What’s Your Problem?

“In her own way, Jane was trying to help me. When I was at NYU, [playwright and film director] David Mamet told me that I should be “an artist,” “speak the text,” not sell out to “commercial horseshit,” etc. “Jane” told me that in order to break into acting, I had to be likable, fuckable, have straight, blow-dried hair, and pert nipples. On a certain level she was more brilliant than Mamet, because she actually had solutions.” - Nancy Balbirer, on former friend, “Jane” aka Jennifer Aniston

“You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.” - Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker (xo to Lindsey at A Design So Vast for this quote)

I have mixed feelings about Penelope Trunk and her advice blog located at the ‘intersection of work and life.’

That’s a hot crosswalk and a great place to be. I like intersections and borders and the lines between and cracks in the sidewalk and all the interesting, passionate, generative stuff therein. In my imaginary world, daisies and/or global peace grow there.

So sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is funny. Sometimes I think she’s real. Sometimes I think she’s Doing The Right Thing like when she writes about Asperger’s and work and explains in mundane, scintillating, illustrative detail how she compensates for social deficits on a daily and minute-by-minute basis.

Sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is Liz Fucking Phair without the melody and the beat: her voice gets bare, flat, and disassociative when she writes about emotional, controversial, personal stuff. Hemingway does the same thing. It’s a neat trick.

Sometimes Penelope Trunk infuriates me. Still, she is successfully hopskotching through all the right squares, because she’s trying to assess and live in the real world. Like when she writes that being attractive is important to your career and then goes to great investigative lengths to document this shocking information with statistics and studies.

Newsflash: this is not news. It is a pretty interesting story – HOT PEOPLE always makes for an interesting read – but if this is true, which it is, what do you do about it? Penelope Trunk works out and looks hot and seems to be (maybe, one day) contemplating cosmetic surgery. That’s fine but I’m not sure that’s advice.

And what about ugly people? Should ugly people just go home and get over the whole career thing? How will they pay the rent? What will they eat? Maybe, implicitly, Penelope Trunk is a Darwinist and thinks/hopes/anticipates that ugly people will just un-profit and un-breed themselves out of existence.

Maybe Penelope Trunk doesn’t watch daytime TV, either.

So I read her blog and it stirs up wildly conflicting lovehatey kinds of emotions which is great because at least I feel something when I read it (unlike a lot of other blogs, ahem). Right now, however, I have an entirely new feeling for Penelope Trunk: respect.

Sometimes Penelope Trunk seems like the Empress Dowager High Dictator of women who benefit from feminism but sneer at their privileges. She writes that women should not report sexual harassment (and in fact leverage it), that the gender wage gap is a myth, and oh yeah if you want to succeed, get hot (we may have covered this, already).

And then, with a single tweet, she breaks my feminist heart wide and lovingly open with her off-hand, raw bravery:

I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

And then, if I wasn’t already loveshocked into admiring her willingness to tell the truth – that every day,  women are whiteknuckling it through board meetings or nursing or teaching or hamburger-flipping or taking the bus or rushing to soccer games while our fertility (or lack thereof) grows or ungrows decisions and futures – Penelope Trunk writes this:

Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working. Most miscarriages run their course over weeks. Even if you are someone who wanted the baby and are devastated by the loss, you’re not going to sit in bed for weeks. You are going to pick up your life and get back to it, which includes going back to work.

This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day. That we don’t acknowledge this is absurd. That it is such a common occurrence and no one thinks it’s okay to talk about is terrible for women.

Throughout history, the way women have gained control of the female experience is to talk about what is happening, and what it’s like. We see that women’s lives are more enjoyable, more full, and women are more able to summon resilience when women talk openly about their lives.

Yes.

I once went to work Monday morning after spending Sunday at the hospital presumably having a miscarriage.  Then I promptly went home because I was unwell and sad and had to explain to The Powers That Be why I was leaving.

When I came back the next day, the sympathetic stares and averted eyes made me feel like a fecund, failing, un-professional woman.

So yes, we should be able to talk about it.

I have two children. One pregnancy was courted and encouraged and passionately welcomed. The other was poorly-timed and unplanned and I made sacrifices for it. I turned down a dream project that would have paid twice what I have ever made in a year, because I wouldn’t be able to see it through.

And I was depressed. Not ‘blue’, but existentially, clinically, depressed. I had to see a psychologist. Medication was prescribed. I just did not want to be what I was: pregnant.

Two things pulled me out of it.

1. I already had a child, who was love embodied. So I knew with cellular certainty that while I did not want to be pregnant, when this new life arrived, I would fall in love all over again.
2. I felt connected to the women who came before me. All the women, throughout all the ages, who have been pregnant when they don’t want to be. It feels like a trap, like yes, your body has betrayed you even though it is doing what it is biologically programmed to do. I suddenly understood – again, on a cellular, biological, blood-coursing-through-my veins level – why a woman’s ability to control fertility is the essence of her freedom.

I joined the sisterhood, cosmically speaking.

And so the title of Penelope Trunk’s piece gets it just about right: You can’t manage your work life [or anything really] if you can’t talk about it.

If you look at pictures of ‘career’ women in the 70s and 80s, when white middle class women were discovering the workplace (everyone else was already there) you’ll see a lot of buttoned up, mannish suits. Being in the workplace, it seems to me, meant erasing visible traces of femininity. Maybe women had to be caricatures of men to succeed.

And that is why I have new respect for Penelope Trunk. Because she thinks – and acts! and writes! – from the base assumption that women should not, at any time or in any way, have to camoflage the physical realities of their lives and their bodies in order to be acceptable in the workplace.

Sing it, sister. You’re braver than me.

P.S. I promise not to hate (much) if you get Botox.