Recently I was having a philosophical conversation with my 5-year-old granddaughter about time. I was trying to explain to her why time can feel like it’s moving quickly when you’re doing something fun, and feel like it’s moving slowly when you’re experiencing something unpleasant.

Considering that she is still learning how to tell time and only recently moved away from the “how many sleeps” metric, it was perhaps a bit of a conversational overreach.

How we measure time has been on my mind. For many years, there has been an argument in the ad industry about how to best charge clients for work, with many advocating that we charge for the value of the ideas and work. Charging for intellectual property makes lots of sense in theory, but it is harder to execute in practice. I still use a billable hour basis for my work, because I find it simpler to predict and manage scope against hours with clients.

The problem isn’t with how I bill; it’s with how I think. In my mind, I consider a billable hour to be a billable hour, and will look at my personal and professional resource management against how many hours I work in a particular period of time and not the type of work I am doing.

Which is kind of like preparing for a one hour walk around the lake the same way you would prepare for a one hour run up a mountain. Both take one hour, but the run is going to burn more energy, require more calories, hydration and recovery. Add in factors like the weather – heat, cold, rain – and those variables increase.

Maybe you’re having an internal eye roll at the obviousness of this. But I find myself in a self-care deficit because I am not preparing for or recovering from the different kinds of hours I am spending, and I’m not alone in this.

I’ve written before about our allostatic load, the psychological and emotional burden we carry at any particular time. I write about it because I am not good at accurately assessing the allostatic load I am carrying. Which can leave me wondering why I am so depleted after I just ran up a metaphorical mountain in a heat wave with no water and bad shoes.

I do many things in a day, and they are not equal in terms of how they impact my allostatic load. Correspondence, billing, the minutiae of running a business are dull, but easy. Creating content, as I am doing now, is enlivening but takes more energy. A coaching session takes lots of energy, and facilitation with a team is the most intensive work I do.

Obvious, right? But if plan my week with the assumption that each of those activities are equal, I’m going to run empty.

It’s not just the activity, it’s the weather. Many people in this country are in a storm of uncertainty, fear, and threat. Federal workers aren’t sure if they are going to be employed next week. A wide variety of workplaces are preparing for ICE raids. Trans people are under significant threat. Anyone who needs access to programs, support or healthcare funded or managed by the federal government is worried, as are the people who work for and with those programs.

That’s the storm. And for many, it’s a hurricane. Those of us that work with others – which is most of us – also feel the impact of how the people around us are reacting to their bad weather. Executive coaches, mediators, facilitators, therapists, managers, teachers, healthcare providers are all working with people who are struggling with the storms, some of them in real peril.

I’m trying to reframe my narrative away from hours spent to allostatic load. How much energy am I planning on expending on a particular task? How emotionally challenging will it be? How am I preparing? Recovering?

A few things I’ve learned while executive coaching is to give myself time before and after a coaching session, to make sure I physically fuel by eating enough (your brain burns lots of calories), and taking a moment between sessions to move my body, even if it’s just putting on some music and dancing through my living room for a few minutes. If the weather is nice, I’ll go outside. At the end of the day, I get some exercise and try not to think about work.

Like others who are in a helping and listening field, I try to be clear about boundaries. I can’t save people from the consequences of their choices. I need to make sure I’m emotionally regulated and grounded to help others. I need support to keep me grounded – in community, spiritual practice, and with other professionals who understand confidentiality and can give me general advice or feedback without needing to know any specifics.

If you, too, have friends who are attorneys or healthcare providers, I’m sure you’ve heard them talk in a general way about something that was challenging to them, without breaking confidentiality. For example, “A woman came in today who reminded me of my mother, and it was tough.” “I really struggle with the addicts who have young children because I’ve seen so many of them lose custody of their kids and what that does to those children.” I need spaces where I can have those conversations to keep myself on track, and I feel fortunate to have them.

