Why Am I Doing This To Myself???
I'm building again. But this time, I refuse to burn out. How do I know that? Because you're gonna help me.
I told myself I’d never build again.
It was August 6th, 2022, and I was in the middle of a mental breakdown, the third one of my adult life. The first happened when I was 18, the second when I was 25, and the third, at age 31, soaking wet and shivering in my tiny Brooklyn bathtub. There, a sense of overwhelm hit me in sharp waves, rolling in and over me all at once. I felt like I was melting into the water and couldn’t get a grip on my thoughts. My mind felt like it was tied to an electric fence, sadness and doubt zip-zapping faster than I could process, but my body felt numb. Immobile. I had a stress rash on my neck that wouldn’t go away. I was waking up nauseous on and off for three years, puking bile into the sink. I felt so confused and ashamed: I should be happy. I should feel free. And lucky, and light, and joyful, and proud. What's wrong with me?
I had just sold my 8-year-old company, Bulletin, only one month prior, and within a whirlwind 72 hours, I paid off my $40,000 in student loans, tucked a nice chunk of change into the S+P after two decades of intense financial uncertainty, leveled up my healthcare, bought a celebration purse, and hit “send” on a press release alerting ‘the world’ that I’d done the impossible. In an environment where only 1.8% of women get venture financing* , 9 out of 10 startups fail **, and you find yourself pivoting 3+ times, selling your company should feel like a massive win, and you’d think the high would hold for a little while. I dreamed and pined for this outcome for nearly 3,000 days, and was sure that once I “landed the plane,” I’d finally feel safe, calm, and maybe even a little happy???
But that’s not what happened.
I still felt empty. And lifeless. And somehow, both perpetually stressed and impossibly tired. I felt like someone shoved a vacuum hose up my ass and sucked out all the sparkle. If I closed my eyes and imagined my organs, everything looked gray.
I felt like someone shoved a vacuum hose up my ass and sucked out all the sparkle.
I say “still,” because I’d been wrestling with these feelings of depression and anxiety and shame and fatigue for years. By 2019, I was writing everything down: little notes to myself in my diary, or on the Notes app of my phone, detailing everything from severe mental fog, to chronic paranoia, to a persistent sense of inadequacy. The biggest symptom, I’d say, was the inability to lock into the present. I was fixated on mounting “what-ifs” about my future, which made me feel anxious and afraid. My negative thoughts would quietly pull me apart, regardless of whether I was vegging on the couch with my (then) boyfriend, basking in the sun on the beach, rinsing out Tupperware or walking the dog. I was living in my head, and it was fucking crowded up there. It was so crowded, I never made room to ask myself if I was happy, or what made me happy. I didn’t believe that I deserved to feel joy. I wrote so feverishly, I think, because I thought that seeing my pain on paper would shake me awake and force me to finally do something about it.
For years, I did nothing. Until that fateful day in the bath. For some reason, that was the day I decided to act. I decided to name my pain, take it seriously, and get better. Up until the acquisition, I was convinced that being a “venture-backed founder” made me this way, and was the root of all my pain. “Founder Depression” is a real thing - entrepreneurs are 30% more likely to experience depression because of the stressful lows of startup life - but what I quickly uncovered is that Bulletin was not the problem.
In the 500+ days that followed, I forced myself through an “Awakening.”
Immediately, I gave notice at Bulletin and to our acquirer. I decided to work less and make less. I stopped girl bossing and started “girl-resting.” I read books and listened to podcasts and did “The Artist’s Way” and journaled daily. I dumped my boyfriend. I spent days on airplane mode. I traveled and ate. I slept and fucked and cried. I spent months slowly thawing, following my most urgent and true instincts, and reflected on how in God’s name I spent so many years in survival mode, and in my head, burnt to a goddamn crisp but with a smile on my face.
The problem was not Bulletin. The problem was not the pressure from our investors or the stress of managing a team or the inherently volatile, suspenseful nature of building something with no end in sight.
I was the problem all along. Me.
I had constructed my life, relationships, work dynamics, management style, social life - everything - in a way that fundamentally depleted me and put my needs last. I’m not saying I was selfless. In fact, a lot of people-pleasing is actually selfish, because you are martyring yourself to be liked, or to avoid someone’s negative response to you setting your boundaries.
