got a punctured lung your SpO2 will not be okay, and if your SpO2 is okay, you do not have a punctured lung. So if you feel like you’re losing your mind, and this is new for you, allow me to welcome you to team crazy. Although I don’t believe, like Thomas Szazs and his associates, that all mental illness is caused by society’s ills and/or a conspiracy of evil psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, it’s obvious that even before the pandemic we humans had made a world that was just too damn hard to live in, even for the most privileged among us, and now it’s harder still and there are some externalities that don’t seem like they are likely to get easier anytime soon, so, yes, everyone is in fact losing their mind. Losing your mind is actually the sanest thing to do under the circumstances, a real-life Catch-22. It will be okay. You can actually survive losing your mind, I’ve been doing it all my life. Come on join me at this tea party and let me tell you what I know about this topic. Yes, if you come on over and sit down at the crazy table you will be implicitly admitting you need help, and yes, that could be hard, but don’t worry, it’s not the hardest part. To the extent that it is hard, by the way, that’s largely because the death cult we call late-stage capitalism requires us to buy into the mythology that we are all independent individ

17 min
12/16/2021

How to be creative when your back's against the wall, bell hooks tribute edition

This is a cross-post from my other newsletter, woe, which you should also subscribe to. I had not intended to send any newsletter this week, and now somehow I’m sending both. Share, subscribe, reply, buy a subscription, spread the word. Thank you. Here you go: It's 10 pm EST, and I already said I wasn't going to send a Woe this week. I've had some intense meetings. My son is just home from college. I am busy preparing a two minute comment to my local school committee on the topic of how, seeing as we are all basically exhausted and all our kids seem to be pretty wrecked by this worldwide disaster we have been enduring together, perhaps we should not complain to our teachers that they are not doing enough for our kids but recognize that those of us still working from home in our million dollar condos should, rather, ask what we can be doing for our teachers. There is no more downhill for this s**t to roll. Everyone is maxed out. We need to support one another, and in this instance that means me showing up for my child's teachers, the way they've been showing up for my kids for years and years now. Anyhow, I did not decide suddenly to send this issue of Woe in order to tell you about the 2 minute public comment I am drafting in support of the teacher's union. Well, maybe I did. I've been giving you many tips about how not to burn out the people around you with your despair. But the reality is that we are all burning out, even the people who started out kind of okay. And what that means for us as individuals and for us collectively as humans, in this very hard time with no end in sight, is that we need to figure out how to do some things that are not so easy, and they are especially not so easy for people who are by nature already in despair. We, humans, we need to figure out how to find creative solutions to problems when our backs are up against the wall. Long-term stress and exhaustion don't lend themselves to expansive, creative work, generally speaking. If you want people not to have the will or the time or the energy to organize to make change, wear them out. Make them fill out paperwork and navigate phone menus and spell their names over the telephone a million times even though they already sent an email with their name clearly spelled in it. Run them ragged with requirements. Tire them out with exhortations to "do more with less" even when there is obviously more available to some, just... not to all. This is a fundamental problem for the individual who is suffering, this exhaustion that leads to an inability to imagine alternatives, and it is a fundamental problem for a society that is suffering too, when we are all too individually tired to imagine alternatives. So the question, then: what helps people be creative when their backs are up against the wall, when they're tired, when they're dispirited, when they are out of ideas, when they are hopeless? The answer to that question is pertinent not only to those of us who were born inconsolable. It is pertinent to us all, in this moment, as we collectively face a series of slow-rolling ongoing minor apocalypses, while continuing to try to keep calm and carry on according to rules that are so unreasonable they will kill us all even before the pandemic does, even before the climate change gets to us all, we'll all just die of existential despair. But we do not have to die of existential despair. There are people who have been teaching about this, writing about this, living it, for a long time now, there are technologies we can use to turn our energies to the work of surviving together in some kind of world worth living for. bell hooks, RIP, was one of those teachers. There are many others. I can add some tricks myself to this bag of miracles, and you probably can too. The time to teach and learn how to do this is now, and the people who need to do it is all of us, yes, even me, even you, feeling like we're barely holding on, can't possibly take a breath and make a change, move something different in the world. We can. We have. We