I have a difficult relationship with my inbox.

 

Getting my first email address, one that was named after a fandom, felt like a key to the world of the internet. It allowed me to do so much and it let me stay in touch with friends. But since then, that key hasn’t opened doors; it’s locked me in.

 

Before we jump into my relationship with email, I want to set up a bit of scientific context. Specifically, I want to talk about B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments. In these experiments, Skinner famously conditioned rats to learn that when they pressed a button food would be dispensed. But after the rats had learned to press the button, further experiments were done. The button was changed so that it didn’t dispense food every time it was pressed, but rather at irregular intervals. The result was that the rats pressed the button more frequently than when the food came at every push.

 

When it comes to social media and email we are like those rats. We’ve been conditioned to keep hitting refresh for a reward, in the form of likes, comments or contact, that may or may not come.

It became less about the content and more about a constant search for the next dopamine hit. I was playing a fruit machine but instead of a flush of cherries I was getting spam from companies I didn’t care about. I refreshed indiscriminately, in any moment of quiet or anxiety.

 

This wasn’t the world of romantic opportunity we hoped for in You’ve Got Mail. It wasn’t even the efficiency of communication that it had promised in our work. I was a full on email junkie.

 

I want to start breaking the habit, the addiction.

 

My first thought was to go cold turkey. I could probably have managed it for social media, but unlike the people you read about who are able to leave email behind (often because they have assistants or as part of their role as journalists) I’m not in a position to turn my back on email. I also realised that any break, even if I could get away for a week or two, would be temporary. You could sober me up but then as soon as I was back I’d be walking through a digital liquor store every day.

 

So instead of completely cutting myself off from my email, I decided to try to reshape my relationship with it. I wanted to take myself out of the operant conditioning chamber.

 

My first step was to remove the email apps from as many of my devices as I could. Everything personal is now done through the web. That puts one barrier between me and the fruit machine. It also means I get no notifications.

 

I’ve kept my work emails on my work laptop, because it’s part of what I’m paid for, and I’ve kept my work inbox on my phone. But where I’ve had to keep the apps I’ve turned off all notifications, including that little ticking red box that counts all of your unread emails, taunting you with them.

 

My next step was to set up a new address, one that was just for people.

 

This new, more professional email address, gave me two things. First, it brought me clarity. There was no spam, no more constant cycle of emails, no clutter. Second, it had a side benefit of giving me a digital channel I was proud to use to communicate with the world. I’m in the process of growing up online and this felt like finally stepping out of my school uniform.

 

The final step I took was choosing scheduled times to check my email.

 

Rather than checking whenever I felt the itch, whenever I had a moment of boredom, whenever I felt a glint of anxiety that could only be dulled by shine of a message to remind me I was here and in demand enough to be worthy.

 

Since making those changes, I’ve felt my relationship with my inbox become healthier. I’ve been less distracted. I’ve not missed anything important either. I don’t owe anyone an immediate response, and I don’t work in the burning building business so it can all wait until I’m ready.

 

It’s a change that’s still in progress. I’ve still not managed to fully kick the habit, and I’ve not even started on social media yet. But it’s all about those baby steps.

 

I’m not a mouse. I’m a woman and I choose the conditions of my own experiments.

I wrote in my newsletter a little while ago a mini thought piece on how we’re led to believe that to be professional is to be devoid of emotion, to be completely rational and how we’re shown offices are places not capable of containing any strong sensation, and definitely not tears. It was a few rough thoughts jotted down late on a Friday night, but it received such a strong reaction that I felt it was worth expanding upon, and shoring up with research, in a piece here.

Increasingly we’re being told that we need to find careers that fulfil our passions. Work is no longer just supposed to just be about providing the means to have a roof over your head and food on your plate. More specifically, we’re meant to find jobs that suit our specific preferences so well that can’t help but to make us happy, and there are endless guides to get us there.

That branding of the ideal job being one that makes us “happy” is the start of the limiting of emotions in the workplace. We need to be positive about our work, otherwise, foolishly and by our own volition, we’ve chosen a career that doesn’t suit us.

