The day after the embryo transfer, I picked up my sister, brother-in-law, and niece from the airport. We decided to stop for lunch on our way home at an outdoor shopping center in Culver City. I dropped them off and drove into the multistory parking structure. It was lunchtime, and the lot was packed. As I drove up the ramps to the upper levels, I started worrying that there weren’t going to be any more parking spots, and I’d have to drive out and find my sister and her family, and then I saw a spot next to a column. I turned in extra carefully, so as not to hit the expensive car to my right, and heard the telltale CRRRRRUUUUUNNNNNCCHHHHH SCRRRRREEEEECH as I scraped the driver’s side of my car against the concrete column.
“Fuck. Me,” I said to no one.
I carefully opened the door to inspect the damage. “Oh fuck,” I said again. The rear driver’s-side door and the quarter panel behind it were completely gouged. I had been extremely lucky not to have hit the shiny orange sports car next to me. Just like when I had driven into the side of the garage at my old apartment, the only damage was to my own car.
* * *
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, I found out that my HCG level was six; a pregnancy is usually anything over fifty. It was most likely a chemical pregnancy, or what should more accurately be called a tease pregnancy, a phantom pregnancy, a pregnancy that allows you to glimpse, for the briefest of moments, a future where you needed a car that fit a dog and a baby and a stroller. For days, I obsessively googled message board posts, trying to find anyone who had had such a low first HCG reading and had gone on to have a successful pregnancy. It wasn’t impossible, according to my doctor, but very unlikely. Still, I held out hope. Maybe this time, the smallest odds would actually be in my favor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When I think back on the brief period working in the internet 1.0 boom, I always think about how so many companies that flamed out spectacularly were just ahead of their time—like Kozmo.com, which, if you don’t remember, was an online delivery service that would bring you pints of Ben & Jerry’s within an hour. They opened up in 1998 and were shut down for good by 2001—ten years before Postmates. It was a good reminder that being first doesn’t always mean you win.
I also think about how, at one company I worked for, everyone was granted stock options, and at a company-wide meeting one of the co-founders confidently told us that the company was worth $70 million. (It wasn’t. Not even close.) Soon after I left for grad school, the stock market tanked and the same company had to lay people off. Then 9/11 happened, and most of my friends in New York lost their jobs. Things got better, and then they got bad again—really bad—which was when I lost my job at the Observer. And now some of the same things that had contributed to the first internet boom and bust were happening again. Companies, especially digital media companies, had taken on too much venture capital, with the assumption the exponential growth they’d been experiencing would last forever. Even I, who took a grand total of one college-level econ class, can tell you that exponential growth never lasts forever. In the years since I started at BuzzFeed, they’d taken on an astronomical $500 million in additional venture capital funding, but by the fall of 2017, revenue was falling short, and the company announced it would be laying off around a hundred people.
Almost immediately I got several panicked messages over Slack—the workplace instant messaging app we used to communicate with one another—from younger colleagues who were shocked that this had happened at BuzzFeed. They’d been in high school or just starting college when the Great Recession hit in 2008; they’d only ever worked for a company that was a total media darling, where new people were hired every week, where there was frozen yogurt on demand and free lunch multiple times per week. In contrast, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, just like all the other elderly (that is, anyone over thirty-five) people on staff.
I tried to be less “horribly jaded old lady” and more “supportive and wise elder” in my responses. “I know it’s hard to see people being let go,” I typed. I wanted to tell them that we’d been lucky that we hadn’t been hit by layoffs already, but I figured that probably wouldn’t help.
“Do you think there will be more?” one of them asked.
“I think your job is safe for now,” I wrote back, not really answering the question. I should have been more straightforward, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that there’s truly no such thing as a free lunch, even when it’s Taco Tuesday at work.
It was a grim time, and a grim reminder that capitalism is ruthless. Don’t be fooled by a company that tells you that everyone who works there is “like a family,” because it’s usually just something they say to get you to work longer hours and never see your actual family, until the day they lay you off, which they will do without a second thought, and all the free BuzzFeed knit hats in the world won’t make up for a shitty severance package and having to pay for your own health insurance.
I didn’t get laid off that day, but I was struggling at work. After a particularly rough period where it became clear that I couldn’t successfully manage editors in New York from my post in L.A., I successfully navigated a transition from editor and manager to senior writer, first for the Culture desk and then for the Tech desk. The stories I wrote were generally well-received, but I’d been feeling increasingly despondent about my job in the last few weeks; after a couple of big stories over the summer, I hadn’t written anything particularly groundbreaking lately, and I started getting obsessed with the idea that I was going to get fired. No one had indicated to me that this was the case, but because I wasn’t writing as much as I thought I should be, I was feeling like a problem child—an expensive problem child, because I was still making the same amount of money that I had been making when I was an editor and manager.
“If you want to quit, you should quit,” Matt said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I can’t just quit,” I said. “I mean, right? I have this job that people would kill for. Jobs like mine are not that common in journalism right now. I can write pretty much whatever I want, my editors are great, I like my colleagues…fuck, what’s wrong with me?”