will. *** Last week I was reading Pleasure Activism, by Adrienne Marie Brown. She made a reference in the book to a bell hooks essay I hadn't read before, or had read and forgotten "Love as the Practice of Freedom" , which I then found online and printed out and read. In the essay bell hooks quotes from Joanna Macy's book World as Lover, World as Self, and the words she quotes are these: "The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies." I read them and I thought yes, this is it exactly. The goal is not to push the despair away, it's to turn the energy of our pain, our despair at so much destruction, to turn it so it flows toward creation, so as we grieve we are also joyfully celebrating whatever new world we are bringing into being, us, together, backs against the wall, allowing ourselves to take those breaths and feel that grief and love one another and make something new. That, friends, is the thing I think I'm here to do, and it's why I write these newsletters and it's the sales pitch of the book that I want to make out of the words that I've been writing about this -- a handbook for the panicked, overwhelmed, delusional, hysterical, the exhausted, the hypochondriacal, the suicidal, the self-hating -- a handbook for our most hopeless selves on how to make hope real in the world, for us all. Because if the most congenitally hopeless of us can do it, well, then so can we all. *** Thanks for attending my sermon. I am serious about the book, by the way. It is the thing that I have been talking about for months now, for years, that I couldn't quite explain. If you think this sounds like something you might read or you know an editor or an agent or you want to help me write the book proposal let me know. At the same time, I am self-conscious about the idea that I might have something important to add to this conversation when so many people are all doing this work and have been teaching these things for such a long while now, much better than me. Like, am I saying I have stuff to say that is important in the way the things bell hooks said were important? But then I remembered a thing that bell hooks herself wrote, and I am consoled: "Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’ … No woman has ever written enough.” There is room in the world for every word I have to write that helps to turn despair. I might not believe it in my head but I do believe in my heart that words I write reach people other words didn't reach in ways that other people couldn't have done. All of this matters. Every damn sparrow. Each tired woman laying her head down to rest, taking a breath. We matter. Let me put a tiny spark of hope in your heart today and then take a very long breath in. I have some words on how we can blow on that spark and make it a flame, and I expect they will come, but right now I need to lay my head down and rest. Subscriptions, updates, other projects, etc: If you liked reading this pulverized wisdom tooth of an essay, why not share it? If you hate it, well, I’m cool if you hate-share it too. I need the publicity. If you like the newsletter why not subscribe, and if you really want me to keep writing it, why not pay for your subscription? $5/month or $50/year or $150/year if you think I’m actually super great and have the money to spare. Paying subscribers will get subscriber-only discussion threads and probably some subscriber-only posts, but mainly you get the joy of supporting my work. You can start a new subscription or upgrade your subscription to pay me here: Or, maybe you want to give gift subscriptions to some other techies. Like to all your angry burnt-out techie mom friends, so that they get to read my stuff and I get more money to have the time to write it. It’s a gift all around. Now: I gave a talk at Rubyconf 2021, on debugging product teams. If this sounds interesting and useful, well, good news: I’m trying my hand at making courses and I’m going to be turning this talk into a whole course. Sign up here to be notified about it. Upcoming: Holidays, mostly. But stay tuned, I’m thinking about some more cool ideas for educational content for engineering managers. Engineering Career Coaching: Wondering what the next step in your career should be? New tech lead or manager? Complicated work stuff you don’t know how to resolve? Just want to get overall more effective at work? Need to talk about your exclamation points? I offer bracingly-realistic, always-actionable, strengths-focused and individually-tailored engineering career and leadership coaching; check out this info or email me and ask about it. I am also still offering my free office hours for women and non-binary engineers, 12-2pm EST every Thursday. Sign up here and please share with folks you think could benefit. Unrelated projects: Reminder that I started another newsletter: “Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World” and you can subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/woe It’s a weekly on Wednesdays short newsletter I’ll be offering at least through the end of the year. It’s also sometimes an advice column so if you have a question you’d like answered in Woe then hit me up! Also, 50,000 selfies later, I now do portrait photography and modeling. Get in touch if you’re in the Boston area and you want a portrait or you need a model. Talk to me! I love to hear from my readers so you can always smash that reply button and let me know what you’re thinking. Get full access to Amy Writes Words at www.amywriteswords.com/subscribe

