Alice in Corporate Wonderland, Chapter 1: Running with the brakes on
In the last few days, I have been frantically reading the The Naked Truth: A working woman’s manifesto on business and what really matters by Margaret Heffernan (Jory, thank you so much for the recommendation).
Even if I felt a little bit skeptical before reading it, after the first few pages I was completely hooked. What Margaret was describing was exactly my corporate work experience. The enthusiasm, initial rewards, the successive disappointment, and then the eerie feeling that something is wrong, which sets in after a while and never goes away. Alice in Corporate Wonderland.
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. ‘I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.” “You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
For the longest time, I tried to act like women’s issues in the workplace could not affect me. After all, I was raised a boy by my father. In his mind, even if I had a woman’s body–which was disappointing, unreliable, and dangerous–I still had a male mind. As old fashion as he was, he wanted for me exactly what he had for himself: he wanted me to be an engineer.
It didn’t work out that way. I ran away as far as I could as soon as I could. Maybe becoming an engineer, as my father dreamed for me, it wouldn’t have been all that bad. But at that time, it felt as threatening as a lobotomy. I was craving for my identity, and I could not find myself in the image of the “ingegner Pavese” that my father was pushing on me.
Even if I’ve had my passionate feminist periods and I am deeply interested in gender discrimination in the workplace, I just assumed that being a woman would not make a difference in the asexual work environment. At least, not for me.
I was wrong. It does make a difference. And I am not even talking about how the corporate world treats me, but how I feel in my corporate job. I completely feel the pain of living in the two disconnected worlds Margaret Heffernan describes (”work” and “my life”); so much that I often feel I’m deceiving myself and my employer when every workday I put my corporate mask and costume on and go to work. I get so exhausted at the end of the day because of the added effort of being someone I am really not for so many hours each day.
I suffer the disconnection between my values and corporate values. My company is a very good one: it takes honesty and integrity seriously. It values its customer. It’s fiscally responsible. It has great benefits for its employees and doesn’t believe in periodic layoffs. But at the end of the day, it’s still a large corporation and behaves like one. Its values make sense in that context and can be explained rationally, but are not mine. And yet, I have to make decisions and take actions based on them every day.
The true proof that I’m really a woman–rather than a man’s mind trapped in a woman’s body–comes from the errors I’ve made and continue to make in the workplace: I take things way too personally; I constantly look for outside rewards and recognitions because I don’t feel good enough; I want others to discover my value rather than making the effort of making my value impossible to ignore; I hope that somebody will hand me my perfect job rather than making the effort of creating one myself; I bash myself mercilessly and then I complain that others don’t recognize how good I am. Not always, but often enough to make me restless and make it hard for me to be happy at work.
Most important of all, I push only halfway because I don’t completely believe in what I do. I care about my career, but I don’t believe in it. I have a lot of ideas about how to do my job, but I don’t always push hard to make them happen. Even if I have in me the passion and the drive, they are just not turned all the way up. I run with the brakes on, and it’s a very wasteful way to run.
Perhaps, I run with my brakes on because I am afraid of where running full speed would get me. I see how it is to be at the top and I don’t like it. I see people married to the company, with less time to dedicate to their family, their health, and their creativity. I see people aiming to the top, driven to the point of losing the ability to care and be kind to others.
Which brings me back to my father. In my twenties, I desperately wanted to be loved by him, but I rarely did what he wanted me to do. I wanted to be loved for what I was in all my young woman’s raw passion, beauty, creativity, insecurities, mistakes, and imperfections, not for the male ideal he wished I was. Now, I desperately want to be appreciated and recognized by my company for what I am, with all my raw passion, beauty, creativity, insecurities, mistakes, and imperfections, not for the corporate (male) ideal that my company seems to appreciate so much.
Virago
From dictionary.com “word of the day” for October 26 (I know, I am a little behind with my readings):
Virago: an ill-tempered, overbearing woman; also, a woman of great strength and courage.
Isn’t it interesting? I thought that men would find difficult to maintaining two contraddictory thoughts in their mind at the same time. I guess I was wrong. Or perhaps this is not a contraddictory definition after all?
Good night, and good luck
I went to see Good Night and Good Luck tonight at the Ambler Theater, and, after a long time, I remembered why I like cinema.
I loved the Ambler Theater. Scott and I had several frightening experiences in multiplex theaters and solemny promised to each other never to repeat the horror again (the screamingly loud stupid stream of ads, about 25 minutes of it, insulting to anybody who is older than 8; the poisonous popcorns that make you sick; the general atmosphere of video arcade; the feel of humiliation rather than of pleasure). So, we just don’t go to see movies in theaters; we much more enjoy the domestic Netflix experience. But small movie theaters are the real deal.
The Ambler theater is a beautiful space with good movies and special events. We noticed that there was an older crowd, and it was great. It felt like I was among my people.
Good Night, and Good Luck is a really good movie. Often movies that describe real events or people play like a disjoined sequence of vignettes; they want to cover too much in too little time and they loose depth and connection. Clooney’s movie is very tight. It describes a very specific and limited series of events and stays close to it. It takes time to focus on the details, the atmosphere, and the feelings. Of course, it has a strong an unapologetic message of social responsibility in difficult political times, but it’s also a very good movie. And David Strathairn is amazing as Edward Murrow.
A few additional observations:
- The 50s come to life not only in the beautiful black-and-white, the costumes, and the scenography, not only in the omnipresent cloud of cigarette smoke, but in all the little details like the eyeglasses with lenses made of glass (which, if you can believe it, were not anti-reflective, superlight, and UV filtered).
- Frank Langella’s Bill Paley demonstrates almost painfully how lonely it can be at the top, when you don’t share your power and everybody tries to work not with you but around you.
- The actors were not beautiful young actors; they looked like older, normal looking people (well, except George Clooney, of course). And I realized that because they seemed real and I could distinguish one from the other, I cared. Even when they showed up only for a scene, I cared. I cared about the secretary of Bill Paley, with the ugly 50s corporate dress and clunky shoes. I cared about each of the people who lived at the periphery of the screen and only had few lines.
Cool Readings
-
More Links...
-