“Maybe you’ve just outgrown it,” he said. “It’s okay.”
“I guess I just feel guilty about quitting a quote-unquote dream job,” I said. But in actuality, the BuzzFeed job had never been quite what I wanted—or what I felt like I was good at. Then again, what job had been fulfilling? The Observer, for a while. Gawker, occasionally. Rolling Stone—no. I suddenly realized, with a terrifying clarity, that the media jobs I’d had had all, in their own ways, made me anxious, made me second-guess myself, made me feel like nothing I did was ever quite good enough.
“Well, set that aside,” Matt said. “If it’s not your dream job anymore, then it’s not a dream job.”
* * *
—
EVEN THOUGH MY HCG had risen for a week after the initial reading of six, it still seemed unlikely that I was actually pregnant, but I had to go see my doctor for an ultrasound to make sure. “I’m sorry,” she said, as she tilted the monitor toward me so I could see what she was pointing to. “You have a sac, but it’s empty.” I nodded mutely. “Why don’t you get dressed, and then I’ll come back and we can talk about it.”
When she returned a few minutes later, I had a question. “I don’t understand why my HCG was rising, if there was nothing in there,” I told her. Even after all this time undergoing fertility treatments, when nothing ever made sense, I was still looking for an explanation.
“I know,” Dr. Baek said. “The embryo was really trying to make it.”
That was when my eyes welled up, as I thought about this embryo that was struggling to stay alive. Even though I knew on a rational level that I was assigning agency to a collection of cells so small it was barely perceptible to the naked eye, I felt protective of its struggle and fate. I also didn’t understand it
. Why had I undergone the septum surgery, all the prep, the retrievals, only to be confronted with yet another failure? It just didn’t seem fair.
There was another layer to my sadness: the knowledge that Matt and I would have to discuss it on our podcast that weekend. In the year since we’d started doing the show, an incredible community had sprung up around it. There was a Facebook group with thousands of members who loved having a safe space where they could talk freely and privately about their fertility struggles without being judged, and where no one was allowed to use cheesy infertility message board terms like “baby dust” or “frosties” (baby dust is what you “sprinkle” to have good luck in your attempts to get pregnant, and “frosties” are frozen embryos). And we got dozens of emails each week from listeners who wanted to share their experiences with infertility or ask us for advice. By sharing our experience, people had felt emboldened to be more public about their own.
Of course, we didn’t have to be so open about every single detail of the IVF process; it was our podcast, and technically we could talk about anything we wanted to. But we’d brought our listeners along on every doctor’s appointment, every procedure, every blood test. It felt unfair to not tell them what had happened. I also knew that our listeners, more than anyone else, would be able to empathize with and understand what I was going through, because so many of them had been down the same road.
But sometimes, I regretted doing a podcast about our fertility treatments in real time. Because IVF hadn’t worked, was I letting down our listeners? Did they see us as “characters” in an ongoing infertility saga, and was I disappointing them by not giving them the storybook ending they craved? I wanted to be able to give them that storybook ending, because it was the ending that I wanted for myself. “We can try again,” Dr. Baek said. “When you’re ready.” I nodded. I was so sick of coming to the clinic. I had just assumed I would follow a story arc that went something like, protagonist visits fertility clinic, protagonist gets pregnant, protagonist has baby, protagonist is triumphant and lives happily ever after. Instead, my story felt more like I was trapped in the movie Groundhog Day, but set in a fertility clinic, which sounds like possibly the worst movie ever made.
But why had I expected that the story of trying to get pregnant would follow some predetermined arc? I’d already had to learn that my path—whether that meant career, marriage, or financial stability—was more meandering than I might have thought it would be. But I’d never before felt like I had so little control over the outcome. Until now, it wasn’t like everything had worked out perfectly for me, but when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to or had expected them to, I could course correct. I was ashamed that I had never really considered what it meant to always have options, even if they weren’t necessarily the options I wanted; it was a privilege, I realized, that had gone pretty much unexamined until now. And maybe, I thought, this was a part of growing up that I still needed to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Do you want to start a podcast about skin care?” The text was from Kate, my friend with whom I’d been in a two-person writing group when I’d been working on Startup.
It was the fall of 2017. Donald Trump had been president for most of the year, and people seemed to be looking for comfort wherever they could find it. Skin care suddenly felt like a necessary coping mechanism. It was something I could control, in a world where so much was out of my control—a feeling that, thanks in large part to infertility, was all too familiar. Self-care was taking on new meanings as I navigated this new world of external and internal challenges. Instead of looking to the beauty industry to impose its often toxic standards on me, or the almost-as-nefarious “wellness” industry, with its juice cleanses and similarly unattainable and unhealthy body ideals, I was looking for something I could dictate the terms of. It was time to reclaim what it meant to care about what I looked like, how I saw myself, how I wanted to be seen by the world.