But even if we’ve found that one magical career that will bring us joy 40+ hours a week, often the vetting systems in place actively seek out those who can replace emotion with ‘logic’.

This vetting system is most easily seen in bids for the biggest jobs going, just think of every time the public was told a woman would be too emotional to be president or that a specific woman has modulated their emotions too hard and is thus too “cold” to wield power.

Elena Ferrante writes: “Even today, after a century of feminism, we can’t fully be ourselves”. She explains that not only is female power suffocated but also, for the sake of peace and quiet, “we suffocate ourselves.”

I don’t throw the term ‘toxic masculinity’ around willy nilly but this is it in action if I ever did see it. But displaying emotions at work isn’t just a women’s issue, although it is something more acutely and consciously felt by women. The idea that to be professional is to act in a masculine way and that to be masculine is to restrain one’s emotions is an issue for anyone who experiences a range emotions, which is pretty much all of us.

But we’ve gotten good at it, we’re good at balancing being just emotional enough to show we’re passionate about without being so passionate that it spills out of the prescribed shape of professional passion. In fact, many of us grew up training to do it curating our online selves to be palatable for likes, for financial gain, for potential employers to browse.

But I’m not sure this careful on stage management of our emotions in order to present as professional is good for anyone involved. As we’re asked to bring our whole selves to our jobs, to fail fast, to create personal brands outside of the office and be deeply invested in what we do inside of it, in a world where potential employers browse our social media as well as our CVs, where do we get to stop being on stage and be real? Even if that means being hurt or angry or frustrated?

I’m outwardly, usually, a very calm person but I feel, everything, very intensely. I’m learning to accept that this tendency to care isn’t a bad thing.

I care about what I do. I care about what I do during my day job. I care about what I make on an evening.

I care so much sometimes, heaven forbid, I show it.

In fact, I once even cried in the office because I cared so damn much, because what I was working on affected me. That was a personally terrifying moment, because I knew the invisible boundaries I was transgressing. While my, largely wonderful, colleagues didn’t let that specific moment phase them. I have also been asked to be cautious with the more emotional aspects of how my partner and I presented our research in the past and I’ve asked a number of times if I could “handle” my work after showing any moment of vulnerability.

A couple of months ago, after a lot of work in drafts and redrafts I lost a freelance job I was really excited about. It had felt like a perfect fit, a project I cared about in a style I loved, plus they reached out to me. But, in the end, they decided to go in a different direction. If I was being “a professional” about it all I would have just brushed it off. I would have cut my losses and been grateful for my cancellation fee. I would have rationalised their decision, leant from it, and put it into practice for the next job.

That’s not what I did because I was sad. It hurt. I was disappointed. I was frustrated.

That doesn’t make me any worse at what I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t have wallowed, but it’s part of life.

The idea that between the hours of 9 and 5 we shouldn’t feel, or show our feelings, is so bizarre. It’s genuinely mind boggling. We’re human all of the day not just when we’re at home.

But what does it mean to be emotional in a professional setting? While I without doubt stand alongside Jennifer Palmieri, the former head of communications for Hilary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, in the belief that “it’s our world and we should be able to cry in it if we want to”. I want professional, and political decisions, to be made with an empathetic consideration of the facts at play. But how do we strike that new balance and importantly how do we open up our workplaces to human decision making?

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin is the first book I’ve ever read from start to finish on my phone. In a bid to find a reading groove that works for me I’ve been trying out new reading media. By about half way through this one, I was actively looking for any chance I could to pick up my phone, not to scroll blindly through Twitter, but to read. Anything that gets me looking forward to my tube ride is pretty darn powerful, let me tell you.

The Immortalists follows the story of the four Gold children who, in New York’s Lower East Side in 1969, venture out to see a fortune teller to hear the day they will die. It toes the line between page turner and thought provoking depth brilliantly. Essentially Chloe Benjamin asks her readers “If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?” Then she gives them a story which is “dazzling family love story and a sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth” that “probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next” to make the question a little more real and a little more visceral to ponder.

Benjamin has a way of making what could be ordinary lives feel extraordinary and completely compelling. It’s a book that can make you want to get on the Victoria line in rush hour. This is particularly impressive because you know exactly how the story and in fact each section of the novel will end as they each include the death year of the sibling whose story are about to follow.