9 min
12/02/2021

Why I'm Finally Renouncing Exclamation Points

Hello it’s me, Amy Newell, engineering leader/mental health advocate/boot fanatic, with another good-enough newsletter issue for you. This issue has been sitting around in various states of readiness for literally months now. Editing it has felt just like the very first wisdom tooth I had to get extracted. The tooth wouldn’t come out, and the dentist was grappling with it for far too long a time, and I was not under anesthesia, and there were all these awful crunching noises as the tooth started shattering under the pressure of the pliers, so at the end of the extraction I was traumatized and very bloody and the wisdom tooth was in pieces. So, I dunno, this wisdom tooth might also have ended up in pieces, you’ll have to decide, but I got no more energy to give to it, so here you go. *** But first, a word from our sponsor: I recently gave a talk at Rubyconf on Debugging Product Teams. The talk is not available to the public yet, but you can check out the slides here. If you want to learn more about debugging product teams, sign up to be notified when the talk is public and also about my upcoming course on the subject. Finally, it’s the most wonderful time of the year (or something) and why not give all your favorite angry mom techies a gift subscription to Amy Writes Words, and a lil subscription for yourself too. Your support means a lot to me and will help ensure that I can keep writing these newsletters every week instead of spending 80% of my waking hours in Zoom and the other 20% putting out various teenager-related fires. Okay, on to today’s topic. *** Today I am formally renouncing my use of exclamation points. This is a big deal, because I have insisted for years that I use so many exclamation points because I am just so damn excited about everything, and not because I’ve been socialized by the patriarchy to use them so that when I ask for things or tell people about things I seem less threatening, as described below: To be fair to me, I am in fact excitable. Here's a classic photo of me being incredibly excited, like, so excited you would think I had just won the lottery or a date with Kate McKinnon where she’s dressed up as her character from Ghostbusters, or free mental healthcare for life, or the opportunity to be a Jeffrey Campbell Shoes brand ambassador: In fact what I have won in this photo from early 2019 is a trip to The Tasting Counter, which, while certainly a great restaurant, is something I could have just bought for myself if I really wanted it. Doesn’t matter. I was really excited. It’s the exact same expression that is on my face in a photograph from my wedding in which Max and I are walking back down the aisle after having wedded, but like, it makes sense to be that excited about getting married. Anyway so yes, I do get excited. And yes, sometimes it makes sense to use exclamation points to express excitement, WHICH I WILL CONTINUE TO DO! Also to express emphasis! Shock! And warnings! And yes, I have been insisting for years that my use of exclamation points is in fact the exact opposite of the usual understanding of women’s use of exclamation points, that it is in fact a flex: But. A few months ago Max asked me to edit a draft email he was sending to our condo association about some window repairs that we needed to get done. He’d written a straightforward email explaining the needed repairs, the quote from the contractors, and the cost breakdown per condo unit. Not an exclamation point to be found, which made sense, because if there are people in the world who get excited about managing and paying for window repairs, I do not know who they are but they are not Max and they are not me and they are not any of the other people we live in the building with. “Hi folks! Hope everyone's enjoying their summers!” I inserted at the front of the email, to get things off to a cheerful and non-confrontational start before we got into the part where people will owe money. I pride myself on my authenticity and yet there I was being inauthentically chipper and it wasn’t even MY EMAIL. I went in and girl-ified someone else’s email. I started remembering all the emails, both in work and in life, that I’d peppered with exclamation points and all-caps and “I’m just really f*****g hyper” energy and I started wondering if perhaps I hadn’t maybe deluded myself a tiny, tiny little bit about why I use so many exclamation points. Like maybe every single one wasn’t completely authentic. This upset me. Authenticity is one of my core values. How can I claim to value authenticity and in fact give a very good impression of being completely authentic and yet use even one exclamation point that is not completely heartfelt? I could go down a terrible rabbit hole at this point, hating on myself, but I won’t. There’s actually a perfectly reasonable way to think about how I can value authenticity and also I nevertheless do not have to consider myself a total fraud just because I’ve had this realization about some of my exclamation points. Fundamentally, that question I asked myself “how can I claim to and yet?” is not legitimate. It’s the rhetorical method of a teenaged bully. Its aim is to catch someone out, to accuse them of fraudulence and hypocrisy, to call them a phony, like Holden Caulfield would. It would be a kind of self-harm to bludgeon myself with the question, a kind of self-harm I am also trying to renounce, along with exclamation points. I can value authenticity and also make strategic choices about how I communicate. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite, it makes me a human. *** Sometimes, however, we believe we are acting authentically and later we realize that some of our choices were unconsciously inauthentic because we unconsciously understood the risk of authenticity in that moment. I believed in my exclamation points. I defended them. But they were also part of an overall and almost entirely unconscious strategy of softening the blow of my assertions, opinions, and directives, of stripping my persona and communication style of anything that might look like an overt display of dominance. Why? I mean, we know why: To the extent that I have had to get things done, convey information, or disagree in the course of my career, I have had to squelch overt dominance behaviors, and every ‘your personality at work’ test that I have taken has suggested that I have been doing that, that each particular workplace I have been in has required me to be less dominant than comes ‘naturally’ to me. And every time in my career that I have failed to do that effectively, that I have left off the exclamation points, and the hedges, and the circumlocutions and the perhapses and the maybes and the I’m-not-sure-buts, I have paid a price. When I have stated the facts as I saw them, plainly, when I have disagreed directly and without apology, when I have offered feedback to anyone at work in any but the most time-consuming, gentlest way possible, when I have advocated for myself — it has cost me. Sometimes it has cost me quite a bit, just like all the research says. I have been punished for it. Do I mean punished directly, or even deliberately? For the most part, no. I mean something subtler. I mean that when I have had to assert myself directly — often because my usual communication strategies were failing me and the issue at hand was one that I couldn’t simply give up on — the result has typically been that I have lost leverage. Maybe I got the thing I was asserting myself to get, and maybe I didn’t, but either way I paid a price. I appeared less likable, more combative, angrier, and less competent. Just like all the research says. White men largely do not pay that price, and women of color pay a much higher one. *** Look, I’m probably paying a price right now, writing directly and without apology about these things. I know it makes me less employable. Who wants to hire such an angry, abrasive woman? So why am I writing about it? I don’t have to pick this battle, I can just keep on using exclamation points even when I’m not excited, keep on hedging. I can stop deluding myself and just accept that my status as a woman in a male-dominated world means that I must strategically police my own words and my tone not simply because, as I wrote a while back, words matter and we should be careful with them, but because if I don’t do so I will pay for it. But the truth is that I’ll probably pay either way, won’t I? *** This is why every “boss edit” or “lean in” piece of advice about how women should communicate in the workplace is so ultimately disempowering. Almost all of that advice places all the burden on individual women to change their behavior (often in contradictory ways). And, it places no such burden on men. It also fails to acknowledge, much less help women think through, the potentially negative impact of actually taking that advice. To exhort women to speak directly but fail to acknowledge the potential costs to them personally is disingenuous. It erases the systemic reality of sexism and misogyny which means that no matter what individual women do, women overall will continue to lose unless we are collectively able to move past these tired rules aimed at individuals, and instead to work in solidarity with one another to address the systemic problems. Look, I’m tired of obsessing about my exclamation points. I want to simply state the facts plainly, as I see them. I want to disagree directly. I want to advocate strongly for myself and also for other people. And I want you to get to see me do it, to see what it looks like. And then I want us together to work toward a future where sometimes we use exclamation points and sometimes we don’t, and sometimes they’re strategic and sometimes they’re not, but we don’t have to f*****g talk about them all the time. We get to talk about more important things. ***