What I still struggle with is the piece where I give myself permission to rest. To block out my calendar the day after I do a training, speaking engagement or facilitation to allow space to recover. To not chastise myself for having lower energy when the people around me in my personal or professional life are struggling with bad weather and looking for me to provide appropriate, boundaried support. I automatically extend grace and compassion to my clients who are facing heavy weather, but I don’t always do that to myself.

Because one hour is not like another, a walk around the lake in spring takes less of a toll than the run up the mountain in a heat wave. And the concept I need to work on isn’t how many sleeps between Tuesday and Sunday, but how to be realistic about what support I need to get from one point to another in a way that allows me to do my job and maintain my balance.

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With my new book coming out in May, I need to engage in social media more than I have up to this point. I know about marketing. I need to market the book to the best of my abilities. I have a publisher who has offered extensive and useful guidelines and assistance to show me how to use social effectively.

And yet I balked.

The balking is complex. I would like to say that it is solely a result of my moral compunction about acting on platforms that further enrich and empower amoral oligarchs. That is certainly a part of it, the convenient high horse excuse.

But I also know myself. I get sucked into the appreciation from the ether, eagerly monitoring the harvest of symbols of approval, the hearts, thumbs ups, reposts and other accoutrements of affirmation.

I’m a recovering alcoholic. I understand the appeal of the dictum “If a little is good, more is better.” The old muscle memory of the relief of getting annihilated by a sensation to the exclusion of all worry and trouble lingers still, and plenty of activities get me checked out besides alcohol or drugs.

I don’t spend time in bars unless I have a very good reason. Other venues also have emotional yellow caution tape around them. I need to be clear about why I am going in, know what I have to do there, and then get the hell out.

Since I worked in advertising for so long, I have always been an early adopter of social media and its precursors. I was active on message boards in the early 90s before social media existed, reading the extensive and lively posts by this guy named Mark Cuban who was doing some cool tech stuff in Texas.

Because of this, I’ve had many opportunities to watch my attention shift away from the good - engaging with various viewpoints, joining conversations, posting things I like, using words in this specific way – into another arena, the yellow caution tape area. Posting and then obsessively checking engagement. Wanting to respond to trolls or outrage bait, fuming in judgement, wanting to opine on issues I know little about. The digital peer pressure, the yearning to be one of the cool kids in any social playground is hard wired into me.

I understand that most of you can go into a bar, enjoy a cocktail and not end up puking in the parking lot or blacking out. But plenty of people who are not alcoholics keep an eye on their alcohol consumption, checking in with a Dry January, or staying accountable with a friend when their nightly glass of wine turns into half a bottle. They have an ethic of consumption around alcohol or drugs, just as many people have an ethic of consumption about what they eat or buy or how much debt they carry or how often they fly for pleasure in planes that contribute to global warming.

For those of you who might be interested in considering an ethic of consumption around social media here’s what I did to get to my rules of engagement. Yours will, of course, be different.

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A friend mentioned a recent substack in which I wrote about how grief can cause us to lash out. I was referring to specific situations in which my grief spilled out into unjustified, unskillful outbursts at people who were helping me.

She nodded and said she had, in her grief, lashed out. She used that specific phrase, which I had used. As a veteran lasher-outer, I got curious about what lashing out meant to her.

She described a situation that, to me, sounded like setting appropriate and necessary boundaries with a medical professional who repeatedly ignored her reasonable requests for care and respect. That’s not what I consider lashing out. It’s advocacy, self-care, boundary setting in a hostile environment.

Who taught us our names for anger? Does our language need to evolve?

As women, we are inundated with cultural messages around anger in personal and professional spheres. What we are, or are not, allowed to feel, express, or act on as women, especially Black women, is clear and strictly enforced.

For those of us who participated in a religion, even years ago, there’s a whole narrative there about how expressing anger isn’t spiritual. Therapeutic language, reframed by content creators, throws around terms like narcissism, abuse, or personality disorders for a range of behaviors from saying no to sociopathy.

What’s on my mind are the internal narratives, what we say to ourselves about anger, how we name it, and what kind of permission we give ourselves to feel it. I, for one, have internalized all that misogynistic, paternalistic, sexist b******t about anger and have been trying to name and dismantle it for my entire adult life. Since I’m an executive coach, I think about how leaders, male and female, can reframe their narratives around anger.

Women often use negative language about their own emotions, and the emotions expressed by other women. She’s a b***h, I was b****y. Attack. Lash out. Undermine. Passive aggression. I studied Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew – all these centuries we have been told that anger and sharpness make us shrews who must be tamed.

Anger is a swift, decisive, emotional response to a threat against us or our loved ones. Our bodies react with a surge of energy so we can pick up a branch and hit whatever is threatening our children. Our senses can heighten to assess the direction of the attack. It is meant to save us. It is a superpower. It’s no surprise the patriarchy wants to control that right out of us.

I think of rage as more intense, and collective, something that can be harnessed and channeled for good or evil. It’s like fire – it can keep you warm, cook your food from raw to palatable, or burn your house to the ground.

Anger is situational. Often, we don’t track the road to anger. I have been in multiple situations, professionally and personally, where I have asked a man to change his behavior. I have set a boundary. At first, the volume is low. I’m comfortable with conflict, so I don’t need to wind myself up anymore to get the energy to set a boundary, and initially I’ll say it at a low volume. You need to do X, or stop doing Y. Depending on the circumstances I might explain my reasoning or the emotional impact. The man – it is always a man – often agrees. Sure, that sounds reasonable.

And then he does the thing again. And again. And again. After multiple attempts to reestablish the boundary, especially in circumstances where leaving isn’t a good option, I’m going to turn up the volume. So many men have criticized me for my ‘over-the-top temper’ in reference to situations where they had knowingly traipsed right over a firm boundary multiple times. By ignoring their part, the repeated transgressions, they just focus on the end point, where I met them with a level of anger they considered to be offensive. My response was disproportionate to them because they had erased the many actions that preceded it.

For everyone, regardless of gender, think back to the last blow out argument you had with someone. My guess is that the issue at hand, the stated topic of the fight, was built on top of a pile of other grievances, ways large and small you felt discounted, ignored, hurt.

I do have a temper, and I have spent lots of time working on managing it. I am aware of the impact of anger in relationships. It can be corrosive and destructive. But most of the women and many men I know need to claim it before they can manage it. Because anger can also set guardrails, teach people how to treat you, separate you from relationships and jobs that are damaging and destructive.

In my book, The Saint and the Drunk, coming out in May, I have lots of journal prompts for writing and reflection. In that vein, here are some thing to consider about your narratives around anger. The point it not to judge yourself, but to get curious and see what arises and if there is an invitation to evolve.

· What were you taught about anger when you were a child? In your family, your place of worship, your community? Who got to be angry? Who was condemned for it?

· How was anger expressed? Was there yelling or stony silence? Physical violence or throwing things?

· Were there different narratives around the anger of men and women? Children and older people? Was your family conflict avoidant or was conflict an accepted way of communicating?

· Who gets angry in a way you admire? It could be a real person or a fictional character. What do you admire about their anger?

· Where has your anger saved you?

· Have you ever experienced someone ignoring your boundaries repeatedly? How did that impact the volume of your response? Did you shut down or get louder?

· What names do you use for anger in yourself and others? Are they positive or negative? Are they helpful? Do you want to consider different language?

I’d love to hear more in the comments about your thoughts on this.

It’s human nature to enter a new season of life, look around, and think, oh my goodness, this is so different from what I expected. Is it like this for other people? How do I navigate this?

In our hyperconnected world, we are just a few clicks away from other people who share or speak to our season of life, who invite us to huddle together and swap stories about this new/challenging/exciting time.

