🧗🏻‍♀️The Struggle is Sacred, Part Two

Guest post by Brooke Siem of Happiness is a Skill

Dearest Doh Readers: I am delighted to bring you part-two of

Brooke Siem

’s guest post this week. Catch-up on Part One first:

Brooke is the author of May Cause Side Effects: A Memoir, a two-time Pivot podcast guest, and publishes the newsletter Happiness Is A Skill by Brooke Siem.  

Where we left off . . .

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[My astrologer] explained that the struggle itself is my sacred path.

For me, it will always be like this so I can learn to trust that I will always have enough to live, day in and day out, in the way that I want. Which, for me, means the flexibility to work from home (or prep at home, in the case of cooking), being in charge of my own schedule, and being known enough for my work that paying opportunities arrives organically. 

The problem is that today I have $3.12 in my checking account.

Logically, I know this is the point of savings. I have enough in my emergency fund to carry me for a frugal year, if needed. But who wants to do that?

I only feel financially safe when I add to my savings. God forbid I ever have to use it! Its purpose is to sit there, gaining four percent interest per month, until the day I die. Which, incidentally, is November 6, 2069. Yes, I have done the math. 

So, just before I overdraw an account with an automatic credit card payment, I transfer $4,000 into my checking and cancel the $50/month LinkedIn Premium subscription. Landing private culinary clients isn’t the sort of work that comes through LinkedIn recruiters. It’s a game of inside referrals, where discretion is king, privacy is sacred, and timing is everything. I need that $50 for gas. 

I huff at the transfer, grateful that the savings exist but irritated that I have to dip in them. Again.

I think about my career. Every few years I seem to come back here, to a place of uncomfortably long underemployment. Each time—I’m forced to admit—something special came out of it. 

At 25, after failing to land a “real job” despite months of applications, a business partner appeared and together, we opened Prohibition Bakery. The place was an emotional and financial pit, but I am still proud to have created and sustained a brick-and-mortar establishment in Manhattan.

The misery of it, too, led me to the realization that I had spent half my life on a cocktail of antidepressants prescribed to me in the wake of my father’s death when I was a teenager.

Upon realizing that I hadn’t had an unmedicated moment in my entire adult life, I sold my shares of the bakery for the desperate price of $25,000, took the $10,000 check from a surprise win on the Food Network show “Chopped,” and spent a year working through horrific antidepressant withdrawal in cities around the world that had a lower cost of living.

One month before flying back to New York—at 31 years old with no job and no plan—my literary agent from the bakery days suggested I write a book about my year in withdrawal. Five years later, MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS hit bookshelves and was recently awarded the 2023 BIBA Prize (Best Indie Book Award) for Memoir.¹ 

In the meantime, when I wasn’t looking for a shiny opportunity, work appeared. During the pandemic, while waiting at a crosswalk, I applied for a job teaching online cooking classes. Within hours, I was employed, making literally 3,000% more per hour than I’d ever made in restaurants. 

As the pandemic waned, an old friend started a consumer packaged goods company and asked me to develop a line of just-add-water baked goods. Then, my nutritionist passed my name to a Major League Baseball player, and after a thirty-minute Zoom, I became his new personal chef.

I can’t deny that over and over, my most meaningful work comes after a drought. And that in the meantime, the Universe always provides lucrative clients and opportunities without any major effort on my part.

 Meanwhile, the work I spend hours actively trying to get through marketing, networking, or pitching either fails to materialize or doesn’t pay enough to offset the electricity cost used to send the email. 

My widely read op-ed on antidepressant withdrawal that ran in January 2020 in The Washington Post? WaPo paid me $150 dollars for the piece, which took months to write and research. The dozens of speaking gigs I’ve applied for? Crickets. Creating video content for Instagram? A minimum of eight hours per video, only to have them inevitably lose traction in a sea of influencers who are younger, prettier, and happy to peddle untested supplements with the code NEWYOU2024. 

What if, this time, I simply trust?

Given the inevitability of fallow periods, what if I choose not to overly worry, and instead use this free time to rest, to create art, and to take a walk with my mom at two in the afternoon without guilt?

Can I surrender to knowing that despite withdrawing from my savings instead of depositing, I am safe and opportunity will come?

My mother and I are now taking a two-week trip to Egypt for our birthdays, one we planned long ago. We get back on February 11, 2024, so I’ve decided that I’m going all-in on a trust experiment until we get back. Thus, on February 12, if nothing materializes and my athlete doesn’t get a new contract, I have permission to panic.

But until then: my job is to go to bed early and wake up late, pull long strokes of bright color over canvas, keep only a light eye on my inbox, and see what happens.

🤷🏻‍♀

Brooke’s work in progress, created during this fallow period. 30” x 20” oil on canvas.

1. JB Note: I couldn’t resist also sharing Brooke’s Instagram post about the book award. . . huge congrats, my friend!

author

Brooke Siem on Instagram: “MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS won the 2023 BIBA Prize for Memoir and I am pretty chuffed about it, as the Brits would say. From the day I agreed to write a memoir on the paradoxical year spent in antidepressant withdrawal while on a once in a lifetime trip around the world, this book has been like trying to get water to flow upstream. My agent went out to sell it in April of 2020. Hell timing. Multiple big publishing house editors loved it, only to have legal or marketing kill it in the last hour. It finally sold in 2021. The release date was pushed back three times due to paper supply chain issues, which completely screwed the marketing process (because it’s hard to market a book when you don’t know when it’s coming out.) By the time it did hit shelves, I’d accepted that it was going to be the little book that could, not a splashy bestseller (you need marketing for that. And a good dose of luck. @oprah helps too.) But every day I hear stories from folks around the world who found the work and they tell me it’s helped them. More than a few psychiatrists tell me they’ve changed the way they practice because of it. But my personal favorite feedback was from my high school AP English Teacher, Mr. Meschery. This is the man who taught me to speak Middle English (whan that April with his showres soote…) and showed me that writing could be beautiful. It took a long time to put that lesson into practice, but 20 years later, something I learned in high school turned out to be useful. So here’s to words and the people who love them! Tag Oprah if you loved MCSE too. 😉 @bestindiebookaward #antidepressants #antidepressantwithdrawal #ssriwithdrawal #psychiatry #depressionhelp #mentalhealthbooks #amwriting #binders #memoirwriting #bookstagram #maycausesideeffects”

January 10, 2024