Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  The only story sexier than a woman under thirty starting a company was two women under thirty starting a company. Cover story in Fast Company, profile in the Styles section, slideshow on Vogue dot com: “Workplace as Vulva—And Why Not?” Our interior designer conceptualized our layout and decor to be a visual representation of our brand: female-facing, luxurious yet accessible, and totally transparent. Break boundaries by literally having none. My office was one of the few with walls and a door, but they were glass walls, and the door itself was just a glass wall with a handle.

  From my desk, I could see the entire floor of my small but dedicated kingdom, a dozen ladies wearing noise-canceling headphones, sitting at long marbled-pink tables, or ruining their thoracic spines on jewel-toned velvet couches. Emerald and sapphire, garnet and citrine. Even the girl we hired to be the receptionist was usually wearing headphones, which someone should really do something about.

  Last night, I told Maren she needed to take some PTO and the office definitely felt more chill without her. Probably because nothing was on fire. I put some lavender essential oil in the stone diffuser on my desk and took a deep breath. In between a lilac Pusheenicorn I got from Secret Santa and a vase of pink ranunculus, I had a little inspiration library: The Glitter Plan, Big Magic, Sparkle, You Are a Badass, You Yes You Are a Unicorn, Style Your Mind, Mind Your Magic, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Peace Is Every Breath: A Practice for Our Busy Lives.

  Thich Nhat Hanh says, “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself,” and I knew that Maren must be suffering deeply. She definitely didn’t seem as grateful as she used to be. I slipped on my therapeutic gel toe separators, curled up in the papasan chair in the corner of my office, and googled burnout or depression which more dangerous and leaky gut SSRI addiction and pitta-deranged panchakarma and acting out behavior alkaline reset hormone imbalance clean recipe juice fast greens tonic.

  “Is now a good time?” Khadijah was knocking on the glass wall to my office.

  I waved her in. “Did you see the press release?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought it was pretty good, right?”

  “Do you want to start with the editorial calendar for the rest of Black History Month or do you want to see the slideshow of your morning routine?”

  “Slideshow! Here, you sit at my desk,” I said. I pulled my chair closer so I could see her laptop. Khadijah was SVP of editorial strategy and she’d earned every letter in that title because she did the job of, like, ten people: writing the copy, editing the copy, taking the photos, editing the photos, A/B testing the headlines, publishing eight posts a day. She was almost better at writing in my voice than I was.

  Ladies, I have a confession to make. When I was in college a hundred years ago, my morning routine used to go something like this: I would hit “snooze” two or three times before jumping in the shower, put my wet hair in a bun because I didn’t have the time to blow-dry, and grab a bacon, egg, and cheese from a food cart on my way to class. My chin kept breaking out and my legs were covered in patches of scaly eczema. I always felt like if I could just find an extra thirty minutes somewhere, I could catch up, but I never found it.

  Now I know that anyone who wants to actually get anything done today needs to get up before dawn, so let’s get dark with this dinacharya.

  “Damn, girl,” I said. “That sounds just like me.” We knew from Maren’s analytics that posts that started with “I have a confession to make” or “I have a secret to admit” or “There’s something I’ve never told anyone before” got the most traffic and elicited the most emotional responses in the comments section. “But I wonder if the eczema bit is TMI?” I was so in tune with my body that even thinking about eczema made me want to itch until I bled.

  She deleted it.

  “And we’re going to define dinacharya somewhere?”

  “In a sidebar,” she said.

  I watched over her shoulder as she flipped through the slideshow. There I was, smiling at my own reflection in my bathroom mirror, holding up my silver tongue scraper (not my actual scraper but a new one for the shoot); me in a white crop top doing ardha chandra chapasana as the sun rose above the East River, light dappling my yoga mat. In the next slide, I’m watching the sunrise out the window, holding an earthen Kintsukuroi bowl of overnight oats and chia seeds with coconut sugar.

  “Is there anything we can do about my jaw?” I tapped her screen with the tip of my nail. I hated how my underbite looked in photographs. Having spent the entirety of my twenties sharing my life on social media, I was very aware of my angles, conscious of the face I allowed the world to see.

  In Photoshop, Khadijah fixed my face one pixel at a time. When we first launched, Maren had explained to me, If we’re going to be two white girls with a startup, we can’t be two white girls who don’t know we’re white. I don’t want any press that’s like, “They didn’t get the diversity memo.” I agreed that I was white, but I didn’t feel as bad about it as Maren did. Khadijah was our very first hire. In the media kit photos, her box braids looked bananas. Maren wanted to give her 5 percent equity because of reparations, but I talked her down to 2.5.

  I still was confused about whether I was supposed to let Khadijah know that I knew she was black or if I was supposed to pretend that her blackness never crossed my mind.

  “Your skin looks great,” I said. “Are you using hyaluronic acid?”

  “Nope.”

  “Pore-refining mask?”

  “I’m not doing anything different,” she said, trying to suppress a yawn. For the shoot, she’d had to arrive at my apartment before dawn.

  “Maybe it’s just that color on you,” I said. “What is it, MAC Rebel?”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll get this posted as soon as I finish editing your face.”

