Survival is Existing

Yes, I survived - but it wasn’t neat. The truth, it turns out, doesn’t care.

When I found myself crying at work dinners and getting lost in terrifyingly dark thoughts, it wasn’t enough to get help. I raised the white flag only after mentally crafting the entire redemption arc: I’d be the leader who takes a medical leave, turns her frown upside down, and returns with jazz hands to her former kool aid-chugging glory.

I joined Facebook 16 years ago, as a 21 year old hourly-paid employee, and was a director by 30. My performance history includes superlative after superlative after superlative rating, promotions, equity awards. I’d built a rocket ship with what I thought was emotional astuteness (spoiler: intellectualization of emotions) and courage to go against the grain (spoiler: autism). I was successful and successful and successful until I was suicidal.

My suicidal urges could only square with my role as a corporate show pony for resilience if I returned as an example that you, too, could prioritize yourself and recover so that you, too, could return and reprioritize the company.

After a year of medical leave, still in intensive treatment, I was laid off – I wouldn’t return, I’d write no company memo about resilience. A year later, I reach for paper scraps and scribble ideas as they come to me, like, “what if women didn’t need to be resilient to succeed?”

It’s been months of my fingertips grazing the keys, of my pen hovering just above the lined page – I know that I want my experience to help others, but I struggle to wrangle stories that won’t be shoved into a tight, tidy corral.

Watching a corporate show pony prance back to her post fits the narrative; a middle-aged woman who has clearly seen some things, stumbling like Moses coming down from the mount, mumbling in mixed metaphor about mares led to pasture– or glue factories– doesn’t.

Yes, I survived - but it wasn’t neat. The truth, it turns out, doesn’t care.

My survival story expands like an almost-murder-mystery; scraps of paper, photos on a wall, connections marked with string. String labeled with phrases like “the double empathy problem” or “unchecked corporate power,” or “social-emotional learning in schools,” even “the health insurance industry’s stake in the medical gaslighting of women.”

Surviving doesn’t mean I’m back to my former self; surviving means she’s dead. I don’t operate at the capacity I used to, and I probably won’t again. But, surviving means exploring new capacities, it means rebuilding a human (me!) from the ground up, with novel ingredients like self compassion and self acceptance. It means going to occupational therapy at 37 years old to learn how to meet my basic needs, it means another round of trauma treatment, it means saying no to 3 invitations out of 4. Surviving requires me to recognize there’s more to me than what pops into a Zoom room, and it requires being okay with anyone seeing it differently.

The experience of taking part in Facebook’s transformation from a startup in Palo Alto to Meta, the trillion dollar company with 3.5 billion active users was the opportunity of a lifetime. I got to partner with, coach, learn from, know, and be known by some of the most intelligent, impressive, passionate people from around the world. The strongest emotion is gratitude, but it’s not the only one.

Surviving requires confronting the ways I’ve been harmed, and then of course the ways I harmed others with misguided guidance, with a narrative of me doing it all, succeeding wildly, with full faith in company -. I bedazzled blinders before asking what they were obscuring, like the way I braided my own lead, the way I saddled so many people I loved – surviving means seeing it clearly now, surviving means doing what I can to make it right.

Survival meant saying no to a severance agreement that would’ve required self abandonment. Survival is speaking out, especially when my story challenges narratives that uphold systems of power.

That redemption arc promised a clean ending, an answer. Survival offers something better than an answer, survival offers the chance to chase the truth.

Survival is finally, finally existing.