My Life as an Accidental COO of a Tech Startup (Part 4)
This is the last installment in a four-part series. See part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Note, names have been changed for privacy.
I started crying a lot. I would cry on my walk on the way to catch the N train in the morning, and when I walked out the doors of Impact Hub in the late afternoon. It was confusing. I didn’t know what I was crying about, because I wasn’t sad. At first, I thought it might just be an acutely stressful day, or mercury was in retrograde or maybe I had read a sad article. I started crying every day without feeling better, often losing focus of where I was. On my walk from the N at Duboce Triangle to Impact Hub I would jolt into the present and realize I had been in a daze for the entire commute. When I was on my MacBook, in my favorite booth, with my tea, I could concentrate and be peppy and feel completely fine, but the moment I closed it and started heading back home I started crying again. I put on my favorite podcast and couldn’t retain a single sentence. Music sounded bad. I stopped being hungry, and all food I tried to eat tasted like cardboard. I slept much, and badly.
I began living a dual life — one in which I energetically embraced my early-career, startup co-founder, living-the-GRT life identity, and one in which I felt entirely numb and discombobulated. For the first couple of weeks, I successfully hid my second identity from Ben and my family. I tried telling a couple of close friends that I was “in a funk”, who were deeply sympathetic but couldn’t magic away my crying. I was able to function well enough to have the occasional dinner with my dad and brother without suspect. For the first couple of weeks, anyway. The second identity, the Funk, crawled into my real life and wouldn’t leave me alone. It started making me lose focus when I was working if nobody else was around. I started using the Meditation Room on the top floor of Impact Hub to cry in the middle of the day, then go to the bathroom and wash my face before returning to my booth. I was terrified. Was I just going to feel this way — or rather, not feel anything — forever? How was I supposed to plan my week if I couldn’t anticipate if tomorrow I would abruptly shut down?
On my 30th day at this company, and 14th day as COO, Ben said I was going to need some business cards, and I should design them so we can get them printed. That was the moment I decided to quit. There was something about putting my name and my company email address and my title on a physical card that was a “no turning back” point for me. If I had my name printed on a card, that meant I was staying through the midterms, and that meant my Funk was staying with me. That day, before we sent the business cards to print, I told Ben I was depressive, that it had started to affect my work, and that I needed him to carry on without me as I sorted myself out. He was the first person I said that out loud to, and I am grateful for the gentleness and care with which he responded. We said our goodbyes and good lucks, and I walked out of Impact Hub, walked to the corner, and cried. For the first time, I felt better after crying. I felt a huge weight lifted. I had more energy than I had had in weeks.
As abruptly as it had all started, both my time in the GRT and my first dance with my Funk seemed to be coming to a close. The relief I felt after quitting was tremendous, and while I may never fully understand what it was that pushed me out of that world, I have come to understand that my gut usually knows me better than my head does.
After I quit that job and that world, with a completely empty slate ahead of me, I started applying for jobs full-time in earnest. In two weeks I had four interviews and two offers. The one I accepted took me to a building in West Berkeley that looked like a 1970’s newsroom. I was the youngest there, and everyone insisted on leaving by 5. There were no ergonomic sitting cubes and only one whiteboard. With my first paycheck I moved out of my dad’s. I found a decent apartment in Berkeley with a nice roommate who worked for an education non-profit and had a similarly boxy old Dad Car. For the first time in a long time, I felt like myself.
