The math I've been doing at 1am
On layoff-proofing myself, which is not a thing btw
For six months, my workday had two shifts. The first one ran from whenever I woke up (usually 7:30) until about 6 at night, like a proud corporate american. The second one started after dinner, after wrangling the kids to have their baths and making sure the teen did their homework, after the kids were down, and it ran until 1 or 2 in the morning. During that second shift I wasn’t even doing new work half the time. I was checking work I’d already finished. Triple checking, quadruple checking, and then checking whether the team had done theirs, rummaging through google sheets and notion docs looking for a box I’d left unchecked. Whatever time was left went to figuring out how to do more.
No one told me to do this, by the way. I think if my manager knew that I was putting in this much effort, he’d probably put me on leave. This working style was invented by yours truly. It started the same January my husband got laid off after five years of doing everything right. I wrote about that Tuesday when it happened, and at the time I thought the essay was more or less just me venting about how crappy it felt. It took me a few months to notice what the layoff had installed in me. My stomach turns on itself every time another founder posts about scaling to millions with a team of four, and every time, the same thought shows up: I need to make myself irreplaceable, and the only way I don’t get replaced is if I can prove I can do 5 people’s job.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you that mindset is toxic and I quickly learned to let it go and now I do yoga, namaste namasteeee.
I did not.
Anyway, today I’m writing about what I’ve actually been doing about it, none of which is a system.
This article is sponsored by Lovable.
Which is a little funny, given what I’m about to tell you, because Lovable is where a marketer with zero engineering background goes to build actual working software. I’ve used it to ship the voting platform for the Golden Thumb Awards, and another public voting site for Slate’s rebrand campaign, and it shows up later in this essay as evidence. Lovable lets you describe what you want in plain English and it builds it, which means “I’m not technical” is a choice.
Being the Swiss Army knife was not the problem
I want to be clear about something, because the setup of this essay makes it sound like ambition is the evil villain. Doing five people’s job was never an issue for me. I have wanted to be the Swiss Army knife since long before I even knew what the term meant. Early in my career I was the one volunteering to learn work outside my scope. I wanted to be sitting in meetings with people who were higher up. I didn’t mind taking on the extra thing because I genuinely wanted to know how it worked. I am a proud overachiever. I don’t do things half-assed, and my bar for excellent is one I haven’t even cleared myself, which is probably why I’m so critical of my own work. That gnawing self-doubt has, in its own backwards way, made me a better marketer.
The newest blade on the knife is that I can build things now. Me. A person with a master’s in professional writing and a deep, documented history of AI skepticism. When vibe coding started showing up everywhere, I had every excuse imaginable not to lean in. Too busy to figure it out. Too skeptical of any output. And if I’m being so for real right now, I didn’t have the patience to learn how to properly prompt. But when I got handed budget constraints and a tight deadline at the same time, that pressure had me opening Lovable one night to describe the voting platform I needed for an awards program I was running. A few hours later, the site was up and ready for voting. People praised how creative and beautiful it was, and they were even more impressed when I told them I built the entire thing myself in one night. Using 40 credits.
If you’ve been following me for a while, then you know how skeptical I’ve been about this stuff. Skeptical enough that I even brought it up in therapy. I admitted to her I have these fears that don’t even agree with each other:
If I don’t keep up with the new tech, I’ll be one of the folks who fall behind, heaven forbid I have to be bad at something for a hot minute before I figure it out.
But if I do lean in, then I’m inadvertently cheating, and my creativity doesn’t count anymore.
And underneath both of those, the fear my ego least wanted to say out loud: that using the tool would be admitting to people that I’m not very smart.
There’s no winning move in that head. Eventually I had to remember my roots. I built a whole career on being okay with learning things outside my scope. It made no sense to suddenly draw the line at the one skill that would uplevel me the most, just because it’s the newest tool in the box.
So no, my personal ambition didn’t need fixing. But the layoff did give it the shaking of it’s life. It’s crazy that the same instinct that used to feel like innate curiosity started feeling I was running against a clock, and no amount of compliments on the work my team and I produced could make me believe it couldn’t all be ripped out from underneath us.