24 min
11/16/2021

How to Talk To Me About Amy Wears Boots: A Primer, for Men

Hi again it’s me, Amy, with a weekly newsletter slash podcast about tech, management, gender, mental illness, and sometimes fashion. This week, what do you do about a problem like Amy Wears Boots, a primer just for men. But first, if you’re reading this on the internet why not subscribe, and if you’re subscribed already why not upgrade to a paying subscription because that’s how you show you love and appreciate all the work I put into this? Okay, let’s move on to our topic for the day. Sometimes men are confused about how to interact with me around my Amy Wears Boots project. I just hit 5,000 followers on Instagram and am building a mailing list with plans to start a membership site that will generate income for the project, so this problem is not going to go away. Actually, when I say that men are confused I mean that most men are not confused, but that they sometimes express confusion about why I get angry about men who theoretically could be confused. I bring this up now because I recently received an email from a recruiter about, ostensibly, career opportunities for me as an engineering leader. It started like so: “Hey Amy - I've just thoroughly enjoyed the last 20 mins taking in some of your internet presence. I confess @amywearsboots took up the largest slice of that time.” I complained about this email to a friend of mine and he was confused. Maybe that guy is just confused, he said. Because, well, you are putting it out there. My friend didn’t mean “you were asking for it.” He really meant “might it not be genuinely confusing?” No, it really shouldn’t be. So okay, let’s get this part straight. Yeah, I post my body on the internet. I’m damn proud of my body and I’m damn proud of the work I put into that project. I’ve explained elsewhere how much I’ve learned from it and how hard I have had to work, and you might think it’s all just thirst trap but if you look into it even the tiniest bit you can see it’s actually a long-running art project through which I explore some really difficult themes: about aging, about gender, about sexuality, about power, about mental illness, about love, and about trauma. Not that this should matter, because people are entitled to share their bodies with the world. Aside from the artistic goals of the project, I like to bring joy to the world, and guess what, humans like to look at pictures of people being beautiful. The fact that I am beautiful on the internet has nothing to do with whether it’s appropriate to hit on me in a recruiting email. *** My friend who thought maybe other men are confused is a good person. I love him. But the men who are problems for me are hardly ever confused. They actually know perfectly well what they’re doing and they hide behind confusion to dodge responsibility. Because other men haven’t experienced the differences between genuine mutual interest (complexity), a one-sided interest that nevertheless respects boundaries, and harassment, they are easily convinced to buy into this confusion defense. The other thing going on is that most men cannot read creep signals the way that women can. To give a very basic example, Max and I were watching an episode of The Wire recently and at one point I said “ugh, that guy’s about to creep on her” and Max was like “really?” and then the guy creeped on her and I was like “didn’t you see how he was standing?” But he didn’t see how the guy was standing because he hasn’t spent his whole life being creeped on and observing other women be creeped on and getting extremely good at reading that data. And hey, I get it. Max is as feminist as they come but the mind does not get good at detecting patterns that are not very important to it, like when a man is standing too close to a woman in a way that is ever so slightly menacing. I understand that it’s hard for well-meaning men to see. If it had been necessary to their survival and bodily integrity to see things they would see them. And they could learn to see them if they chose to devote their attention to it, but if that’s too much work they could also just, I dunno, believe that women see stuff they don’t and it’s not because we’re imagining things. Like, would you tell a mushroom forager that there aren’t any hen-of-the-woods in that forest because you went for a stroll there and you didn’t see them? What the f**k are they selling you then? Either learn to find mushrooms or believe the people who tell you they are there, and for god’s sake don’t tell them there aren’t any mushrooms when they are holding a mushroom in their hand and explaining to you exactly why it is a mushroom. *** Because men don’t generally see what women see they are easily bamboozled by other men into believing those other men are simply confused. Meanwhile we’re not living in a Jane Austen novel, where people are constantly