Adulting at work (when you are well into adulthood)

A guide to help all my fellow frauds remember who's the boss. Plus, my fave summer top and an audiobook that I never wanted to end.

It started at the end of this week, that occasional sensation that my right eye was trying to wiggle its way out of its socket.

I was sitting at my desk at home looking at my computer monitor on Thursday afternoon and reading through a report I’d been writing for work when I felt the twitching start. Usually, that’s the signal I get when my internal stress levels reach maximum capacity and start slowly leaking through my eyeball.

Actually, I’m not quite sure if it’s the quivering of an eyeball that I feel or just a muscle that surrounds it that starts spasming periodically. What I do know is that when it starts happening, I am feeling way more stressed out than I’d realized.

Initially, I blamed it on work. That report I mentioned was a beast to wrestle into something that made sense, with a lot of moving parts and requiring way more writing than I initially anticipated. I recently heard a quote from the filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan, who said, “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life,” and I couldn’t agree more. It’s like I always feel something scary hanging over my head.

This week also brought a lot of adulting I had to do for my job, which included not only putting together some slides to present to a group of salespeople virtually at the end of the week but also figuring out how one does that. I make lots of PowerPoint presentations for other people at work, but never for myself. I know how to create the slides and then add a talk track for the presenter in the notes below each slide. But how did you read those notes when someone else was driving the presentation deck from their computer on Zoom?

I presented this dilemma to my daughter last weekend when I stayed with her in Philly, and she brought me to her basement home office and helped me try to figure it out. We fooled around with a bunch of different ways of looking at slides on Zoom and finally, she said, “Dude, I don’t think you’ll be able to see your notes.”

“Impossible,” I thought because I could tell that the woman I make a deck for every month to present to the sales team sometimes reads right from my script.

So, I decided to ask her. She came down to my desk with her laptop this week and confirmed you cannot see notes when someone else is presenting the slides from their laptop, so she has a sneaky workaround of pulling the deck up to look at notes while she’s presenting.

All of this does not even touch on how nervous I was to present to this group of 20-ish folks in my organization. I always feel like such a fraud when I have to speak publicly, and I know I’m not alone. I shared all my anxiety with a friend during a long walk we took on Tuesday night along the boardwalk. We ate salads first that she’d picked up for us at Sweetgreen so by the time we headed out my door, the sun was starting to make its descent in the summer sky.

The air though was still warm and as we walked north along the coast, she told me about her daylong offsite meeting for work where teams presented strategies and goals for the upcoming school year and how nervous she’d been to present to all the private school’s leaders. We both love listening to the tech journalist Kara Swisher on her (multiple) podcasts and always marvel at what a boss she is. How she interviews big newsmakers and gives lots of talks around the world and really gives zero fucks about what other people think about her. We admire her confidence. “She’s really much more like a man in that way,” my girlfriend observed.

Then she told me about how throughout her career, she’d watched male coworkers get up and say a whole lot of nothing with incredible confidence. “Why can’t we be more like that?” she asked.

The lights were coming on as we reached the start of Ocean Grove, and we could see the gingerbread trim and turrets of the homes along the edge of the boardwalk backlit by the last strips of light in the sky. I’d started the walk in a sweatshirt and by the time we headed home, I’d wrapped it around the top of my skort at my waist. The warm air felt good on my arms and I thought about how much I’d miss that in a few months when everybody leaves and it’s just me walking with my dog on the boardwalk most days.

Right before that call I had on Friday morning, my daughter texted strong arm emojis and wished me luck. “You’re gonna slay,” she said and I told her I was channeling my inner Beyonce. And when I texted my friend afterwards and said I survived, she texted, “Kara Swisher vibes!” and called me a boss.

In the end, I felt pretty good telling the group about a program I help run. The upside of getting to a certain age is that you bring a ton of life experience to every encounter. Before the call I gently reminded myself that I had done scarier things, like giving birth four times and standing in front of a judge to say I didn’t want to be married any more. That’s true adulting. And not for nothing, I was old enough to be a parent to many of my coworkers on the call.

This week at work, I have a couple of other adulting things I have to do — some upcoming calls that are giving me anxiety — and then things look like they lighten up after that. I mean, until it all ramps up again.

Until then, I am turning my attention to that manuscript of mine that has been collecting dust for months while I poured all my energy into work. I am about to start a new round of sharing pages with outside readers, and I think that’s contributing to the eyeball twitching. I need to figure out how to be the kind of person who doesn’t get lost in focusing so intensely on one thing, that everything else falls apart. What is that life even like?