  “Don’t stay too late tonight, okay?”

  She’d already put her headphones back on so I wasn’t sure if she heard me.

  I should wear more lipstick, I thought, looking at myself in selfie mode on my phone. But my lips were thin, and drawing attention to them would draw attention to my jaw, which was more Samantha Bee than Reese Witherspoon. Not that I didn’t totally admire them both for being older women who were still visible in public.

  There is a typo in a headline on the site , Maren texted with a screenshot.

  You are supposed to be resting!!!!!

  I am resting. I am in bed right now.

  You are working.

  Not working, just scrolling.

  She couldn’t turn it off, not even for a day.

  Hey , I texted Evan. He was our first investor, the person who’d made all this possible. I tried to only ask him for favors when it was truly necessary.

  Sup

  Can we use your house this weekend? I think Maren needs detox.

  Am I invited?

  Ummmmmmm , I said. I knew what he was really asking, but my hands were full with Maren. Girls’ trip?

  Totes magotes , he said. Just lmk when you’re coming by for the keys.

  Maren

  As soon as I saw the tweet, I knew I wanted to help,” Evan said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. I mean I will be.”

  “Because I’m sorry to tell you this, but you look like shit,” he said and we both laughed. I had to laugh. In a couple of weeks, Evan and I would be in back-to-back meetings with VCs. “Sleep-deprived teen goth who swears these jeans must have shrunk in the wash” was not the best look for me to deliver our value prop. Male founders could get away with a sloppy genius aesthetic, but I had to be a brand ambassador for self-care.

  “So take the weekend—take the whole week if you need it. My parents hardly ever go up to the house anymore. Put your phone on airplane mode, light a fire, take a bath, whatever
you need to get back in fighting shape. And most importantly?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t read the comments.”

  “Too late,” Devin and I said at the same time.

  Evan’s penthouse on Rivington was all high ceilings and right angles and cold daylight. The open kitchen had a distressed reclaimed wood light fixture with vintage Edison bulbs hanging from it, the exposed filaments like fairies trapped upside down in jars. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a wraparound terrace and views of Lower Manhattan. Evan had made a small fortune while he was still at Wharton, when the mobile-friendly cryptocurrency trading bot he built was acquired by one of the world’s largest banks. But more people knew him as the Bachelorette runner-up who abandoned the bachelorette during the rose ceremony of the fantasy suite episode in a radical protest of the show’s amplification of toxic masculinity. “I will no longer be complicit,” he said, before ripping off his mic and riding off into the tropical night, shirtless, on a motorcycle. Girls at home, gripping their third goblets of rosé, lost their minds, googled toxic masculinity, started petitions for Evan to become the next bachelor, even as he told TMZ he was done with the franchise.

  He was our first investor and one of our most trusted advisors, the guru behind our exit strategy. Through his connections, he’d helped us raise five million in our series A.

  “Alexa!” Evan yelled in the direction of the living room. “Play the Julie Ruin.”

  “Shuffling songs by the Julie Ruin on Amazon Music,” a pleasant woman’s voice answered and a bouncy keyboard intro sounded through the speaker.

  It was only polite to stay beyond the length of a single song, let Evan show us how he synced all his home furnishings to voice-activated electronic devices.

  “Siri. What. Do. I. Have. In. The. Fridge,” he said, and photographs of a milk carton, a hunk of cheese, and a six-pack of Stella scrolled across the screen of his iPhone. “This has integrated functionality with synchronous voice activation and live feed from the interior cameras. I get notifications when I’m out of beer. My boy Jay? He’s at Samsung now. I get beta versions of everything.”

  “Is it just me or is the future men yelling at computers named after women? And the woman always answering with a smile in her voice?” I said.

  “Who’s yelling?”

  “You’re commanding,” Devin suggested.

  “I’m sure there’s a setting to change the gender of the AI.”

  I didn’t think he was right, but I also had to be careful about how many times a day I told other people they were wrong. I had to give Evan credit—he was one of the first people to really get what Devin and I were trying to do. A couple of years before, we were naive and arrogant enough to think that our idea would be a no-brainer for female angel investors, but we got no after no after no. Their wellness portfolio was full, or they didn’t see the need for yet another social media platform they would have to check and monitor (no, it’s a community, we insisted), or we couldn’t convince them that self-care was a concept that could be packaged, marketed, sold. We lost one pitch competition to an app that would tell you how long the line was for each women’s restroom at a venue like Madison Square Garden; their “revenue model” was to run ads for antiperspirant and low-cal Moscato. The founders were two energetic white guys wearing short-sleeved shirts buttoned up to their necks and Clark Kent glasses. If you really want to disrupt women’s restrooms, I thought, just add more fucking stalls.

  Along the upstairs hallway Evan had a series of framed movie posters: Kill Bill, Mad Max: Fury Road, Silence of the Lambs, Thelma and Louise, Erin Brockovich. I could almost hear the ghostly cries of all the girls Evan led down this hall: OMG, I love that movie.

  “Bedroom TV up!” he yelled and I watched from the doorway to the master as a flatscreen rose slowly from the bench at the foot of the bed.