almost just realizing they are in love with each other but then accidentally getting engaged to the wrong person instead. Misunderstandings and confusion do happen but they’re rare and obvious cases, and the rest of the time what you have is a combination of deliberate ignorance, knowing a thing is bad but doing it anyway because you have poor impulse control, and actual malice. All of it hiding behind “that’s not what I meant,” “I didn’t mean to,” and “wow, paranoid much?” *** Let’s go back to this recruiter. Every woman I’ve shown that email to agrees with me that it’s grossly inappropriate. “But, Amy, you do put that content out there.” Yes, that is true. But context matters. If you are emailing me about career opportunities as an engineering leader and you’ve spent any time at all checking out my internet presence then you have about 5 million things that you could lead with that are germane to engineering leadership. If you instead tell me how you just spent 20 minutes “thoroughly” enjoying my Instagram, well, that is a choice. It’s a choice to focus on an aspect of my life that is not relevant to the topic of the email. Even so, there are ways he could have pulled it off. “I love your sense of style,” he might have said. “You take incredible photographs”. “I have some job opportunities in fashion tech that could be up your alley.” He didn’t do any of those things. It’s not an accident. *** Anyways just to eliminate the confusion defense (haha, this won’t really eliminate it, because the harassers weren’t confused in the first place, but let’s pretend), here are some guidelines about things you can say to me about Amy Wears Boots and under what conditions you can say them. Don’t @ me. One: Nothing at all. Nothing is always a great thing to say about Amy Wears Boots, especially if you do not know me. If you do not know me and you are also approaching me about a job opportunity that is related to my work as an engineering leader and not related to anything to do with Instagram, fashion, photography, social marketing, or the Creator economy, nothing at all is the very safest thing for you to say. Two: If you don’t know me, but you’re approaching me about an engineering opportunity where Amy Wears Boots is relevant, such as a fashion, marketing, photography, or a Creator economy business, you can say something like “among many reasons I thought you might be a good fit for this job is that it’s clear from your Amy Wears Boots project that x is of interest to you”. Three: If you don’t know me and are approaching me about work as an engineer and there is no connection to the job opportunity itself it is still probably fine for you to say any of the following about Amy Wears Boots: * “You have a great sense of style!” * “You take amazing photographs!” * “I love your boot collection! I collect (sneakers|beanie babies|pokémon|bowties)” * “You have so much creative energy!” * “You’re so strong.” * “You’ve really mastered that crow pose.” * “I saw you’re learning to roller skate?” * “I can see you have a lot of commitment to this project, it’s been 2 years now!” * “I find it really inspirational.” Four: In the course of a conversation in which we are generally discussing business, it is appropriate to ask me to talk about the business side of Amy Wears Boots. “I’m curious to learn more about your business model, technical choices, and sales and marketing strategies for your Amy Wears Boots project. Would you be willing to share more?” There’s plenty to talk about here. 10 years ago I didn’t really understand why the marketing folks were always asking for landing pages (which the engineering team often had to build from scratch for them, like cavepeople!) and now I’m looking at my landing page stats in ConvertKit like, every day. I have a spreadsheet comparing SaaS products as I gear up toward monetizing the project, and I’m A/B testing email subject lines. I’ve done a ton of user research to find the intersection of what my followers will pay for and what makes sense for me to offer. And I’m busy trying to figure out what my MVP is and what other experiments I want to run to find out what my best strategies are to generate real income. If you ask about the business side, however, you should be prepared to hear some about how payment processors, social media platforms, and other SaaS products make online businesses difficult for sex workers in ways that peripherally impact me even though I am not myself a sex worker. I am spending a lot of time reading the Terms of Service for every platform and product I am thinking of using and I will have to carefully read every single ToS update for any product I use for Amy Wears Boots, even though all of the content I offer is solidly PG-13. If the fact that my art is adjacent to sex work and hence sex work may come up when I talk about it makes you uncomfortable, don’t ask. Five: I

