Part 8: Improv

Editor’s note: this is the last post in an eight-part series about work-life identity in high-tech America.

In the dark on my morning walk I’ll pass by the horse farm on the outskirts of our neighborhood. It’s in a private community of large, multi-acre lots that will one day be developed. But for now it’s just swaths of open land. I’ll sometimes see a pack of coyotes slink by and imagine I’m in the country. With the open sky it’s a great place for star gazing or to watch the sun come up. I’ll go there every morning before I start work to get myself connected and reflect.

At the farm you can hear the horses bray, a rooster crow, and the sound of laborers warming their tractors, laughing and chatting as they clean the stables and start their day.

I think about them and I think about me and what we do for money. White collar, blue collar: whichever kind, it’s still a collar, an identifier. And for as mixed up as I’ve been over work, it’s really just a role we play. You can find yourself or lose yourself in it just easily. And there are more important roles to play in life.

I didn’t blame my old client Jackie for being crappy with me, I blamed her boss Max for creating an environment like that. I didn’t even blame him. No one was all cruel or kind, it felt better to assume everyone was just doing their best. And some of us had more to work through than others.

Jackie left Microsoft and went to work for another tech company. Ironically, so did Max (the same one). But he was like a different person there: kind and fun to be around. Audrick opened a bakery that was so successful he opened another. Gianna went to work for the enemy, Amazon.

I thought I picked a bad time to be unemployed, just before the pandemic, but then work started rolling in and never stopped. From early 2020 until the end of 2022 I could work whenever I wanted. The world needed access to the cloud and companies like Cisco needed help marketing it.

I returned to my old consulting firm, this time as a subcontractor. I didn’t have to manage people, I did all the work myself. I could take off for weeks at a time, and often did. I sometimes felt like a trapeze artist, hanging on to one job but then letting go as I reached for another.

I worked out of my bedroom, right next to the bed. I learned pretty quickly I could take naps throughout the day or just lay there with my phone and rise like an automaton. Everyone I worked with was online, as far away as London or Singapore. Technology gave the impression of connecting us but it could never substitute the true connection we needed as humans.

I learned from a peer that being successful at this line of work wasn’t just about the writing, but how you delivered it in client reviews. You had to kind of present it. So I’d read my narratives like I was reading a script, auditioning for a role. I found the right moments to pause or emphasize, I rehearsed. I worried like hell the world would end and I’d be out of a job so I gave it my all. Like many others I worked a lot harder and longer at home than I did in the office. And I got real productive fast.

But when you give too much of yourself to a job you can neglect other parts of your life, other roles. Perhaps that’s what they mean by work-life balance. People needed my help as dad or husband, child or friend—people I cared about the most. Too often I prioritized work. Relearning that lesson the second or third time hurt worse than the first.

You could find yourself in work or lose yourself in it, even hide there. You could say the same about life. None of us had any prior experience or rehearsal time, life was as much a form of improv as work—for any role, from worker to parent, friend, or partner.

To play the role best you had to connect with it on a personal level. That’s how you made it real. A good actor could connect their true selves to the role so the audience couldn’t tell the difference, where one ended and the other began.

I wasn’t sure where the two parts diverged in me, or if it would even matter in the end. And for the first time that didn’t feel like a problem. It felt like a new kind of freedom.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir