A Twist

Thursday night. September 2, 2021.

Eighteen months into the pandemic, my inner compass feels cut on the bias, the hem rippled, disoriented from the ache of uncertainty. Our global systems have the potential for authentic evolution or disaster in the face of climate change and public health upheaval.

The unknown future rolls toward us.

I left the Toluca Lake bar early on Thursday night. The outdoor area where the vaccinated felt comfortable enough to de-mask with friends, many seeing each other outside of a video call for the first time since our offices closed on March 13, 2020. And possibly the last time. This was a celebration and a wake…we congratulated those who’d recently resigned to move to new employers, alongside raising a glass to the past as old routines disintegrated without the illusion of normality. We’d lost plenty of people over the last 18 months, but each time we’d rallied. We’d pulled off a record year, each team losing sleep and ignoring the simmering potential for cultural collapse as we threw ourselves into the joy of fiction.

But this. This was different. The promise of any return to routine had crumbled with the extension of the pandemic. Remember those joyous days of scoring the first vaccine appointments? But the pandemic was renewed for another season alongside undeniable evidence of global warming, putting economic systems into question. One coast has no water, the other too much. Hundred-year-floods happen a few years apart. The pack mules on the trail have sat down to snack, refusing to budge in spite of the offer of treats, of incentives, as the great streaming wars litter paths with collateral damage. The pandemic offered workers alternatives—desperation created new systems, and suddenly doing someone else’s grocery shopping seems a lot more appealing than working on an assembly line in a chicken slaughterhouse.

We’d all worked so much more with less, knowing this would pass.

And now, we’re pretty sure it won’t.

And so people I know have made choices with this newfound information, sought out alternatives. Symptoms of simmering pain had become permanent and chronic, and those suffering sought relief in the form of the only changes they could control. The ghost of an ache that felt deeply physical as I watched these people hug and raise glasses to each other drove me from the party. I thought about my own early years in the workplace, and how in time, those theoretically unbreakable bonds too had disintegrated as people moved on, corporate restructures occurred, and how tight friendships that seemed impossible to break had eventually wilted into the occasional social media hashtag.

I headed home through the alleys of Burbank, avoiding the sidewalk where I might encounter other people. Small talk turns out to be even more awkward when the lines blur between virtual and physical worlds. But also, I wanted to continue to enjoy the moment, to hold onto the rare instant, the moment between “it’ll all be okay” and “actually, it won’t.” The exquisitely simultaneous hope-and-pain of knowing as much as things had changed a year ago at work, tonight we’d underscored the reality of this evolution. We were never going back, not as a workplace, not as a culture, not as infrastructure.

I was so tired. We all were. Are. And I thought back to a time in Cairo when my office had a situation—we’d all been unexpectedly evicted from our headquarters on a Sunday morning—and I’d had to rally the troops. I was nursing a life-altering emotional wound at the time, one from a half-continent away, from the source of the Nile rather than here at its end, and I instinctively knew I had to pretend otherwise, to offer hope and the promise of a path forward. I gave an inspirational speech under the watchful eye of Grimace at the children’s birthday party room at the Dokki McDonald’s. I rose to the occasion. No one doubted my guarantees that all would soon be better, though I knew inside I was winging it. I was lucky. Things did get better. But I couldn’t have known that. I had lied, performed necessary theater, like the leader I was pretending to be.

I am still tired. Thirteen years has not made me more of a spry optimist. But as I walked home in Toluca Lake, thinking about what I could do to make the lives of those around me a little better, I didn’t really come up with any answers. I have an ambivalent relationship with employment under the best of circumstances, and I don’t pretend otherwise. Somehow this works for me, but now, I need to step it up. To be that person hanging out with Grimace one more time.

I am going to have to resurrect and channel my humor and transfer it to those I supervise, shaping the world’s uncertainty into a familiar tool we can wield to improve our fiction-making and our personal routines. I have to find my own way forward through the ambiguity of this moment, and then find a way to make the end times a bit more…fun.

Come with me if you want to live.