18 min
11/12/2021

Why I did a 180 on remote work

Well, hello, Amy Newell here with another down-to-the-wire newsletter issue. How can I have five thousand ideas, 17 different drafts of essays, and not a single one that feels ready to send? Clearly I need to tune my production process, but what this means for me now is that it’s Friday afternoon and I have to make up something on the fly in the same way that I make a dinner out of random stuff I found in the cupboard. Today’s on-the-fly newsletter topic is… why I went from never wanting to work at an all-remote company to why I now think I’d only want to work at an all-remote company. But first, a word from our sponsor: I just gave a talk at Rubyconf on Debugging Product Teams. The talk is not available to the public yet, but you can check out the slides here. If you want to learn more about debugging product teams, sign up to be notified when the talk is public and also to hear more about my upcoming course on the subject. Okay, let’s talk remote. I spent 2010-2018 at a company where engineers could work remotely on Tuesdays and Thursdays if they wanted to. I liked this a lot, in particular because it meant we bunched up meetings on MWF. Later we had one engineer move away across the country, which generally worked okay but of course sometimes we forgot about him. What I did not like about this policy was all the work engineering leadership had to do to justify it and retain it. And then, by the time I left that company, it had merged with some others and so was in hybrid mode as a result but not really doing it well, because from what I’ve seen hybrid mode is not easy to do well, even in non-pandemic conditions. At that time, in 2018, I still believed that I needed an office to go into every day because I am an extrovert and I liked to meet in person when possible and I also needed the structure of having to go somewhere almost every day in order to propel myself out of bed. Plus I like cheez-its and I didn’t stock them at home. From mid 2018-March 2020 I went into the office almost every day. Sometimes I couldn’t get up till exactly 20 minutes before I had to be across town to a meeting, but then I did it. Then came the great quarantine. From March 2020 through May 2021, well, I learned to structure my day and get things done without having to go to an office, since there was no office to be had. That significantly opened up my options for future work, but I still wasn’t sure I didn’t want to go back to an office. What about the cheez-its? But, like everyone else, the things that were important to me and how I wanted to spend my time shifted a lot as a result of this cataclysm. My cat is getting pretty old and I like spending all day with him. While I wouldn’t like working at the same job as my partner, I do like sharing space with him during the day. I like fitting errands, laundry, and time in the sun on my roof every day. I like not having to waste spoons getting somewhere on days that my spoons are very limited. And, while I am not always pleased to be at home when my 14 year old gets home from school in whatever freaked out state they are in, it’s probably good that I’m around to see it and I can sometimes be helpful. I missed the snacks, of course, but one of the other things that happened during the pandemic is that like many people I thought “wow I have but one life to live and I don’t know how long it may be so I no longer care what other people think of my personal choices.” I can buy myself any snacks I want. What I definitely didn’t like about remote work (under pandemic conditions, in a company that had been inching itself toward hybrid before the pandemic but certainly still had a lot to figure out about remote work) was 8 hours of zooms every day. It felt soul-sucking. So here I am now. I’m mainly doing my own things and spending very little time on zoom. I like that. I mostly want to spend time alone or with the small group of friends and family who are most important to me. This is very different from before. I am doing a lot of work that requires time and focus and creative energy, and it’s much easier and more comfortable to do it at home. So…I don’t want to go back to an office now. If and when I take another role as an engineering leader, I want to work somewhere that has been 100% remote for a while already and knows how to do that efficiently. I do not want my brain to get sucked out of my head via zoom, and I am not particularly interested in solving the problems of a hybrid workplace for a company that is now hybrid but struggling with it, and I do not want to work at an in-person first company where I’d constantly be having to ask for exceptions because of the market realities in engineering hiring. I would want to work at a remote-first company and just get to join something that is already effective. Of course, I remain unsure whether I would like to be employed by someone else at all right now. I have a lot of irons in the fire at the moment (maybe more on that next week) and I guess I’d like to see what pans out and how much income I might be able to generate from some of those projects before I commit most of my brain cycles to someone else’s business. *** There, I did it. I wrote a thing. I can send it. It will be done. I will not get a 0 that will bring down my average for the semester. I will spend some time thinking about how better to close on some of the essays that are lingering. It might be that they linger because the ideas in them are simply not fully baked, and that I just have to let them linger. But maybe I need to do something like Kanban so I’m not allowed to have so many open projects at once. Except that I actually like and need to have at least a few very different things going on at once, that’s my happy place. So we’ll see. Subscriptions, updates, other projects, etc: If you like this post why not share it? If you hate it, well, I’m cool if you hate-share it too. I need the publicity. If you like this newsletter why not subscribe, and now when you subscribe I offer you the option to pay! $5/month or $50/year or $150/year if you think I’m actually super great and have the money to spare. Paying subscribers will get subscriber-only discussion threads and probably some subscriber-only posts, but mainly you get the joy of supporting my work. You can start a new subscription or upgrade your subscription to pay me here: Now: I gave a talk at Rubyconf 2021, on debugging product teams. If this sounds interesting and useful, well, good news: I’m trying my hand at making courses and I’m going to be turning this talk into a whole course. Sign up here to be notified about it. Upcoming: Holidays, mostly. But stay tuned, I’m thinking about some more cool ideas for educational content for engineering managers. Engineering Career Coaching: Wondering what the next step in your career should be? New tech lead or manager? Complicated work stuff you don’t know how to resolve? Just want to get overall more effective at work? Contact me about my engineering career and leadership coaching! I am also still offering my free office hours for women and non-binary engineers, 12-2pm EST every Thursday. Sign up here and please share with folks you think could benefit. Unrelated projects: Reminder that I started another newsletter: “Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World” and you can subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/woe It’s a weekly on Wednesdays short newsletter I’ll be offering at least through the end of the year. It’s also sometimes an advice column so if you have a question you’d like answered in Woe then hit me up! Also, 50,000 selfies later, I now do portrait photography and modeling. Get in touch if you’re in the Boston area and you want a portrait or you need a model. Talk to me! I love to hear from my readers so you can always smash that reply button and let me know what you’re thinking. Get full access to Amy Writes Words at www.amywriteswords.com/subscribe