I won’t give anything more than what the blurb offers about each of the Gold’s stories so you can enjoy them in full.

Golden boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel struggles to maintain security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

I wanted to riff a little on the idea of tarot and predictions as well as mortality in this alternative cover design.

Klara’s story was the one that engaged me most in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that we’re completely different. I could never imagine myself clinging to a bit of metal with my teeth and falling from a great height with only the strength of my jaws to protect me in the name of magic. But I think hers is the reaction to impending death that would most closely mirror my own. That said, I could understand and empathise with each of the Golds despite them all approaching the same subject in such contrary ways

These wider themes of death and family ties are woven throughout the stories as you start to see the impacts of the prophecy on each sibling’s choices. But they really come to a head in a more overt way in the final section of the novel, where Benjamin stops having her characters ask about death but about life with Varya and her turn to scientific research. That contrast, to being with life at the end of a story, especially when you know exactly how it will end, is what really elevated The Immortalists for me.

This is one I’d recommend to anyone who loves a good story. That’s how much I enjoyed it. Each of the Gold’s stories is more compelling than the next and as I closed the final pages I found myself considering what death means to me in a slightly different way.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • The four Gold children have very different reactions to finding out when they’ll die, what would you change in your life if you’d visited the fortune teller?
  • Which character, and section of the story, did you engage with the most? Do they align with your own ideas about death?
  • How are the themes of family and death interwoven?
  • The Immortalists begins in 1969, if the Gold’s had been children today how would their lives have been different?
  • With fortune tellers and magicians as major characters, The Immortalists, seems to have at least one hand in a world of more spiritual prediction. What difference would be made if the prediction had come from the fortune teller of today, AI?

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • This short review from The Observer claims The Immortalists remains a boundlessly moving inquisition into mortality, grief and passion.
  • For Vox, Constance Grady focuses in on the siblings at the heart of the novel.
  • Fellow author, Jean Zimmerman, says “The reader will likely be thoroughly taken by the world of the Gold siblings, in all its shades of brilliant color. It’s not a totally comfortable realm, since we know all too well how this tale’s going to end, but getting there is lovely” in a review for NPR.
  • Read Chloe Benjamin’s own thoughts on the novel and her writing process in this original essay for Powell’s.

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

  • Chloe Benjamin’s The Anatomy of Dreams
  • Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion
  • Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends
  • Elena Varvello’s Can You Hear Me?

“It keeps me out of trouble.” That’s my standard response whenever someone brings up this blog or my creative side projects more generally.

It’s largely taken as a noncommittal shrug off, a way to accept the interest without having to justify what I make any further. After all, what trouble could I, a blue tick verified square, get into? A big night for me is a glass of wine and taking myself out to the movies.

But there is some truth in the idea that making keeps me out of trouble because making keeps me sitting with my own thoughts too long. If you’re busy you’ve got something other than you (in my case many) worries.

My break from (read reduction in) my creative work over January started to get me thinking about who I would be without the making. What would I do with my time if I just worked 9-5? What other interests would I have? What else would I prioritise? How would I define myself?

The desire to make things is a deep-seated part of my character. As a child, I would set myself holiday craft projects – lego and papermaché spinning music box anyone? I got more fun out of whatever repurposing packaging a gift came in than I did playing with the toy itself.

It’s a character trait that I amplify. It’s one I’m proud of because I’ve worked at it. It’s also that’s sort of come to eclipse the others because I’ve spent so much time on it.

That’s not a bad thing. But who wants to just be one thing? I’m not sure I do. I’m not sure I’m confident enough in that one thing to hang my hat on it either if I’m completely honest with you.

So who would I be without my making?

Well, first off, I guess, I would be defined by my day job. I’m a user researcher.

But that’s just more doing, just in a more corporate, codified, conspicuously accepted form.

So who would I really be without the making?

I’m not sure.

I’m sorry if that’s an anticlimax. But did you really think I was going to be able to define the essence of my character in just one little blog post? Psssh.