  Devin raised her eyebrows at me, trying to encourage more enthusiasm on my end. Don’t you want to be rich, rich like this? This was an aspirational field trip, to show us what was possible, if we kept up the grind.

  My fantasies were almost too boring to put on a vision board: Pay off $68,000 of student loan debt from NYU. Get my mom a new car to replace her 2002 Saturn. Buy an item from Duane Reade that cost more than twenty dollars without first checking my bank account balance.

  Richual was making money, but we were putting it all back into the company. “You have to spend money to make money!” Evan liked to remind us; he was always getting on my case for trying to cut costs in any way. “This isn’t a 501(c)(3), Maren. You’re in the weeds again.”

  But I liked being in the weeds. There was no vertigo down in the swamp, no sense of falling off a high cliff of unrealistic projections or expectations. Running a function on a column of cells was my style of self-soothing. If I could isolate the point at which our social spend stopped effectively acquiring users, didn’t they want to know? And were we worrying enough about providing value to our current users? Even when I wasn’t staring at a timeline of key performance indicators on my laptop screen, numbers and words scrolled through my brain like a Jenny Holzer installation of my own self-loathing: “BEING A GOOD GIRL IS WORTH NO MORE THAN $50,000 SO ADJUST YOUR EXPECTATIONS OR BEHAVIOR.” That’s what Devin and I were each making—a childless millennial living wage in any city but New York—but I had a pile of credit card debt ($4,000 dental implant; $1,000 for new clothes, produced at ethical garment factories that comply with all labor laws, to upgrade my ill-fitting thrift store “here’s a woman who is so body positive she doesn’t own a mirror” wardrobe; $1,200 for a weekend in Miami because what’s another $1,200 when you’re already $5,000 in the hole?) on top of my student loans.

  Meanwhile, Devin had a multimillion-dollar safety net—her inheritance and the life insurance from her dad’s sudden death, plus the money from the sale of the apartment she’d grown up in. I waffled between resentment (Couldn’t she see how much of a difference an extra ten grand would make in my life? Why did it have to be fifty-fifty?) and pity (Both her parents died when she was only in her twenties).

  For Christmas, she’d given me a one-month subscription ($650) to Euphebe, a plant-based meal-delivery service, which seemed like an expensive way of telling me she’d noticed the weight I’d gained since we launched.

  I made her a hooped cross-stitch of a bar graph showing our user growth over the past six months. While she’d been restricting, I’d been producing.

  There was a peal of laughter. Devin had her back up against the door to the walk-in closet, playfully pushing Evan away. Evan didn’t always have the best instincts in terms of personal space. He was a close-talker, someone who made you feel like he was giving you all of his attention, whether you wanted it or not. Our younger staff lost their shit when he came by the office. Maybe it was his status as a minor TV personality, or maybe it was just the rarity of having a man around HQ. I once heard our receptionist describe Evan’s scruffily bearded and vaguely irresponsible attractiveness quotient as “retro Mark Ruffalo.”

  We needed to get out of here.

  “Thanks, Evan,” I said. “For everything. Your place is great. I love it.” My depression gave me the personality of a fembot, spewing phrases I’d been programmed with. But Evan didn’t seem to notice.

  He pulled out a ring of at least twenty keys. “You won’t need all these,” he said, “but the yellow one’s the front door, the red one is the doorknob, this one is for the barn slash pool house, and I think these are for the guest suite above the garage. There are other outbuildings but those don’t matter. Mailbox key you won’t need.”

  “Thanks, Evan. Seriously.”

  “Come here,” he said, drawing me in for a side hug. Up close, I noticed a poppy seed in his teeth and the blackheads at the tip of his nose. “Get some rest, and then we’re back in the clouds, right? Ten thousand feet?” He held up a hand for a high five.

  * * *<
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  ...

  In the elevator, I said, “Hey, girl, I’ve been known to raise some capital, but I couldn’t figure out how to raise my TV until I met you.”

  “Siri, what beverage. Can I offer. To this female,” Devin said into her phone.

  I appreciated the emotional labor she put into making fun of Evan for me. Devin was at Barnard at the same time his younger brother was at Columbia and they were like family—a weirdly incestuous family. According to Evan, Devin was one of the few women he could be “real” with, because others saw him as a well-connected ATM. (I saw him as a well-connected ATM.)

  Outside, John was waiting for us in the rental car. Devin was in charge of the playlist, and I sat in the backseat and held a gallon tub of rice and mung beans that she promised would “de-age” me. She couldn’t resist a before and after. John had never been Devin’s number-one fan, but I convinced him that he needed a relaxing weekend in the country, too.

  First up: “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran and Devin started to dance in the passenger seat, swimming backward with her fists, while John cursed under his breath, trying to get on the FDR.

  “I don’t know how many cleanses you’ve done before,” she said, “but I can already tell this one is going to be really fun.”

  John made it through the second chorus before he asked, “Do you have any real music, like John Denver?”

  “Ell-oh-ell,” Devin said, turning to give me a look that was gently teasing, like How did you end up with this one? “Is John Denver even alive?”