Here’s a perfect example: I remember, after hosting a successful workshop at a founders event at the Knockdown Center in 2019, I gave everyone in attendance my email address. All 150 people. The next morning, I woke up to nearly fifty requests asking to jump on a call, to pitch me, to pick my brain. Why the fuck did I do that?!, I remember thinking. I had nothing to sell them. I had nothing to gain. But still, I carved out time to answer each email, to help where I could. I can’t fathom it now, but at the time, it felt like I had to. Even if it meant I only slept five hours. Even if it drained me, when I already had nothing left to give.
I lived my life like this every day, in moments big and small. I donated all of my energy - to my partner, to his family, to my job, to my team, to the people who read my book, and to total strangers - without question. It was a reflex. I didn’t notice I was doing it. I didn’t know how not to do it. And I couldn’t really visualize a life where I behaved any differently. Burnout was my baseline, and I woke up with it and lived it and went to sleep with it every day.
What you don’t realize when you’re experiencing burnout - the most impossible thing to grasp, for me at least - is that you have the control, agency and capacity to change your life. Of course, many people are quite literally stuck in their circumstance, or their caste, or can quickly rattle off parts of their life they can’t change. And I get that. But I think if you have access to the internet, and are subscribed to Substack, and are stumbling upon this newsletter - you likely have the means to change: your mindset, (some if not all of) your friendships, your romantic partner, your habits, and maybe even your job.
What you don’t realize when you’re experiencing burnout - the most impossible thing to grasp, for me at least - is that you have the control, agency and capacity to change your life.
Which leads me to the first part of the New Motives itinerary. I’m writing this newsletter because I look back at that girl - at how she thought, at who she was, at how stuck and lost she felt - and I don’t recognize her. I want to hug her. I want to help her. I want to share the resources and people and lessons and experiences that finally shook me awake and led me to a place of real rest, of joy, of peace and some calm. Thanks to years of light media brainwashing and absorbing warped priorities and #capitalism and all that (which we’ll get into shortly) - I am not “cured,” and still struggle with balance and boundaries and the “scale of my ambition.” But I’m back in my body now, and I’ve developed tools and systems that have helped me hone and control my thoughts. I want to share what that’s been like, in case even a sentence or two helps you navigate your burnout, or whatever name you’ve given your existential suffering. Let’s call this section: recovery resources.
And for what’s left in New Motives, I’m dying to explore how I, we - all of us - got here in the first place. I don’t think it’s a fluke that 61% of millennial women and 70% of men said they aspired to be a top boss or a manager, when on average, only 50% of Gen Xers and 26% of Boomers want the same thing.*** When and how did “having responsibility” become so glorified? Was I born to be this ambitious, or was I somehow shaped? Per the latest from The New York Times, 90s babies are uniquely positioned to feel economic pressure, and thus this unrelenting ambition, because there are simply so many of us competing for more limited opportunities: fewer affordable houses, fewer high-paying. As Kate LoPresti succinctly puts it, we’re all trying to squeeze into a “too-tight” sweater, and it’s been this way for decades, which naturally breeds a survival-of-the-fittest-type competition for what success or status is available. And both my (very ambitious and hard-working) friend Taara and the same NYT piece alerted me to some key context I was missing. The early 90s saw a generational surge in immigration, which means so many in our massive cohort are the children of immigrants, who like Taara, watched their parents hustle and strive with limited financial resources and zero connections so they could help their families thrive. Those children inherited the immigrant mindset, and work ethic, which in many ways means you work to exhaustion, because you quite literally have to. #capitalism.
And how did the media in the 90s, our schooling, our parents’ gender roles, catastrophic events like 9/11 or the 2008 recession shape the crisis of millennial burnout and our hamster-wheel way of life? And how do we reckon with the ongoing backlash? We can unpack how cultural and social trends amongst my generation and Gen Z - the tradwife phenomenon and its domestic escapism, quiet quitting and the lure of de-centering work, women’s newfound focus on raising their standards and putting themselves first as men go adrift - serve as a forceful reaction to the burdened lives millennial women have been leading and projecting outward for years.
