Love the process: written for a sweet sad girl I know.

I work with a very sweet girl who’s very sad right now. Our sales numbers for ForageSF are way down. Just suddenly people don’t seem to want to go foraging, and she takes this as a sign she’s not doing a good job, and I think also that she’s somehow not a good person. It makes me so sad to see, and also feels so familiar because Ive been in that exact place.

I remember when I first started doing my underground dinners. I’d send out an email to my list and then spend the next hours and days obsessively refreshing Eventbrite looking at sales, every purchase a little sign that I mattered, that my ideas were good, that people liked me. She’s doing that right now. I can feel it from here. And oh man did they back then. Dinners would sell out, reporters would call, people would tell me how amazing I was wherever I went. Front page of newspapers, everyone I met knew what I did and loved it. It was a drug. It was important then, because it filled a cup for me that really needed filling. It was almost like the universe looked at me and said “you’ve had it hard these first 26 years, I’m going to go ahead and give you totally unreasonable success for a few years so you can learn that you matter, and then I’m going to take it away.”

What I want that sweet girl I work with to know about those Eventbrite refreshes and the validation and the feeling of the whole world lining up to tell me I was good: that wasn’t the gift. The gift was learning to do things that I cared about. The gift for her is that she found work she cares about enough to be brought to tears. Most people spend their whole lives feeling their work doesn’t matter, numb to how they fill their days. She’s the opposite of numb. And that can feel like pain. But it’s the right place to be. It’s rare and it’s worth something.

Now people don’t know what I do. I’ve been working for years without anything I can really point to that would be called a success. Podcasts no one listens to, software platforms no one uses. I’m living a life where each new person I meet just sees me for what they see, and what I say to them when we talk. There is no history for me with them, nothing I’ve done in the past matters to them. I don’t carry history or prestige with me. I don’t walk into a room with the shine of people having heard of what I’ve done. Yet I’m happier and more satisfied and at peace now than I ever was back then.

I won’t pretend I don’t care. I check views and likes and opens and visits. Of course I want people to like the things I create, buy the tickets I’m selling. Not caring is its own kind of failure. We should care. But what I’ve learned is that caring about the work and the outcome are two different things. We all die. And everyone we know dies. Even if you’re remembered for 100 generations that’s just a blink. We’ll all be forgotten and every trace of our existence will be deleted or covered with what comes next. There’s a quote I love that I’ll paraphrase from Pema Chödrön: “we’re like children building sand castles below the tide line.” We work and push and stress at building and acquiring more and more things and likes and experiences and attention, and in the end it will all.just.wash.away.

What’s left is the process. It’s being someone who cares so much that the numbers make them cry. It’s the learning and growing. It’s living in the ocean. You can pop your head up and see the storm and the waves: they’re real, they’re up there, but the ocean is where you want to spend your time. Sales will rise, sales will fall. Accolades will come, and they will go. It’s like the surf, lapping at our sand castles, and eventually the tide will come in. All we have is this moment, this idea, this interaction, this day, this chance to learn.

It’s ok to be worried. I’m worried too sometimes. The world is scary and full of uncertainty, we can never really know if we’re doing the right thing. None of that matters in the end. What matters is you do a good job. You push yourself and try to grow. You do things you’ve never done before, even when they’re scary. You’re kind. You found work that you care enough about to cry, which most people never do.