Pregnancy and parenthood are a good example. It’s such an epic change physically, emotionally, and psychologically to care for an infant. I remember that season in my life, looking at my new baby and thinking, how do I do this? I need more information.

Certainly, I got information from outside sources like books. But the internet didn’t exist when I had kids, so I turned to friends and family who had children. I asked the people around me what they did. Many of those people were older women. They weren’t influencers, they were moms, they didn’t have a profit motive in giving me information, they just gave me suggestions.

Not all of the suggestions were good – hard no to booze on the gums of a teething child, for example. But they were useful. One I remember to this day is not to do for my child what they could do for themselves. As soon as they learn to tie their own shoes, stop tying their shoes. Same for getting dressed and breakfast and doing homework.

Back then, there was a model where in new stages of life you turned to people who were older than you, and they provided support and guidance because they had been there, and they were connected to you. Not because they were selling something or looking for more exposure on social media.

To be clear, I spend plenty of time on social media and find interesting and compelling content there. I know many people don’t have elders they can turn to. My point is that we have a new model, one which, taken to the extreme, ends up isolating all of us.

The model

First, take a season of life and make it an identity. Make it a personality, complete with catch phrases, persecutions and merch. Pregnancy. Parenthood of young children. Parenthood of teens. Empty nester. Perimenopause. Menopause. Divorce. Aging.

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Consultants and coaches work with different models and methodologies, and I think most of them are valid, and provide useful perspectives. Most of the executive coaches I know are committed to helping the people and organizations they work with thrive.

But there’s a particular model that seems to be gaining traction, and I can’t stand it. I call it the authoritarian. Male and female coaches do this, but there is usually a top dog who is a white male, and he has a Process. He has Experience Working with the CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies, and he’ll tell you that all the time.

His Process is Proprietary. It involves lots of assessments, interviews, maybe a 360 or two, and costs lots of money. You can’t start working with him unless you participate fully in the Proprietary Process. Because he is In Demand and Selective About Working with Motivated Clients.

Once he’s decided what exactly you’re doing wrong, he’ll fix you. Trainings, Models, Goals, Checklists, Check-ins and Accountability Tools abound, all set up in advance for you, regardless of how you learn or stay motivated. Because he is An Expert and Knows Things.

If you fail, or don’t progress, or people on your team are unmoved by the Man or the Model, then it’s obviously a failure of you or your team and not the Man or the Model. He Wrote a Best-Selling Book, he Speaks on Stages, he has a Podcast. Of course he has authority.

People who are grieving make decisions they wouldn’t make if they weren’t riven by loss, riddled by bereavement. I know this from personal experience. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” is how I frame decisions I made in grief that had negative consequences.

We kind of know that individually, and you hear it when you’re going through grief. Don’t make any big decisions after a loss, people say. But we’re less aware of how that works culturally when an entire world, country, group, or city is stricken.

We understand that people who lost their homes in the fires in LA are suffering a loss. But it’s clear that the entire area suffered a significant trauma. Houses left standing are uninhabitable because of smoke and ash. The structure exists, from the street it might look unscathed, but it’s too polluted for habitation. And the fires are still burning as I write this.

I’m not a therapist or a grief counselor, but I’ve lived through various kinds of loss, and what I’m noticing today is the cultural impact of unmetabolized grief. Not as a scholar or practitioner of any kind, but as someone who made some regrettable decisions following a loss.

If we don’t make space for grief, individually and communally, it’s difficult to process it. And that lingering grief, metastasized, can show up in unexpected, damaging ways.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with my father when I was in third or fourth grade. We moved so often that I keep track of my personal timeline by which house we were in. This memory takes place in the dining room of our house in Leland Street, in Maryland, so I was eight or nine years old. It would have been about 1970.

I had just learned about the Bay of Pigs crisis in Cuba. My parents told me what it was like thinking we were on the brink of war, before I was born. At nine, I was the same age my father would have been when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“There is no possible way,” I said, furious, “that I will get to be an adult without another nuclear bomb being dropped, without nuclear war. We have the weapons. We have already used them. How can you pretend they won’t be used again by the time I’m your age?” And yes, I really would have talked like that at nine. I envied them their past; their relative safety that was so different from the future I anticipated for myself.

