I came home and my tamagotchi died
Dear Emberly, Thank you for wanting to start this blog with me. Selfishly, I asked to encourage you to write more, because the small snippets of writing I saw a few years ago I quite enjoyed. There is no pressure to respond to a letter right away, or even at all. You can write about whatever it is that you want, and if you want to format your text a certain way, there is a language called Markdown that is quite easy to pick up. Of course, you don't have to use any of that at all. I think Bearblog is a very intuitive platform. You will pick it up quickly, I imagine. For the sake of our identities do be careful about the personal details shared, locations, pseudonyms, dates, things like that.
It has been a very long week at work. I end my internship at what used to be my "dream job", and has been for probably the past three years now. But anytime there is a dream for something, there is potential for disappointment. Growing up I wanted to work at Google because it felt like this fantastical, heavenly place where you got to innovate and create important things for the world like search or better gps navigation. That era of innovation is gone, and the internet is now consumed by robots. No, it was not an internship at Google, but rather a quite prestigious place where if you heard someone had worked there, you would say, "well, they must be quite smart." I got a very "average" performance review but turned things around at the end, after the performance review and absolutely crushed the end of internship presentations. I found that this place to work, is just another place to work. We are all brought there, regardless of it is listed as "some amazing place to work" by "whatever list you can probably pay your way to get onto" because we want money. If it's not money, it's something. It's escape from our boring families, maybe our feelings, maybe something else that plagues the human condition. It's been a cool job, I got to learn very relevant skills, and I built a tool that I think will have great impacts in certain circles.
I had been bringing my tamagotchi, Miley, to work this week as a little bit of sanity from the outside world. I've been thinking of the show "Severance" a lot lately, where the main character has this chip implanted in his brain and when he walks into work his "outtie" self loses consciousness and his "innie" self takes over, and neither his personal self nor his work self has memories of what the other did. He is "severed" and it's a controversial topic in that show's world... It's a great show. I have watched the two seasons that are out now and have considered getting it on blu ray. But I watched it before I started this internship. Now, I tried to watch the first episode again. It hit a little too hard. You park your big, grayscale car into a big, gray parking lot for some big, gray buildings and you walk into one of these buildings to the gray carpet, the gray tables, the white walls, and the gray bathrooms. The chairs are either black or gray. There might be some bright "energy giving" red somewhere. Dying plants around that need to be watered. Maybe a fish tank. Square offices, some decorated, some not. It's not home.
I was having a rough internship. Very rough, I was incredibly burnt out this summer and got very little support at work for it. So, my performance suffered. I was speaking to another coworker who explained that some folks really are not personable, that they are there "for the glory" because work is their lives, and they wouldn't advocate for me to get a full time spot. I was mistreated by these folks because of my burnout, which made me question if I even wanted to work there anyway. The top performers on the team were also the most emotionally flat. He told me to "sever" myself as I talked about the show, and that what motivates him to come to work despite some of the toxicity is that he is trying for a baby with his wife and wants to provide for his family. And it's a better place to work than most, and the job market is rough right now.
Miley provided much needed distraction at work here and there. I did figure out how to turn off the beeping (INSERT DIRECTIONS HERE). She reached year 5, an accomplishment I felt proud of when just the previous week she had woken me up in the middle of the night, at 1AM because I had set the clock on, and in my frustration I left her in the basement to sleep in her own shit. One morning I felt particularly rushed and frazzled, so I left her at home. I had probably worked a 12 hour day that day. I went to the Dunkin’ Donuts near work in the morning, got the $6 meal deal of a black iced coffee, hash browns, and a bacon egg and cheese bagel sandwich. Basically, super processed food, not the “real” stuff. Just whatever they could thaw from a freezer that kept incredibly well, I could imagine. But it was enough fuel to get me through the workday, just plain calories, a “treat” for myself which in reality was destroying my body. I got the $6 meal deal at least for a week straight, it felt like. After having a black iced coffee in the morning, in the afternoons I would get a Celsius from the cafeteria vending machine, and whatever food was available in the employee cafeteria.
The day I left Miley home, I came back and she had died. I had forgotten to pause her. I didn’t have her for any sanity that day. And admittedly, I felt sad. Should you feel sad over a piece of beeping plastic? I guess it feels a little bit ridiculous, and perhaps I’m reading too far into it, but really, Miley’s (second) death told me that I brought my whole self to work and left no room for anything else. Work got everything. Work got all my thoughts. Work got my health. Work took away the time I used to take to exercise or do art. It felt like it was taking everything from me. Living away from my husband didn’t help. I specifically moved to take this internship, because they offered it to me again and because of the “prestige.” I still haven’t reset Miley, I’m not sure when I will.
The internship ended and they didn’t offer me a job anyway, citing my many technical shortcomings, making no mention of the burnout at all. I felt I should have gotten an offer because I took their feedback about where I was struggling, and turned it all around and gave a fantastic software demo at the end, but it was not enough. What they want then, I don’t know. A robot. Someone that doesn’t bring their whole selves to work. I was treated worse by some of my coworkers when I opened up about being burnt out, when I was tricked into thinking that this was an environment where I could do so. “We’re different from everyone else.” - says every workplace, ever.
This letter is going to sit unfinished because I’ve been meaning to get started on this blog for days. So here it is, unfinished. Just to get started. Just to say “it’s good enough.”