My Formerly Hot Life (18 page)

“Hey, guys,” I said. As soon as I spoke, all three of them swooshed their heads 180 degrees away from the computer
toward me, seemingly startled. They wore identical half smiles and wide, surprised eyes.

“Sorry—does anyone have a straw?” One scooted to her desk and another fumbled in drawers—a bit too solicitously, in my view. I glanced at the screen, and noticed, underneath a few windows with legitimate-looking documents and websites in them, one web page with rows of shoes peaking out. It was obviously Zappos. If we were in a silent movie, there would be an organ chord heralding the moment of discovery that just took place.

The thing is, I couldn’t care less. Those young women worked like Oompa-Loompas well into the evening, whereas I had long since realized that there was very little that couldn’t wait until the next morning, or come home with me at 5:30 if truly critical. I would never have begrudged them a little personal time at work. I was a bit … not stung, exactly, but surprised. They were hiding Zappos from me, of all people? Surely they’d seen the blue, black and white Zappos boxes arriving almost monthly at my office! I said nothing. If I had spoken, the only thing I would have said was “Cute boots,” because they
were
cute, but I didn’t want them to have to stammer an unnecessary explanation. I got a straw, and went back into my cave.

As I ate lunch, I thought about it. I realized I couldn’t remember the last time they opened their clusters to include me in their conversations about recalcitrant boyfriends or their favorite reality shows. We had a nice rapport, and they seemed to feel comfortable speaking their minds about
work matters around me, but clearly, I was not one of them. When had
that
happened? The fact that I wouldn’t have minded if they ordered shoes from their desk was completely irrelevant. The point was, they saw me as someone who
might
mind, and that’s what put me in a different class of workplace denizen. Just as my tween and teen nieces and nephews look at me as a “cool” adult but with narc potential, I had become a “cool” boss, but a boss nonetheless.

It didn’t seem too terribly long ago that I was one of those women, shiny, taut-skinned and eager to please, striving with a smile, even as I was outrageously underpaid. When I was 22 and an assistant at a magazine, I smuggled toilet paper from the ladies’ room home in my purse each week, in part because I was broke, and also because I felt somewhat ill-used. But that was as subversive as I allowed myself to be. Otherwise I was a good puppy, volunteering for the extra-credit projects and laboring over a six-word caption for half a day, grateful for the opportunity to do so.

The captions quickly became blurbs and then stories and features, but over the years my attitude remained the same. I was the goodest girl among the good girls magazine publishing tends to attract. I never said no, no matter how silly or doomed to fail I could foresee a project was, and I was conscientious in the extreme. This all made me very successful, if you define success in terms of raises and promotions and TV spots and parties and making a name for oneself relatively young.

Most people would define success that way. I certainly did, but in the last decade or so I realized that definition was not entirely suiting me. The rumblings of a shift began when I was around 31, and the second-in-command at
Glamour
magazine. We were closing (that’s when all futzing over fonts and facts ceases and the pages of a magazine leave the building one by one to go to the printer), and it was a wicked closing—some stories had come in late, some had legal problems and our editor-in-chief had made countless last-minute changes, which meant that a large crew of us were working late nights. I caught a glimpse of myself from above, as if I were not me, but me looking at a nannycam video of me. What I saw was pretty gross.

There I was, my hair frizzy and twisted up with a pencil, circles under my eyes, scarfing sushi in the back of a Town Car at midnight on my way home from the office for the third night in a row. The corporately funded Dragon Roll had been on my desk since seven, when those of us working late had ordered in. I had meant to eat it, but every time I was about to snap the takeout chopsticks apart, a page proof would land on my desk or someone needed me to weigh in on a decision. I’d hop up and put productivity and good nature before my own growling tummy. That resulted in me, five hours later, being driven home in a luxury company car, one in which Anna Wintour herself, the sleek and coiffed editor of
Vogue
, might have sat in earlier in the evening. I was dripping soy sauce on the sushi from a plastic packet, trying not to splash it on the plush leather upholstery.

Behold, the lowest moment of my fabulous career as a glamorous magazine editor: The raw fish was at room temperature. I knew I should chuck it. I gave it a sniff. It smelled OK. I paused. I was so ravenous that, yes, I ate it, forcing from my mind’s eye all images of the microscopic larval worms that might be squiggling through the little slabs of tuna. There was a tiny, self-protective part of my psyche shouting inaudibly like the Who to Horton: YOU’RE AN IDIOT! DON’T EAT THE FISH! ANNA WINTOUR WOULD NEVER EAT THE FISH! I could barely hear it then. I think that whispering speck of wisdom and dignity was secretly hoping I’d spend the night bent over the toilet puking my lungs up so I would have to take the next day off.

I didn’t get sick, but something clicked that night, like a light switch turning off, and for the first time, the phrase “work-life balance” felt meaningful to me. I knew I had to dial it back, and thought that simply meant working less and leaving earlier. And I did so as often as I could bring myself to. Whenever I lapsed into disgusting habits borne of overwork I’d mentally recite my new mantra:
Anna Wintour wouldn’t eat the fish
, and that kept me on track. To an extent.

Setting limits and saying no to work proved terribly difficult for me, and in the process of trying to live saner I slowly realized why: I believed—despite the awards I’d won for my writing and editing and the fact that I was sought after in my field—that the only reason anyone kept me around was because
they liked me. Some irrational part of me felt that if my relentlessly good attitude soured or if I had a bad day, I would be out on my keister. It was absurd and there was zero evidence for the theory, but that’s how I’d operated for years. In retrospect, I cannot believe how much of my success at work I attributed primarily to my personality.

