The Life I Want: Moments of Clarity
A working mom defines her hierarchy of needs; a rising Democratic star leaves politics for the Jesuits; teens lead a Black Lives Matter protest in a small Oregon town.
Cyrus Habib, pictured here with the Dalai Lama, decided not to seek reelection as Washington state’s lieutenant governor, and is joining the Jesuits. His moment of clarity came when he realized he was caught up in the celebrity culture of politics and asked himself: “What do I want it for? Would that make me happy?”
Eva’s moment happened just after the website where she was an editor folded and she lost her job. Sitting with a friend in the People’s Café on Haight Street in San Francisco, she drew a rudimentary pie chart illustrating the three things that she, at 25, figured she needed for life happiness: people, for proximity to friends and family; place, for how close her home was to nature; and profession, for job fulfillment and income.
That pie chart served as her North Star, and 15 years later, she started working for herself, crafting her life around those three Ps. Today she lives a half hour from a national park, she stops work at 3 o’clock every day for time with her twins, and she chooses writing projects that pay what she needs and provide a sense of purpose.
In early 2007, Christine had her moment: Contemplating whether to leave BP, the company she’d been with for eight years, she attended a women’s retreat recommended by a colleague. On the last day, each participant had to set out small objects representing important aspects of a current question or dilemma, and the facilitator guided her through a set of questions to rearrange them. In Christine’s final configuration, her business card wound up hidden beneath her favorite writing pen and the stone with webbed marbling that represented her networks. Her realization: It didn’t matter whether she was with BP or not; she just needed to focus on writing and building community. At the end of 2008 she did leave, but the transition happened more naturally than if she had quit a year earlier.
Moments of clarity like these can kick off the next phase of your life or career. For a lot of people, the pandemic has forced these inflection points. Many have lost their jobs, others are grappling with new conflicts between work and life, and lockdowns have caused a lot of people to think critically about what they really want to do and where they really want to live. In this newsletter we’re sharing stories about people who have experienced these moments of clarity, and how their work and lives changed as a result.
First is a profile of Leslie Forde, who started a new business—in the middle of the pandemic, with two young kids at home—to help employers fix work for working parents. But before she could do that, Forde had to fix her own relationship with work.
A first-generation child of parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Barbados, Forde was raised to work hard—for someone else. She held tight to her identity as a corporate employee because she believed it would provide her the safety and security she needed. But after her second child was born, she couldn’t maintain her usual pace, so she left her job and cut back to four days a week. When a colleague at her new job asked her why moms are always so stressed, she had an instant moment of clarity. “Well,” she replied. “There’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and then there’s mom’s hierarchy of needs.” That night, she started planning what eventually became Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs—a website helping moms like her prioritize their own self-care and personal growth.
Forde’s second moment of clarity came when she lost her job right before the pandemic. Faced with the choice between going back to work for someone else and working for herself, Forde chose entrepreneurship. She was terrified but she also felt that working for herself was the best way to create a fulfilling career helping working moms. Forde’s new business helps employers understand and respond to the needs of working parents and other caregivers—during the pandemic and beyond. She has a theory: If we fix work for moms, we can fix work for everyone.
We also spoke with Cyrus Habib, the lieutenant governor of Washington state, whose decision to leave politics to join the Jesuits surprised many who saw him as a rising political star in the Democratic Party. Habib’s turning point came when he began to reflect on how the celebrity culture of politics conflicted with his notion of what it meant to serve.
He loves his work, but didn’t love the “addiction to movement” that politics increasingly requires: the never-ending quest for a bigger platform, the inability to be satisfied with where you are. “The more affirmation that I received,” he said, “whether it was in elections or in profiles or whatever, the more I would want to be even more high-profile. If I was interviewed by Ezra Klein, then I’d want to be interviewed by Anderson Cooper…I started seeing myself wanting that without ever asking myself the question, ‘What do I want it for? Would that make me happy?’” In that moment of clarity, he decided to change his path.
Finally, Christine interviewed three of the young people who organized the Black Lives Matter protest in McMinnville, Oregon, where she lives. For Cecilia Flores, Kaiya Miller, and Leobaldo Maldonado, the nationwide protests against police brutality and racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police spotlighted the silence in their own community, which is 87 percent white and located in a state with a racist past. “People are moving on with their lives like nothing is happening, as if there’s not this giant movement across our nation,” Flores said, describing her moment of clarity.
The moment also brought focus to the teens’ future plans: Flores and Maldonado want to become educators; Maldonado wants to teach students that “everybody’s born to do something good in their life, and everybody deserves an equal chance.” Miller wants to go into musical theater and become an “outspoken, activist role model for kids growing up or people my age.”
We hope you enjoy these stories, and we’d love to hear about your moments of clarity. Email us anytime with your questions, reflections, and feedback at hello@thelifeiwant.co.
Finally, we’d like to get to know you: Please take our survey to help us understand what stories you want to read and how we can build and support The Life I Want community. As a token of our gratitude for completing the survey, we’ll give you a $5 gift card to your local independent bookshop. Please share the survey with friends, family, and colleagues, and share it via social media.
For starters, we’ve created a LinkedIn group for The Life I Want; it’s unlisted, so connect with Christine and include in your request that you’d like to join the group.
As usual, we’re sharing some good reads and podcasts that challenged and inspired us below. You can read all of The Life I Want stories here, and find Christine and Eva on Twitter.
We’re grateful that you’re here with us.
Reads and listens:
Mia Birdsong’s How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community explains why community, when at its best, is an antidote for America’s toxic culture of individualism. Birdsong points out that there is something “untenably severed” in America right now: “What I’m speaking of is our ability to hold space for one another, to empathize, to make time for connection, to care for one another, to be part of one another’s lives.” Nonetheless, her book offers hope.
Birdsong also partnered with The Nation on a short podcast series, “More Than Enough,” which explores universal basic income while challenging listeners with bigger questions about the meaning of work.
Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is an up-close look at class in what is too often dismissed as “flyover country,” and a picture of how family, geography, and public policy can shape our relationship and experience with work.
Christine wrote a piece for the Washington Post’s On Parenting section about how to support introverted kids as they go back to school, following her own failed experience trying to get her son back on the soccer field.
Speaking of working parents and school and the pandemic: Leslie Forde has revealed results from her survey on working parents, and this piece on what working parents want their managers to know, is a must-read—and a link to drop into your work Slack channel.
“Labor” is a new podcast by journalists Amy Westervelt and Elise Hu: The first episode was manna to Christine’s policy wonk side, as they spoke with sociologist Julie Kohler about how America’s social safety net was built around the 1950s white ideal of the nuclear family—and then dismantled.
If, like both of us, you’re one of the many parents stuck juggling work and managing your kids’ remote schooling, and wondering whether you can afford to take a career break, this episode of “Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel” goes both macro and micro with advice.
For non-mom rage, there are few better people to be angry with than Paul Rieckhoff, host of “Angry Americans.” Christine loved his conversation with the brilliant Jeffrey Wright (and not just because they’re fellow Amherst College alumni).
For fiction, Christine loved City of Girls and This is How it Always Is, and Eva read Animal Farm with her kids during their second round of remote school.
Until next time,
Eva & Christine
Did someone forward this to you? Hit ‘reply’ and tell us why! Then subscribe below.