Building the thing that can’t lay me off
A while back, before any of this crippling anxiety about working myself into oblivion, I had decided that I never want to apply for a job again. And before you check me on this privilege pedestal, this dream was mostly because I’d just gone through a grueling six-week interview process where the company basically admitted they didn’t hire me because they couldn’t verify my social skillset on my personal channels (crazy story for another day). And partly because I kept watching people who had less experience than me (on paper) get their foot in the door, and ample opportunities handed to them, because they had a personal brand and I didn’t. So I took that as a sign that I had better spend my energy building a name for myself.
I’ve been investing in myself as a creator with the same seriousness I bring to my day job. The essay around my husband’s layoff landed me a year-long brand partnership. And more partnerships kept coming, and then I signed with management, and that was when this entire circus stopped feeling like just a side thing. Sponsored posts, speaking, hosting, consulting. It’s become a second stream of income that now out-earns an avg full-time job.
I’m careful with how I share this stuff because I say that not to humbleflex. I’m sharing it because I need you to understand the math I was doing at 1am. If the worst happens, like if all of my fears around work comes true, there is now income that no restructuring email can touch.
Also, a sidenote, for a long time, my answer to any of this going well was “I got lucky.” I still believe that wholeheartedly. But I’ve also stopped letting luck take all the credit, because I also spent years building this muscle. I’ve written and filmed countless post when nobody was reading or watching. I’ve dm’ed brands that have never answered back. I kept showing up consistently, for years, when it earned me nothing. Sure, luck with timing and place but ultimately, it was the sweat I put in. If this was all luck, it can’t protect my family, because luck eventually runs out. But work is something that you can keep plugging away with.
Is the creator economy getting crowded? Extremely, and I don’t have a differentiation answer to share because I’m still working through it. I mean, idk..are you even reading this right now?? Plug a ladybug emoji if you read up to this point. What works for me might not work for you even if you followed my playbook to a T. The one thing that stays true though is that while everyone else is niching down, I’m niching into being the person stays honest with herself—and that’s to do it while it feels good and I’m still excited but pivot when I begin having existential dread everyday. I know this newfound energy won’t last forever. So I gotta keep moving while it’s hawt.
Harsh reality that my ego kept me from acknowledging
This third thing cost the least but was by far the hardest. While I was running second shifts, my husband, the one who’d just lost his job, was carrying the parental duties so I could keep proving I couldn’t be fired. The man loses his income and I respond by completely disappearing. The mom guilt was the worst I’ve ever felt. Even through my worst postpartum depression, it’s not comparable to the level of guilt I felt with work. Which is a choice I made. Here’s what I kept thinking to myself:
My kids are young exactly once, and I was building them a childhood where mom sacrifices nights and weekends to keep us afloat, and when my 4 yr old said, “i miss you” even while I’ve been in the house the entire day…I don’t know.. I just don’t want that time period to exist in their memory at all.
That’s what finally made me start acknowledging this mental load that I’ve been carrying. To my husband first, which sounds like it would be easy convo because it’s so obvious… except our egos are strange about admitting that we need reassurance. We desperately want it and yet refuse to ask for it. And I think that’s because asking means admitting the fear is very real. I’d been performing fine, for months. Performing fine is my best act yet. But when I started telling the people around me that this actually didn’t feel good. That I’m starting to question what the point of all this was. That I felt immense shame and guilt. The relief that came from people not judging me. I was met with so much care and understanding. Made me wonder why I was trying to make everything feel A-okay when it wasn’t.
I wish I could tell you the three things add up to a solid system. They're a work in progress. Some weeks I still catch myself checking slack at 11 at night like a raccoon returning to a good dumpster. But for the most part, the second shift is pretty much gone. My company can fill my seat in a matter of a few weeks if they wanted to. My 4yr old can't fill hers at all. That's the math I should've been doing at 1am. Not the one where I prove I'm worth five people to a company that could, y'know, fire me after five years anyway.
🐞
🐞(your kids can’t really fire you either) ❤️