I remember my father’s baffled expression. He couldn’t fault my reasoning, but I think he was surprised I was so angry with him. I blamed my parents as part of a generation that should have done something. About nuclear war, about the environment.

About this time, the EPA was formed, after a number of environmental disasters. We made drawings in class and mine were always of a dark, polluted riverbed on one side and a shiny clean river on the other side. We lived outside of Washington DC and there wasn’t any clean water around, the waterways were largely polluted. When we drove out to Washington State to visit my mother’s family, I remember seeing clean water in Montana, sparkling rivers. On a stop we walked by a creek, and I put my hand in the icy water and brought some to my mouth, the taste like melted ice, pure. My grandparents had a house at Birch Bay, up by the Canadian border, and there is an oil refinery across the bay. It belched smoke, like a malignant monster, and often flames would shoot out of the chimney. “Flares,” the adults said without concern, but I was horrified, the sooty fire leaping from the top of the towering chimney like a Tolkienesque beacon of evil. All that oil, so close to Birch Bay and the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands my grandfather taught me the names of as we moved through them on his boat. I remember scenes on the evening news of birds covered with crude oil and tried to imagine the majestic herons that flew low across the tide flats grounded, sodden in oil.

I am quite certain that in a few years’ time my granddaughter will have pointed observations about what my generation, adults in general, should have been doing these years to protect the planet, the children of the world, a civil society. She will be right. I mean, we knew. Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring came out in 1962 and pesticides and “forever chemicals” still plague us.

I know many people envy those of us in our sixties, and I understand why. We had drills as children in school for nuclear attacks, but never school shootings. I bought a house twenty minutes outside of Seattle as a single mother, in 2001, for just over $200,000. I grew up before global warming and the resulting massive fires and apocalyptic storms. You didn’t need air conditioning in Seattle, even in the summer, until the last decade. I didn’t own an air purifier until the fires started and now I have two, chugging away, from that year when the distant forests burned, and the air looked like dusk in the middle of the day, the sun a lurid, distorted orange disk.

We should all be taking action, we should all be doing whatever small things we can politically, in our community, so we can stand in front of our children or grandchildren and say we did what we could. We know. We must take action. But that’s not what’s on my mind.

What I keep thinking about is that I was wrong when I was a child. And that gives me hope. It is still startling to me that even though many superpowers have access to nuclear weapons, the last ones to be used were when my father was a child, and they were used by the United States.

My granddaughter told me this weekend that worry isn’t bad if it makes you more careful. She was talking about her experiments on the bars at the playground at school, that a little worry can make you cautious. We should be cautious. We have cause for worry, and that worry should impel us to action. But I told her that on the other side, if you can’t work with your worry, it might keep you from doing things you want to do, things you need to do.

What if we can make it through? My mother’s mother lived through the Depression, with what we would now call food insecurity. She told me about it as we baked in her kitchen, as she carefully scraped the last scraps of butter off the waxed paper cover, how she and her sisters had to ask the nuns for food.

I remember the beginning of the pandemic, my daughter working in the ICU at a big county hospital. We weren’t sure if we would all get it and die, but we kept seeing her and her new baby. I kept my will on the top of my desk. That was only five years ago, but it seems like a lifetime.

I’m not discounting how bad things are right now. And it hits harder when we can see all the images, live, when social media is flooded with pictures of friends, family, people we feel connected to, showing the burned-out shells of their homes, or another hospital bombed in Gaza. Of course we grieve, we worry, we mourn. But I don’t want to fall into despair, into hopelessness. I want to be able to tell my grandkids what I did, when they stand, fists on hips, furious at the state of the planet. And I want to work, on the chance, however slim, that we can get through this and make it better for them.