Of course, it never hurts to be liked. If an employer has to choose between two people with identical abilities, the one who is perkier, more compliant, works until nine and who keeps a bowl of M&M’s on her desk has the edge over the surly, resentful one who rolls his eyes and heaves great sighs when charged with a task. But the problem with the extent to which I took being liked was that if most of my value was in how others felt about me personally, I was at the mercy of their opinions. Following this logic, the quality of my work (which, after all, was what I was being paid for) meant very little. I knew I was talented, but not enough, I thought, to permit me to be human.

Anyone who has ever watched
Dr. Phil
could deduce that I had issues with authority growing up—more specifically, abandonment issues, which is probably why I felt like I had to be a perfect little pom-pom girl at the office or I’d be out peddling matches on a cold winter’s night. But these days, perhaps because I’ve been The Man at work (though I, too, am working for The Man every night and day) and at least theoretically an authority figure at home, those issues no longer play themselves out in the workplace. My superiors at work are just that—my superiors at work, people who, by
dint of the various choices they made and their ability and experience, are in the position to get me and others to do their bidding. It’s like when my twin girls play house, and one is the older sister and the other the baby—they agree to certain roles and abide by them. They don’t get all twisted up about the unfairness of it all, because it’s really just a game, and they go back to their old relationship when it’s over. These days, work is something of a game—one that, between nine and five or six, I take as seriously as those dark-souled guys who played Dungeons & Dragons in junior high, but a game nonetheless. When I’m the boss, which I have been on and off over the years, I feel that Level III Grand Wizard Overlord, or whatever, is my role for the moment, not my entire identity. It makes me less intense about the whole career thing.

Just so you know, the sushi revelation was hardly sweeping, and did not instantly turn me into a wiser, more Zen person who took excellent care of her physical and emotional health. Even today, I sometimes sit and write until my butt falls asleep and I have to stand up until it stops tingling. Praise from a boss still warms me and makes me feel secure. But gradually I became less invested in other people’s opinions, in a good way. In caring less about how I’m perceived, I follow my own instincts, rather than aiming for what I think would please, which means I often do better work. It sure beats living in self-imposed insecurity. Through finding that I didn’t get shit-canned if I showed up unprepared to the occasional meeting or opted out of a project entirely, I
began to know—really know, not just intellectually—that my worth at work isn’t so tenuous.

I am still occasionally surprised that no one has noticed that my people-pleaser button is permanently broken. There are days when I feel as if I’m slacking off, or that my head is back at kindergarten drop-off, where my daughter Vivian wouldn’t let go of my hand, and no one notices or cares. It just reinforces the fact that my expectations of myself when I was younger were off the charts. Now not only can I state my opinion with the confidence that I know what I’m talking about, but I have leeway to be outwardly grumpy, petty and exasperated every so often, which is critical to my mental health. I am no longer capable of keeping a lid on negative emotions indefinitely.

Oh, and I can afford toilet paper now, the good kind, not the scratchy, one-ply commercial-issue kind.

Having other demands on my time, such as a family or a compelling interest in things other than work, which you’re more likely to develop as you get older, further complicates the life-balance issue. It’s a toughie, and the “you can have it all” line of crap that women my age grew up with doesn’t help. Next to the block-print letters “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL!!!” (three exclamation points, always three) on the banner waved at us by our parents and popular culture and the commencement speaker at our graduation, there is an almost microscopic asterisk. When you find its mate at the bottom of the flag, there is a list of caveats, written in mouse print, that is as long as my arm.

When I had my daughters six years ago, I did manage to have it “All” for a couple of years (the intense, high-octane job; the husband; the rewards of parenthood and the gym membership) and I’ve never been so miserable. Having it “All” turned me into a guilt-wracked, short-tempered zombie with a dried-up raisin for a brain.

Here’s an example of how having it “All” can turn you into someone you hate: One winter morning, my husband and the girls and I were in the elevator of our apartment building, rushing out to preschool drop-off. After that, I was to shoot uptown on the train to my office, along the way grabbing breakfast and dropping off prescriptions and buying baby shampoo and diapers to schlep home that evening, and my mind was churning with all I had to do. Paul was holding Sasha, red-faced and dripping with boogers, still crying over a toy I said she couldn’t bring. I had Vivian, bloated to twice her size in her pink down puffer jacket, who was clutching a waffle with peanut butter, and making little brown handprints on my (beige!) shearling coat. Sweat ran down my lower back into my waistband, I had to pee and my head was throbbing because I hadn’t had my coffee yet.

The elevator stopped on another floor, which, in my crabbiness, made me inordinately annoyed—as if it were my private express elevator—and then made me feel selfish and guilty for feeling that way. A well-meaning, elderly neighbor got on, and smiled, looked at the drippy Sasha and a peanut–butter covered Vivian and evidently saw this as the
perfect moment to say, “Enjoy every minute with them while they’re young, because they get older so fast!”

I seriously wanted to punch him, although of course it wasn’t his fault. Tone-deaf as his comment was (I don’t know any parent who would have enjoyed that sticky, screechy elevator ride), it shined a white-hot spotlight on the fact that I wasn’t even enjoying the pleasant, loving, truly joyous moments as much as I might have if I hadn’t been exhausted and driven witless by too many details swimming around my malnourished, anxious brain. I walked around all day, every day, feeling thick with guilt, remiss and impure, as if anything I did, no matter how necessary or worthwhile, was stealing time from something else I should have been doing. It wasn’t that anyone—my kids, my bosses, my husband—was demanding more of me than they had a right to. It was all just too much.