That said, I’m not going to leave you with a big ol’ question mark. Here are a few of the questions I’m currently trying to work my way through in the hopes that I’ll come to some sort of an answer of who I am, or at least who I think I’d like to be.

  • What are the qualities that keep you making? Are you ambitious or spontaneous or methodical or hardworking? Are you highly visual or tactile?
  • What are your best qualities? Are you bold? Are you kind? Are you stubborn?
  • What are your worst? Are you timid? Lazy? Is stubbornness your weakness rather than your strength? Why are those your worst traits, could they be your assets too?
  • What are the qualities your friends think are key to your character? Would they say you’re generous? Tough? Empathetic? Funny?
  • What do you value? Are you all about honesty or openness? Do you value things or experiences or relationships?
  • If you had to dedicate the rest of your time and leave all of your earthly possessions to a single entity or pursuit what would it be?

I’m sure there’s a lot to us all beyond those qualities too. But they’re a start. They’re a start to reframing yourself as valuable and overflowing with interesting qualities without having to make. That way when you do pick up your tools you’re doing it to make all of those quirks into something new, rather than making to stay out of trouble, out of your own mind.

 

I’ve written a fair amount about self-care, and what it means to me, on this blog over the years. As the concept of self-care out in the world has spread and shifted and morphed so have my thoughts on it and how it’s discussed.

Right now, I can’t shake a looming fear I have around the rhetoric that’s currently getting tied up with self-care.

I think when I first wrote about self-care it came at a moment culturally, and personally, where so many people had become so caught up in performing for others and serving stereotypes that weren’t attainable that we needed to be reminded to stop and look after ourselves in whatever form that took. I found comfort in cooking and walks in the park, in owning, and not feeling guilty about my love of cheesy tv, in dancing with my headphones on.

Then as self-care grew and became something of a cultural zeitgeist in and of itself, rather than just a response to tiredness it became commodified. Everything that’s “cool” becomes commodified, it’s just the world we live in. Every brand and their dog was selling us something to help us look after ourselves that little bit better, as part of what is now a billion dollar industry.

Now as the softest parts of self-care have become commercialised from bubble baths to boxes of individually wrapped snacks, there’s a new edge creeping into how we talk about self-care.

Increasingly I’m seeing on social media is variations on the following statement.

The world doesn’t owe you anything so you don’t owe the world anything in return. You’ve got to look after yourself, that’s the real self care.

The use of the word owe rattled around in my brain for a while. It’s a term that’s been used in conjunction with moral philosophy for a while. The Good Place has certainly popularised T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. But there’s something that feels more sinister underlying the word, because its most common use is financial.

To owe (verb): have an obligation to pay or repay (something, especially money) in return for something received.

When coming from a generation who grew up in the midst of a financial crisis caused by the selling of bad debt and huge personal loans, the idea of self-care freeing us from a huge obligation we have to repay sounds wonderfully freeing. Who would want to walk around with the burden to repay every kindness we are shown.

Equally, there seems to be a desire to shake the language of being owed. Young people have for centuries been accused of being entitled, but it’s something that seems to be felt particularly acutely today. We can’t afford houses because we don’t work for them, because we’re too busy eating avocado toast. So in accepting responsibility for our own care in its entirety we may be seen to be shaking some of those criticisms.

We are not owed and we do not owe.

It makes sense to me. But it also terrifies me because care doesn’t need to be transactional. Love isn’t transactional. It’s not even always reciprocal. But it is shared.

To take on the burden of all of our own care isolates us from being looked after and we need to be looked after sometimes. As Hugh Grant taught us in About a Boy, no man is an island. It’s as true today as when Hugh said it with his foppish hair in 2002. Whether it’s your mother’s cooking, a friend’s shoulder to cry on, or just a hug after a hard day sometimes we need someone else, and that’s okay. In fact it’s more than okay.

We can look after ourselves. We can be alone and thrive. But accepting care from someone else isn’t a debt.

As soon as we mark out self-care as being our only solution to being emotionally debt free, we create, as a consequence, the care of others as a transaction which comes with obligations.

Self-care is brilliant, it’s important, it’s essential even. But self-care shouldn’t be all we have to sustain ourselves. It’s essential but it isn’t enough.