This conversation is not new, and I follow in the footsteps of published authors and thought leaders like Anne Helen Peterson and Malcolm Harris, but chances are you haven’t read their books or connected your lived experience to a larger cultural and historical context. With their help, and some of my own ideas and analysis, I’ll explore the B-roll of our collective, very ~American~ burnout, and dig into how other countries and societies deal with constructing boundaries and creating work-life balance. Maybe their ways will inspire you, or maybe putting your experience in-context will help you feel less insane, less shameful, and less alone. We’ll call this part of the newsletter: the bigger picture.
And lastly, I am building again. I’ve joined an e-commerce startup as its Chief Marketing Officer and Co-founder. I’ll be announcing my position shortly, but that’s not the focus of this first post. The point is: I’m ready to work hard again on one consistent thing, and on something that’s mine. But I want to do it differently this time. Since I started my recovery journey, I’ve been asking myself:
Am I okay with having balance at the expense of outcomes? IE, is it possible to build a highly successful, profitable, exit-worthy business while preserving my weekends for rest, and my weekday evenings for…well…whatever I want? Or will my new boundaries, my new ~way of life~, if you will, interfere with the company’s success? At one point, I journaled: “Stacey Abrams didn’t challenge voter suppression by girl-resting. Melanie Perkins from Canva didn’t build a 3+ billion dollar juggernaut by girl-resting, either.” So how do you do important or effective or meaningful work, without burning out? Is that even possible? Is success without some degree of burnout even possible? I’ll be writing through my own attempts and share what I learn as I go.
Melanie Perkins from Canva didn’t build a 3+ billion dollar juggernaut by ‘girl-resting.’
Is there a strand of ambition that doesn’t completely eat you up inside? It’s easy for me to say, here and now, that I have a healthy relationship with my ambition. Because I’ve been consulting for a while, i.e. working at a slower pace, and I have not yet hinged my reputation and happiness on this new company doing well. But I want to confront my ambition in public, and see if I can want something to work out without becoming obsessive in an unhealthy and dangerous way again.
Why the f*ck would I do this to myself again? I used to think second-time founders were absolutely insane. Ty Haney? Off her rocker. Sophia Amoruso? Batshit. Michelle Cordeiro Grant? Crazy. Jaclyn Johnson? Nutjob. I’m obviously kidding, in the sense that these women are very sane and very impressive and I want all of their companies to succeed. But as a first-time founder seeing these founders leave or sell and start new businesses, I couldn’t understand why they’d do it. But now, I do.
My hunger to build is like my hunger to write. It’s ever-present, loud and forever nagging at me. It gets stronger and stronger the more I ignore it. And even though the act of writing, or of building, is often brutal and lonely and, like, 28% good/yummy and 72% bad/icky, I feel the most myself when I’m doing it. I’m not building again for ego, or identity, or wealth or status or a delicious, addictive sense of productivity.
I’m building again because I want to. Because on some level, I feel like I have to. And because I want to investigate, and hopefully prove, that there’s a way to do impossible, ambitious, and hard things without losing yourself to burnout. That there’s a way to live - within your families and your friendships, as a creative, as an earner, as a lover - that pulsates with joy, drives successful outcomes, but still puts you first. These are my new motives.
This newsletter is for you if you are changing your relationship with work, if any of the symptoms I describe above resonate with you, if you just need something interesting to read and chew on when you’re dialed into a work call you can pay 23% attention to, you’re a founder or employee somewhere trying to balance doing insane and impossible shit while maintaining your sanity, you find it hard to rest your body, you find it hard to rest your mind, you are struggling to find the line between hustle culture and quiet quitting, you tend to subtly punish yourself, or you sense some persistent self abandonment at the expense of other people.
For now, I’ll be writing and sharing once a week, as best I can. Probably on Fridays. Things will start out free - though you can pay if you want - and I’ll figure out when it makes sense to pull the trigger on a paid-only subscription. But we’re not there yet. And my next entry will be slightly more snackable, and a quicker read :) . We’ll get into our groove. I promise.
I didn’t know it at the time, but for years, I was ripping myself apart so I could stitch myself back together. I’m honored you are here to bear witness to my next chapter. And I hope we can learn a lot - together.
Talk soon,
Ali 🧘🏼♀️
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*https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/10/funding-for-female-founders-remained-consistent-in-2023/
**https://www.luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/
let’s set your stress rash up on a blind date with my repetitive stress injury 💕
Wow! This was the best thing I have read all week. Thank you for writing this, Ali