In an attempt to get back on track with my memoir — and also run away from Corporate America — I booked five nights at a little studio cottage along a river in Maine in mid-September. Despite vowing to never drive north of Newark, NJ after the debacle of a journey I took a few weeks ago to Massachusetts, I am low-key obsessed with Maine. The Airbnb listing for this tiny home, dubbed The Nest, seems worth navigating the traffic nightmare called Connecticut (although Westchester kinda sucks, too).  

My hope is that those five days along the water in September, lost in thoughts and words, will help calm my quivering eye. That I come home with a manuscript stretched across a solid structure and a plan for getting it in a good enough place to start querying agents next year.

Like figuring out how to present decks at work and get giant reports across the finish line, it will feel really good to have closure with this book and start working on something else. I am so ready to write about something other than myself. I’m becoming a novelist after this.

In the meantime, I sit out on my porch with my laptop and try to write but mostly, I look around at the late-summer flowers surrounding me on all sides. My neighbor’s hydrangea peeking over their white fence and reaching their way toward me stretched out on my little metal loveseat. The hot pink crepe myrtle along the front of my porch really exploded this summer, its flowers weighing down its slim branches in every direction, like a firework caught in mid-blast. And my morning glories growing up the trellis along the far side of the porch have made their way all the way up to the eaves, the bright purple flowers nodding up and down in the breeze. Egging me on. They are so damn happy.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

• A story I never wanted to end. Do you love Ann Patchett? I LOVE Ann Patchett. Last summer was my Summer of Ann Patchett after listening to two of her audiobooks in a row. Tom Hanks got me hooked telling the story of a brother and sister who can't let go of the past in The Dutch House, and upon completion, I immediately downloaded Commonwealth and lost myself in another tale of complicated family dynamics. The other day, I finished listening to her latest, Tom Lake, gorgeously read by Meryl Streep. I gobbled it up, listening while I sat in bed at night, in the car long after I parked at the curb, and while sitting on my couch eating dinner. More family dynamics, but much less broken. And Streep's reading made it all the cozier. Can you tell I liked and miss it?

• A necklace to build an outfit around. For work this week, I needed to wear a cute necklace that I got for my birthday. It’s definitely a statement piece — with a hot pink lucite pendant on a chunky gold chain — that needed a clothing canvas that matched its vibe. I paired Citizens for Humanity darker jeans with a white Target crewneck t-shirt and then dug out what can only be referred to as a vintage Isaac Mizrahi for Target seersucker blazer, which I haven’t worn out in years. I got tons of compliments on the jacket, which proves that you should never get rid of clothing you really love — even if it’s been more than a year since you last wore it. #hoardersunite

• When snaking your bathroom drains if preferable to writing. My bathroom sink has not been draining well for a couple of weeks. So, it makes sense that the one weekend I finally have with nothing to do, I decided the start snaking drains. First, I tried the Liquid Plumr and the water still didn’t drain. So I pulled the long yellow plastic snake from my closet that I’d bought to have on hand for just such an occasion. I could never pull the stopper out of the drain but as soon as I slipped the narrow end underneath it and started feeding it down the pipe, it immediately started to come out, along with some other really gross stuff. While I was at it, I snaked the bathroom drain as well and finally, had to go back downstairs to write.

  

• A girlboss needs to look cute. For that presentation on Friday, I wore my favorite summer top, which I got from Amazon for like $25, and am not sure what the fabric is. Plastic? Regardless, it’s super cute and even my mom complimented me on it, which is saying something. I just realized it comes in a whole lot of prints, if the seersucker/stripes vibe is not your thing.

• Ready for fall. Instagram’s been doing a great job feeding me things I want to buy to wear to work when the weather starts getting a little cooler. This Old Navy skirt is killing me and would look really cute with boots I bought last year and a black turtleneck.

  

  Pinch of Yum on TikTok: avocado majo bowl

• Cooking for one. Food shopping is weird again when I’m just buying for myself. When my son first went to college two years ago, I invented Girl Dinner (LOL) when I ate a bowl of pistachios for dinner every night for the first week. Nowadays, I’ve gotten better at putting meals together with things I have on hand, salads with grilled chicken, avocado, pickled red onions, things like that. But I’m really into this meal I saw on TikTok that I plan to make tonight with a roaster from Costco. I’ll keep you posted.

See you next Sunday!

xoAmy