11 min
11/03/2021

The First Rule of Talking About the Stuff is You Do Not Talk about the Stuff

I’m dealing with some Stuff right now. I do not like this Stuff and I do not want to deal with it. My whole body is vibrating with how much I do not like this Stuff. I am being deliberately obscure about what the Stuff is. It’s Stuff, okay. You don’t always need to know more. I’ve been writing feverishly about this Stuff, but the writing I am doing is not the kind of writing I can ship today, or maybe ever: That I cannot publish this particular writing is itself causing me pain. Here’s Ursula Le Guin, on what happens when there are things that cannot be spoken: [T]he unspoken, as we know, tends to strengthen, to mature and grow richer over the years, like an undrunk wine. Of course it may just go to Freudian vinegar. Some thoughts and feelings go to vinegar very quickly, and must be poured out at once. Some go on fermenting in the bottle, and burst out in an explosion of murderous glass shards. But a good, robust, well-corked feeling only gets deeper and more complicated, down in the cellar. The thing is knowing when to uncork it. I don’t know if I’m fermenting vinegar or fine wine, but I’m sure as hell fermenting something. *** I could finish up some draft about some other topic, certainly. Instead. I could pick something remotely palatable to my audience, for the first time in a few weeks, something a little bit snarky but not too challenging. Something like the essay I wrote about the brokenness of engineering hiring, which has been one of my most popular ones to date. I think that’s because it’s easy for many engineers to relate to. Whiteboarding algorithms is a widely despised interview practice, and not specific to my experience as a woman. When I write about such things, I don’t have to explain why anyone might care about them, why those things matter. Few people question the validity of my experience or the relevance of the topic to their lives. I don’t have to ask anyone to either understand or else, if they cannot understand, simply to believe. To heed me. It is easy to write lots of things that plenty of people already understand, to say things they already agree with. People like to agree. They don’t always want to work hard to understand someone else’s perspective, and a lot of the time they really don’t have to, and so they never do. I could use some agreement right now, I really could, but here I am instead vaguebooking my way through an essay about something I can’t publish an essay about. *** Another option, if I don’t feel like hating on something that’s easy for lots of people to hate: I could talk about my Instagram account. When I talk about my Instagram account that’s popular, I think because it’s a little bit titillating, even when I’m actually talking about things that I’ve learned through having that account. Here you go then, here I am dressed up for Halloween as a Humorless B***h: It’s really all in the facial expression, but it can be difficult to tell from a still photograph whether the expression is Resting B***h Face or Humorless B***h. I do a lot of both. You will have to take my word that this one is Humorless B***h. I would like my word to be taken on many things more important than how to describe the look on my face in this picture. I would like my word to be taken on some of the reasons behind that look on my face, but there aren’t a lot of people available or willing to take my word on that. *** My god, woman, stop vaguebooking, it’s annoying, you might yell. But I can’t. I can’t talk about the Stuff and I can’t talk about anything else, except about what it’s like not to be able to talk about the Stuff. *** Ijeoma Oluo sent out a newsletter issue earlier this week that offered some timely wisdom on the matter of writing about what I will continue to refer to only as Stuff: “Writing may help heal readers, but it will often leave you bleeding harder than you were before.” I read that and I knew it to be true, that to travel back to some hard things that have happened and to write them may leave me bleeding harder than I was before. I asked myself what, then, is my purpose in writing something that can’t be published? Who can I heal with my unpublishable words? Then I remembered that some of my best work has not been publishable. Or was once not publishable and later became so. Became publishable, but only because it existed. If I had not written it down at the time that I needed to write it, it would never have become publishable. I wrote a whole collection of poems about a dead man. Those aren’t ready for the world at large, yet. But I have sent that collection to friends, to some people who knew the dead man, to some people who were interested in reading what I had to say about him and about his death, about the sort of death he had and the ways in which it hurt me. I would like to publish that book someday. Even unpublished, though, it has had, as we say, Impact. I once wrote a love poem in the format of a performance review. I am not sure that will ever be ready for the world, but at least I sent it to its subject. When I think on this, I realize I’ve actually written many things intended only for an audience of one. Those aren’t typically publishable, but they serve the same purpose as writing I publish. My words mean to move someone. Whether that someone is one person in particular or some particular group of people or anyone, everyone — the intent remains the same. Anyways, sometimes one person is all you need to move. *** I’ve spent the last few months urgently writing plenty of words that don’t now seem publishable. I’ve done it because I hope they maybe will be, someday, or because maybe something that is publishable will be born from those words. Or because it is possible to share words without publishing them, and that may be all I need to do. But maybe when I choose to write things that I cannot publish, it’s because I really don’t have any damn choice. Here is Cheryl Strayed as Dear Sugar writing about how she felt when she finished writing her first book: I didn’t know if people would think my book was good or bad or horrible or beautiful and I didn’t care. I only knew I no longer had two hearts beating in my chest. I’d pulled one out with my own bare hands. I’d suffered. I’d given it everything I had. I seem to have an inexhaustible number of extra beating hearts to pull out of my body, like the 500 hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. *** In any case the words I’m writing that can’t be published have been taking up most of my writing time and all of my emotional energy. I can’t write something more palatable right now. This is all I have to give you, this circumlocution. *** And one last thing. I was feeling lonely and defeated about the Stuff, I was feeling heartbroken, and then I remembered that I already knew the balm for this kind of loneliness and heartbreak and defeat. That balm is called solidarity. The words that I’m writing, about the Stuff, writing them won’t heal me. But solidarity might. And solidarity has the potential to do more than heal, solidarity is how you multiply your impact. That’s what the manager in me would say, anyway, but you can go even further if you stop thinking in Business. Solidarity is power, more power than any ordinary person could ever unlock on their own. If I feel lonely and defeated, if I am writing hard words that I can’t say and that won’t heal me, then I need to go in search of solidarity. I cannot be alone writing hard things I can’t say and saying scary things that people don’t want to hear. There are other people saying scary things and other people holding hard things they can’t say, and I need to find a way to be in solidarity with them. I need to feel that solidarity in my body, to counter all my impotent rage and its children: loneliness and despair. *** If the First Rule of Talking About The Stuff is You Do Not Talk about the Stuff, well, I guess maybe there comes a day when I have to break that rule. And when that day finally arrives, I’ll be ready, because I will already have written the words. Subscriptions, updates, other projects, etc: If you like this post why not share it? If you hate it, well, I’m cool if you hate-share it too. I need the publicity. If you like this newsletter why not subscribe, and now when you subscribe I offer you the option to pay! $5/month or $50/year or $150/year if you think I’m actually super great and have the money to spare. Paying subscribers will get subscriber-only discussion threads and probably some subscriber-only posts, but mainly you get the joy of supporting my work. You can start a new subscription or upgrade your subscription to pay me here: Upcoming Talks, etc.: I’ll be giving a talk (remotely) at Rubyconf 2021, on debugging product teams. If this sounds interesting to you just smash that reply button and let me know and I’ll make sure you’re one of the first people to hear when it goes live. (I may also be offering this as a full course! Stay tuned.) Consulting services: I do engineering management consulting and leadership coaching on a limited basis. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more! I am also still offering my office hours for women and non-binary engineers, sign up here and please share with folks you think could benefit. Unrelated projects: Reminder that I started another newsletter: “Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World” and you can subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/woe It’s a weekly on Wednesdays short newsletter I’ll be offering at least through the end of the year. It’s also sometimes an advice column so if you have a question you’d like answered in Woe then hit me up! Also, 50,000 selfies later, I now do portrait photography and modeling. Get in touch if you’re in the Boston area and you want a portrait or you need a model. Talk to m