All my life, I have tried to keep the various parts of my existence in separate places. Work, motherhood, writing, community, I wanted them all to be walled off from one another. When I was younger, I didn’t even like when friends from different areas of my life met one another. I remember being at a football game in college and seeing that happen and feeling acute unease. I had to restrain myself from running down the bleachers and separating them.

I’m a deeply private woman who speaks and writes about very personal experiences. Part of the way I preserve my emotional balance is to have areas of my life that are tucked away, just for me and a small circle of my closest friends and family. Which, fundamentally, works for me.

When I was in college, I read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. It was published in 1962 and wasn’t in fashion when I read it in the 80s, but it had a big impact on me because the narrator has that same insistence on separating parts of her life. (There’s a workmanlike summary of the book here.)

The narrator has multiple notebooks, all different colors, in which she writes about aspects of her life. Each separate volume is about something different. The Golden Notebook is the goal, a place in which she will write everything, a bringing together of her thoughts, observations, and dreams, with stories about various seasons in her life. That unified, integrated, Golden Notebook seemed brave, subversive, and slightly terrifying to me.

I started this substack to be about work. Not because work is my preferred topic, but because my job as an executive coach means I think quite a bit about work, and it’s relatively easy for me to come up with 900 words a week about work. 900 words a week, week in and week out, since July 2022 has built 138 posts, which is over 125,000 words, like a book and a half.

And that’s not counting the Bad Boss Brief, which I do with Eugene S. Robinson which is close to 50 episodes and also about work.

I write about other things, like grief and getting older. Those topics are more interesting to me, they are my other notebooks. The personal essays get more engagement, are harder to write and tough to do every week.

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One day, when my sister and I were young, she cut her knee on a piece of playground equipment. She screamed. I ran to her and looked at her leg, and for an instant there was no blood, just the white flesh angling down to the glutinous pad of her kneecap at the bottom of the wound. Then the bleeding started, our parents came running, my father scooped her up and we all went to the emergency room.

It was a clean cut, they said, easy to stitch up.

Some bereavements are clean cuts. While all loss is complex, those that fall within the boundaries of accepted narratives can be easier to navigate. I was nineteen when my father died. My son died when he was nineteen. I loved them both, they loved me, and I grieved their deaths. Everyone understood.

When you lose a beloved parent, child, or spouse, you step into a cultural framework people understand. The story of your loss is like a good house, a sturdy structure. It exists already and you just step into it and find shelter.

My friends and I joked with dark humor that I could play the dead kid card now, because the card meant something, it was currency. Almost every person who finds out that I lost a child gets the same expression. The conversation stops, for a moment, but it is a cultural hat tip to trauma. I see you, bereaved parent. That conversational hurdle is difficult, but it is comforting to be acknowledged.

I thought all bereavement was a clean cut until my mother died in 2022.

My mother was a difficult person, and we were estranged for most of my adult life. It took years to strangle the hope that she would change, that she would get therapy or find recovery or leverage another vector for self-awareness. She never did.

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My house was built in the 1940s. I don’t know much about the people who lived here before me, but I have questions. The green shag carpet? The blue flowered wallpaper glued on with a mystery adhesive almost impossible to remove?

The cosmetic issues I was able to see and solve soon after I moved in. But every time we get anything fixed or remodeled, more questions come up. Right now, an electrician is upgrading the kitchen in preparation for a new oven, and he’s shaking his head in disbelief. He pointed out a cord to me, an actual extension cord that was used inside the wall instead of wire. For decades.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Who would do that?”

Like I said, I have questions.

This happens in the workplace all the time. Some previous manager decided on a process that makes no sense now. It might have made sense then, or it may have always been a folly. Decisions about infrastructure, from software to HVAC, are made quickly and without thought, often driven only by cost considerations. And years later, as people huddle beneath coats in offices where the air is so cold their breath is visible, someone has to get that fixed. It sucks if that someone is you. It’s worse if you didn’t see it coming.

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