live! from a corner office breakdown

I found out I was pregnant with my first child the week after I was made Chief Strategy Officer at Mekanism. I was coming off of two miscarriages, a fertility scare, and my mom getting diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Here I was embarking on two paths I had wanted so badly, living one of the highs of my life, having just experienced the lowest of lows.

Lows don't just dissipate. We carry them in our bodies -- like how my body felt pregnant weeks after my miscarriages, even though the baby was gone. We carry them in our minds -- Will my third pregnancy pan out? Will my mom stay cancer free? Will I fail at my big job because of all the big things happening in my personal life?

We can't just leave our lives at the door when the clock strikes nine. We can't compartmentalize our way out of loss, illness, grief, heartbreak, overwhelm, burnout. Compartmentalization is built on the assumption that emotions only belong in certain spaces, and outside those spaces, should remain unspoken. But compartmentalization is bullsh*t. The people who saw me everyday could sense the grief all over me - in my unusually messy hair, my slumped posture, my wandering mind.

If I was taking on this new role as a leader of our company, and therefore, a leader among our people, my pretending and powering-through would set the wrong precedent. Then people would think they would have to do the same, keeping their "negative" emotions out of the workplace. And that felt wrong.

So I opened up. I talked about how miscarriage should be part of bereavement policies. When I had a sudden doctor's appointment or bad morning sickness, I gave the real reasons for not attending meetings, even if traditionally these reasons would've been TMI. I made it a point to reveal the challenges of getting pregnant, staying pregnant, having a baby during a pandemic, and ultimately parenting during the pandemic.

And as far as I've been told, some people have found it helpful. And a lot of people have opened up to me in return.

I'm starting this newsletter with the intention of bringing in conversations that have traditionally been left out of the workplace. Maybe because there haven't been enough women in the room. Or because we haven't had people of color at the top. Or maybe just because we've been taught that acknowledging emotions makes us sensitive, and sensitivity is an Achilles heel, a surefire path to failure (speaking from personal experience having grown up in the South Asian diaspora).

But life informs work, and work informs life. It's how our team at Mekanism put lactating breasts on TV for the first time (by having real conversations bemoaning how hard breastfeeding is). It's how we helped OkCupid launch the most inclusive dating campaign the world had ever seen (because so many of us hadn't seen ourselves in the category). It's how we thought through Joe Biden's campaign identity (we were too fired up to let the other side win). It's how we strategized overcoming vaccine hesitancy in minority groups (by talking to our friends and families in those very groups).

I've only gotten where I am by being real about who I am. And I have the feeling that's how any of us will get anywhere.

I hope you'll join me and subscribe.

Love, Ambika