12 min
10/27/2021

A Cheap Audio Experiment

So, what you have here is a recording of last week’s issue, Amy Writes Words, #20: On Metrics: Part 1 of 3 million. It occurred to me that some of you may prefer to listen to me read my newsletter to you while you do dishes rather than you yourself having to read the newsletter. So I thought I’d experiment. But I’m lazy and the experiment needed to be very cheap. (If you can run a cheap experiment, you should. There’s your engineering wisdom for the day.) This is not good audio quality. I was on my roof and there are a lot of sirens in my neighborhood. I did no post-processing at all. Yes, I’m really that sloppy come the end of October, it’s a miracle I’m shipping newsletters at all right now. Please reply and let me know if you like this and would like more of it and would prefer it with better sound quality and I will think about investing in better equipment and recording inside the closet rather than on the roof. That’s all folks. Good enough is good enough. Subscriptions, updates, other projects, etc: If you like this post why not share it? If you like this newsletter why not subscribe, and now when you subscribe I offer you the option to pay! $5/month or $50/year or $150/year if you think I’m actually super great and have the money to spare. Paying subscribers will get subscriber-only discussion threads and probably some subscriber-only posts, but mainly you get the joy of supporting my work. You can start a new subscription or upgrade your subscription to pay me here: Upcoming Talks, etc.: I’ll be giving a talk (remotely) at Rubyconf 2021, on debugging product teams. If this sounds interesting to you just smash that reply button and let me know and I’ll make sure you’re one of the first people to hear when it goes live. (I may also be offering this as a full course! Stay tuned.) Consulting services: I do engineering management consulting or leadership coaching on a limited basis. Get in touch if you’d like to learn more! I am also still offering my office hours for women and non-binary engineers, sign up here and please share with folks you think could benefit. Unrelated projects: Reminder that I started another newsletter: “Woe: Mental Health Tips You'll Hate From The Saddest Woman In the World” and you can subscribe here: https://buttondown.email/woe It’s a weekly on Wednesdays short newsletter I’ll be offering at least through the end of the year. It’s also sometimes an advice column so if you have a question you’d like answered in Woe then hit me up! Also, 50,000 selfies later, I now do portrait photography and modeling. Get in touch if you’re in the Boston area and you want a portrait or you need a model. Talk to me! I love to hear from my readers so you can always smash that reply button and let me know what you’re thinking. Get full access to Amy Writes Words at www.amywriteswords.com/subscribe

14 min

11 Episodes

Creator

Amy Isikoff Newell
Years Active

2021 - 2022
Episodes

11
Rating

Clean
Show Website

Amy Writes Words

Amy Writes Words

Episodes

A few things instead of a whole-ass Essay

The Book of Life and The Book of Death

Three Icebergs, Two Internet Miracles, and One Mint-Condition Set of Sassy Magazines

The Owl of Hope

Area Woman Reveals Shocking Secret: Admitting you need help not, in fact, the hardest part

How to be creative when your back's against the wall, bell hooks tribute edition

Why I'm Finally Renouncing Exclamation Points

How to Talk To Me About Amy Wears Boots: A Primer, for Men

Why I did a 180 on remote work

The First Rule of Talking About the Stuff is You Do Not Talk about the Stuff

A Cheap Audio Experiment

About

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