It seemed I wasn’t alone. Kate and I had been texting about skin care for the past few months, and on social media, women I knew who I’d never before seen discussing beauty products were suddenly fixated on the ideal shade of red lipstick or which serum would make their skin perfectly smooth. For the first time, it felt like we were participating in beauty culture not for status or for the benefit of the male gaze, but for ourselves.
I especially needed all the creams and serums, because as a BuzzFeed News reporter, I wasn’t allowed to protest, call my reps, knock on doors, or donate money. Journalists were supposed to be “objective,” which meant never publicly taking a position on anything political. I had chafed against this restriction before, but now, having to pretend to be “objective” felt particularly out of step with the moment we were in. In January, I went to the Women’s March in downtown Los Angeles, carefully removing the BuzzFeed patch from my backpack and not posting about it on social media. I hated feeling like I had to hide my beliefs in the service of some nebulous, arbitrary notion of objectivity, and thus I had retreated into self-care and comfort, while simultaneously trying to write stories for BuzzFeed that put forth a progressive point of view without being explicitly “political.” It was a tricky needle to thread, and one that I was growing increasingly resentful of having to thread in the first place.
So the text from Kate, coming at a moment when I was feeling especially impotent, seemed like a respite, an escape, a manifestation of a desire that I hadn’t even known I was subconsciously putting out into the universe. I don’t know if she was actually expecting me to say yes, but I responded immediately: “YES. YES I DO.”
* * *
—
I WAS ENERGIZED by my new project. It was a welcome distraction from work, which I was feeling more and more hopeless about, and IVF, which I was trying and failing not to feel hopeless about. I’d learned enough in the year that we’d been doing Eggcellent Adventure that I was confident that Kate and I could produce the new podcast pretty easily with some outside help, and so we hired a producer named Samee to come on board. The show would be roughly an hour long, we decided, with some discussion between us at the beginning of the show, an interview, and some “intention setting” at the end of each episode; each week, Kate and I would come up with something we intended to do the following week. Our intentions could be anything that felt like they were broadly in the service of self-care—drink more water, fold the laundry, meditate for five minutes a day, call a friend. We agreed that our guests had to be racially and ethnically diverse, but we decided to try to only have female or nonbinary guests on the show, as a kind of antidote to the overwhelming maleness of the podcast industry.
From the start, it felt right. I loved working with Kate—she was smart and funny, and we were on the same page about pretty much everything. We weren’t beauty influencers or even amateur makeup obsessives; we were just two women approaching middle age who wanted to unpack our place in the world and be in a conversation with each other and our listeners. And we could do whatever we wanted to. I remembered the moment when, writing Startup, I realized I had the power to make my characters say or do anything. No, I could do this in real life. There was no corporate overlord telling us we had to mention a certain product because they were advertising that week or interview a vapid but popular celebrity because it would get listeners. We could interview the people we wanted to interview, talk about the things that we wanted to talk about. As we geared up to launch, I felt professionally fulfilled in a way I hadn’t in ages. All this time, I’d been chasing a dream in journalism, and I’d gotten the dream job, only to realize that it wasn’t a dream job for me. The podcast felt like the thing I was finally meant to be doing.
Kate and I may have agreed on almost everything, but we couldn’t agree on a name. I suggested Women of a Certain Age, which we liked but didn’t love, and then my friend Jane Marie, who ran her own podcast studio called Little Everywhere, suggested Forever35—a kind of play on the fa
st-fashion clothing store Forever 21 that would make light of the period of life at which many women felt like they started to become invisible. We were here to make those women—and ourselves—more visible.
When we started the show, Kate was thirty-eight and I was forty, and we decided we wanted to target women around our age, who felt like they had been left behind by most fashion and beauty media. There’s a peculiar but profound deflation in clicking on a story about someone’s “minimalist” skin care routine and seeing a fresh-faced twenty-five-year-old who not only doesn’t even have a zit, but also has nary a wrinkle on her smooth, glowy skin. Please come talk to me about your minimalist approach when you’re forty-four and still getting pimples and your skin is dry and you have wrinkles and dark circles and are those new freckles? Nope, they’re age spots, and no hundred-dollar cruelty-free all-natural face cream is going to help.
The goal with getting into skin care was never to seem ageless, or even just younger than I actually was, but simply to look in the mirror and be content with what I saw there, which had always been a challenge. As a teenager, I had moderately bad acne—or at least, it seemed bad at the time. Now I wonder if it truly was that bad, or if all those nights when my mom would position me under the reading lights above her bed to pop my pimples made me think that my skin was worse than it actually was. A dermatologist prescribed me Retin-A, which dried out my skin and made it peel off, and I was also on the swim team, which dried out my skin even more. As an adult, I was still addicted to popping my pimples and overanalyzing every blemish on my face; I spent way too many years staring at my skin in the mirror and not liking what I saw. Now, at forty, I had an opportunity to reframe the narrative I’d always told myself about my skin and my appearance, and I would do it publicly. If that made people uncomfortable, so be it.
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