Hi fellow troopers,
Happy June! Happy summer! Each new month feels like a new year! Each new season a new day!
The rain has finally cleared here in Brooklyn and I can again write outside, though the vengeful little ants will not leave the table and I’m still recovering from a long overdue but unexpected wisdom teeth extraction, as well as the petty inconvenience of my finsta getting hacked. On the bright side, adhering to a lumpy liquid diet has freed up much of my brainspace otherwise spent obsessing over the next meal. Joy is a discipline and we choose you!
Today’s issue is on the personal side and thus more aligned with something I’d send to paid subscribers, but for no reason other than spontaneity, it’s going out to everyone. If you enjoy the spiritual questioning and charming quotidian pictures and references to Chinese arthouse film, consider subscribing at $5/mon or $50/year for more:
just plug me in and go
I’ve never worked at a large, corporate company. Most of my professional operating experiences have been variations on the throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall-in-smart-strategic-ways theme, with singular people responsible for a multitude of cross-functional tasks. (Vis-à-vis the small nation-states of specialized analysts or product marketing managers that larger orgs employ.)
That said, it wasn’t completely intentional. My parents are entrepreneurial but that wasn’t a path they emphasized for me. Understandably, starting a business was their sacrifice *so I wouldn’t have to*. I didn’t recognize my small is beautiful instinct until I lived in New York, the equivalent of the liberal arts education I lacked.
New York City: the weird wild west where I discovered Joan Didion and bougie natural wine bars and gritty Bushwick nightlife and the complex portrait of a transplant city dweller—the ironic polymath, suspended between tensions of language and class and race and sexuality, holding fast to each other by virtue of our circumstantial overlappings through our cultural pilgrimages. Also because we literally had no personal space until corona.
But as beautiful it is to be a scrappy creative, it often entails being undervalued, underestimated, unseen. Overperforming your talent or skills out of insecurity, rather than joy and belief. Yielding to the persisting human plague to be highly functioning through chronic stress. Even if we know grit doesn’t always yield financial or emotional margin—the heart wants it all.
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I recently watched Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s new documentary Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue, which could be described as so granular and peculiar to the point of irrelevance. Google’s description reads:
Prominent Chinese writers and scholars gather at a literature festival in Shanxi, China, where they reflect on the cultural changes that have influenced their work.
And yet if you’ve seen any of Jia’s other films—which chronicle China’s staggering transformation over decades through quietly devastating tales—this feels the most crude, the most intimate.
Postmodern author Yu Hua recalls his previous career as a dentist, wondering why he was staring at the worst view in the world (ugly human mouths) day after day, spurring him to bust his pen and ass to pivot into the cultural arts. Clear-eyed writer, researcher, and professor Liang Hong breaks down over her family’s trail of illness and marital strife. The talk deftly weaves between poverty and abundance, overt and subliminal.
The Cultural Revolution did a lot to us—though when I say “us,” it’s one that I feel I can’t claim. I’m far removed from the rural village, yet why do I resonate with it? When I see these writers, I can’t unsee my grandparents, the ones who have done the most with the least. I think of a line of scripture the apostle Paul penned while imprisoned:
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. (Philippians 4: 11-12)
Which brings me back to the present, to the years where we all feel we’ve exhausted our margins, confronted spiritual hunger and need to no avail. I’m eagerly waiting—and dare I say it in 2021, excited?—for my professional rhythms to rise back towards abundance. I’m ready for sweet, sweet ample provision in teammates, expertise, resources, planning, the likes! Make me scrappy within a magnanimous organization, the artsy-nerdy cog of a great big wheel, ironing out delicious projects like Stripe Press, WeTransfer’s WePresent, Mailchimp Presents.
The world wide web is more than just software; it’s also hard desires and fleshy humans. I want to see it up close, tinker with it within the squishy playpits of established structures. I want to tell stories that transfuse a rush of fresh blood, replenishing what was lost. I want to believe in organizations who set up systems and supervisors and guardrails to play boldly—but also kindly, safely.
Much love, V.
Ending on the view from BK: