“Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.” - Hugo von Hofmannsthal

As I wrote about last week, like any good pest or pollinator (because really, what is the difference?), I’m going to keep trusting that which gives me energy.

For as long as I can remember, I have been most energized by learning about wh…

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Last week I shared that the most surprising thing that I learned from a year of studying pests is how often they (whether bats or mosquitos) turned out to be pollinators.

The more I learned about the w…

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Last week I wrote about how a mistaken identity in Tokyo sent me on a quest to better understand how we knew whether a creature’s hunger was helpful or harmful.

It was a funny coincidence that I sent that email about embarking on a new adventure on the same day that I set off on a different adventure (the Tour d’Afrique), fourteen y…

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1. Egg: RIP 🪦 book about fun that was totally boring [Japan / Sept + Oct 2023]

2. Caterpillar: RIP 🪦 choose your own adventure book [Thailand / Nov + Dec 2023]

3. Pupa: emergence of a memoir about pollinators [Vietnam / Jan, Feb, Mar 2024]

4. Butterfly: well, let’s just say this post is about trying to break out of my cocoon..

🦋 Stage 4: Butterfly [Ongoing…] 🦋

My interpretation of this Fuller quote is that a caterpillar will only become a butterfly (or moth! but there are no moth emojis 😔) if it is absolutely true to itself. If it spins itself a cocoon, and hopes to emerge as a bat, well, it will feel like a failure won’t it?

I think the same is true of this book. It will be exactly as successful as I allow it be. In other words, I’m listening to it, not trying to bend it to my will. It’s almost as if my book is a living, breathing creature telling me which stories and studies belong in it, and which ones—however entertaining or interesting they may be—don’t.

It’s for this reason that I have continued to find feedback from friends and my editor so valuable. They are helping me hone in on the integrity of the book. I am especially grateful for 🐞Dany🐞 who read my whole ~fourth draft, and for my editor 🐝Geoff🐝 who has probably read three whole drafts at this point🙏.

As my friends have helped me see where the book wants to take me, and when (for example, by pointing out that the book essentially became a love letter to my communist father, while I was writing from a communist country…), I have often wondered what “success” would even look like.

If you know anything about the publishing industry, you’ll know that the most likely outcome is that it earns me precisely $0 for my year of effort (and if I factor in how much I’ve spent for the privilege of writing….it’s depressing). So I defined my own measure of success: I just wanted it to reach the person who needed to hear what I had to say.

I didn’t know who that was, but I imagined this person may be feeling something like a moth: misunderstood, undervalued, overlooked, and emoji-less. It did not occur to me that my dad was this person until I learned that he had been given days left to live. Suddenly I could see that he was the only reader who mattered.

I needed him to read the book, ”before it was too late,”—remember that foreboding line from an earlier draft?—and now he unfortunately didn’t even have enough energy to read anything.

I’ll eventually write more about what happened next, once I have enough space to process it, and all the parallels it had with the end of my mom’s life when I didn’t get to tell her how I really felt. But in short, I was worried I wouldn’t make it home in time to read the most important parts to him myself, so I asked my brother to read him the last three chapters.

Here’s an excerpt that he heard:

Kurt Vonnegut, who was born in Indiana, once said “what people like about me is Indiana.” 

When I first heard that, I believed that what people liked about me was Winnipeg. All the paradoxes that, when combined, have earned the city the right to call itself the Heart of the Continent. The world’s worst winters, followed by epic floods, followed by insect outbreaks worthy of a horror movie. We have the honour of being called the mosquito capital of the world after all. Of course I left. But if you grew up with those wide-open prairie skies, and that Winnie the Pooh hospitality, you’d understand why I keep going back. Who could bear to leave their heart behind? 

Now, I believe that if indeed people like anything about me, it is my dad. Harold Dyck is the exact opposite of a dick. He is the epitome of Friendly Manitoba. The heart of the continent.

I know enough to admit that I don’t know how to reverse climate change or end income inequality. But I know how to care, and I have my dad to thank for that.

Now you’ll have to read the whole book to benefit from all the Winnipeg references, Dyck jokes, and to understand how hard it was for me to come to this conclusion, but you should know that my dad has worked tirelessly, without pay, for the last ~25 years to advocate for people living in poverty. You can learn a little more about his work in this teaser for the doc I started to make about him (and one day, when finances are more in my favour, intend to finish editing.)

He was the last line of defense for Manitobans who had fallen through every other social safety net, as he had. And yet he has received virtually no recognition for his sacrifices. Before he died from a disease that feels all the more tragic for its direct correlation with his socioeconomic status, I wanted more than anything for him to know that he mattered. Gratefully, he got the message.

Now my goal is for others to see that too. No matter which way you look at it, my dad and the people he helped, are the least appreciated beings in our society. Just like moths, mosquitos, ants, and other pollinators. It’s uncomfortable to think about them. We may not say it aloud, but our actions show that we’d rather they change, or simply cease to exist.

I hope that the pollinators in my book (both human and “more-than-human”) may serve to remind us of all the meaningful work that is invisible, uncompensated, and often really misunderstood. The world is simply too interconnected to go on pretending as if any being is more important than another.

Ok, that’s enough sounding like my communist dad for today. (Also, I should note that he is still alive! Though his prognosis remains grim 😔.)

I’ll leave you with one more quote from my favourite:

Fuller wrote that 55 years ago. Talk about trying to send a message before it was too late. Anyway, I really, really do believe that paying pollinators the respect they deserve will have a butterfly effect that saves us! So stay tuned for more rants 😉

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me, it’s been a weird one!

To refresh your memory, these are the different life stages my book (or more accurately, the current version of what has really been three totally distinct books) has taken over the last ~year:

1. Egg: RIP 🪦 book about fun that was totally boring [Japan / Sept + Oct 2023]

2. Caterpillar: RIP 🪦 choose your own adventure book [Thailand / Nov + Dec 2023]

3. Pupa: emergence of a book about pollinators [Vietnam / Jan, Feb, Mar 2024]

4. Butterfly: you’ll have to read on to see!

Now back to where that last post left off….

🇻🇳 Stage 3: Pupa [Vietnam: Jan, Feb, Mar 2024] 🇻🇳

As the above quote suggests, the transformation that occurred in this “cocoon” phase of my book was extraordinary and dare I say, totally unpredictable.

While taking a break from writing to transition from Thailand to Vietnam, I was able to see that while v2 of my book certainly embodied “fun,” there were a few seeds in it that could really grow into something beautiful if I committed to watering them.

Given all the metaphors I’ve been using so far, it may come as no surprise that I wanted to further explore what nature can teach us about how to navigate life and work (I’ll spare you the details on how this connects to “fun,” at least for now, but trust me, it does!).

I salvaged what writing I could from my time in Japan and Thailand and drafted book #3. In it, I tried to make the case that the interconnectedness we find in nature proves that every living being is inherently worthy, despite what our capitalist system may lead us to believe.

It was only after completing nearly an entire first draft of book #3 that I realized I was arguing for the very same thing that my dad had been arguing for my entire life: equality and dignity, irregardless of wealth or economic output. And yet, there wasn’t a single mention of him across ~200 pages. 🤯

That’s when this book, the one I am determined to polish and publish, finally started to metamorphose into something that resembled a memoir about pollinators.

Now, I must point out that of all the possible paths I could imagine my book taking, none included a memoir (I still cringe to call it that!) or a close examination of insects (doubly cringe!). In fact, most of my thinking and writing up until this point, had been through the lens of trees (!!), not pollinators.

But the more I wrote, the more trees—as much as I love them—came to feel too sedentary to illustrate my twisty-turny life. Pollinators on the other hand offered such rich imagery (metamorphoses, migrations, butterfly effects, etc). I love how pollination happens entirely inadvertently! I love how it’s the result of a pollinator simply following its gut! I love how we still know so little about such vital creatures! Pollinators are our planet’s essential workers, and just like human essential workers, they are terribly undervalued (and often even vilified).

Check out my attempt to describe the beginning of this shift (from writing about a “jungle” to writing about “home”) in the rough intro to what we’ll call Book3.Draft2:

This book is a painting of my world.

Faced with a blank canvas, I initially set out to paint a thriving jungle powered by a kaleidoscope of jobs. I spun and spun this kaleidoscope looking for the perfect combination of vibrancy and mirrors that would prove every single job in this jungle was essential. What I was really trying to do with this kaleidoscope trick was prove to myself that my work mattered. That I mattered. I figured if I could prove that to myself, maybe it would help others convince themselves they matter too.

The painter Bob Ross was famous for incorporating something undesirable into his pristine landscapes. “Ever make mistakes in life? Let’s make them birds. Yeah, they’re birds now.” I was determined to paint over all of my “mistakes” until my jungle looked pristine; full of hummingbirds and free of pesky mosquitos.

But as I kept spinning my kaleidoscope, instead of a thriving jungle coming into view, a familiar pattern took shape. I soon realized I wasn’t looking through a kaleidoscope at all, but a telescope directed at a smattering of stars with only one constellation shining bright as a neon light: Ursa Major—the Big Dipper. It’s the only constellation I can ever reliably find. If I’m lost, it’s also the one that points me all the way to the North Star; home.

Home is Winnipeg, Manitoba, a medium-sized city north of North Dakota. Colder than cold. If I were to direct a sequel to Guy Maddin’s cult classic My Winnipeg!, bugs would be the main characters. Manitobans are notoriously easy going and accommodating (the licence plate slogan is Friendly Manitoba after all). Not so of Manitoban bugs. They have big city energy. They demand your attention, get in your way, and aren’t ashamed to keep you up at night. I’ve avoided my home town and all its insects since I was old enough to leave it.

Home is also feeling I lost when my mom died, soon after I left Winnipeg.

As I brought my home into focus, it quickly became clear that there were simply too many things to try to turn into birds. Bugs and winters, but also grief, remorse, and in particular, my dad. Home may be where my heart is, but it’s also where all my skeletons are.

Bugs were the last thing I thought I would deliberately bring into a piece of art I had any control over. But I knew that if I was to succeed in bringing my vision of a thriving jungle to life, I couldn’t just paint pretty hummingbirds, I’d have to incorporate the metaphorical (and actual!) moths and mosquitos I was running away from. There are no hummingbirds or trees without them. Which also meant I would have to at least try to paint my dad, before it was too late.

As my writing continued to pull me home, I kept returning to another Bob Ross quote: "Beauty is everywhere—you only have to look to see it."

I’m so grateful I started looking at the lives and experiences I once ignored, even hid from. I didn’t even know what I was looking for, but somehow I found it while writing this book. I hope my looking may inspire you to look too.

Though the only paragraph I have kept from this intro is the one about Manitoba’s bugs having big city energy (I will forever maintain that Manitoba should be crowned the Insect Capital of the World), that phrase in the third last paragraph—”before it was too late”—proved to be an intuitively important one. But I’ll come back to this.

So why focus on pollinators specifically?

There’s a lot to unpack here (an entire book’s worth, you could say 😆).

The simplest answer is that I just followed my gut (which is exactly how pollination happens! It is also FUN).

An example of what following my gut looked like:

One morning when I sat down to write, I just so happened to feel like writing about a job I once had at a call center. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I was calling farmers to ask them about their pesticide use. I was thinking about the crush I had on my Filipino supervisor. I don’t know why, I hadn’t thought about him, let alone that tedious job, in a good decade. Maybe I caught a whiff of Swiss Army—the cologne he used to douse himself in? Whatever the reason, that morning, that job came to mind.

So I started writing about Dimark Research, which then made me reflect on the task of calling farmers across North America, which led me to research pesticides, which led me right back to Winnipeg (as, I regrettably came to learn, most pesticide research will). That’s just one example of the ‘kaleidoscope becoming more like a telescope pointing home’ feeling that I described in the above intro.

Anyway, this is when my interest in moths was piqued. I had no idea that the “canker worms” which occasionally infested Winnipeg were in fact several different species of “tree caterpillars,” all destined to become pollinating moths.

Loooong story short, I didn’t start writing that chapter thinking it would send me down a moth hole, but it did. And the more I learned about moths, the more I realized they weren’t a butterfly’s homely cousin. They were more like a butterfly’s wise neighbour.

For example, emerging research suggests that moths are as important pollinators as bees. A 2019 study which examined pollen on moths and bees in community gardens in England found that while bees were more drawn to plants like cabbage and maple trees, moths visited plants like tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, and stone fruit. Researchers also found that moths carried more diverse pollen than bees by the middle of summer.

Moths are widely considered to be an “indicator species.” Because they are so widespread, but also so sensitive to changes, their presence (or lack thereof) reflects the overall health of their ecosystems. Our well being depends on theirs. Their drastic decline should be an alarming wake-up call, but instead, we continue to invest in mass moth extermination efforts.

In How to Read Nature, Tristan Gooley writes that “we emerged from a habitat and we will return to a habitat. Our experience in the short time between these two moments will be in some part determined by the interest we take in our habitat. It’s hard to lead a poorer life by noticing more.” In writing about my job as a telemarketer, I couldn’t help but feel as though moths were begging me to notice them, before it was too late.

My interest in moths led me to realize just how much pollinators had defined the first 25 years of my life, which led me to reflect more on mosquitos, which led me to flies, then wasps, then ants. Before I knew it, I found myself feeling like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing: writing an ode to pollinators.

Once I connected the dots between Varroa mites and my dad’s decades of full-time, unpaid, anti-poverty advocacy (you’ll just have to read the book for this to make sense!), I knew my book was ready to break out of its cocoon and take flight.

🦋 Stage 4: Butterfly [Vietnam: Apr & May 2024] 🦋

Well once again…this ended up being (and taking) much longer than I intended, so guess what, there will be a part 3 now! Maybe in your inbox next week 😁

Since I have struggled to make progress on my book this last month (and if I’m honest, the same is true of April, May, and June), I figured I’d at least write something here.

After such an inspired and productive Q1, it’s frustrating to feel like I have completely stalled since. Travel is partly to blame. Disrupted routines + jet lag + reconnecting with friends (!!) + orienting to new surroundings + sporadic childcare = scattered attention that does not lend itself to the type of deep, deep work required to refine my fifth (sixth?!) draft.

I think a lot about this quote from the architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller. At each level of my book—from word choice, to sentence structure, to paragraph order, to chapter flow—I gratefully now know what it feels like to find a truly beautiful solution.

It feels like “I can’t believe I just did that.” As in, I honestly don’t know where this beautiful solution came from. A sort of literal “OMG” that makes me wonder if my very-atheist parents might have been missing out. (Side note: writing a book, and especially editing it, is an incredible, if exhausting, way to tap into your spirituality and strengthen your intuition!)

Which is all to say that I want this final draft to feel truly beautiful. While many of its pieces do (🙏hallelujah!🙏), a few decidedly don’t 😩. And I worry that it’s not possible for me to find a beautiful solution while in Mexico (or NYC for that matter).

And that is because I have come to see this book as being inseparable from Vietnam, where (to employ a cliche, but apt, pollinator metaphor) its most impressive metamorphosis took place.

Allow me to explain…

🥚 Stage 1: Egg [Japan: Sept & Oct 2023] 🥚

Believe it or not, the primary motive of our year abroad was not to adventure but to lower our cost of living (and especially the cost of childcare). I felt compelled to write a book, and drastically cutting my expenses was the only way to satisfy this compulsion.

Inspired by the Fuller quote above, I intended to write a book about fun. It felt (and still feels) obvious to me that the world needs more fun (ICYMI: I explain why in this post from last year).

Over the previous ~half year, I had thought a lot about the answers to two questions:

1. what fun was? and

2. how can we have more of it?

From my research, I knew these questions had not yet been sufficiently answered. The two published books about fun didn’t even come close to capturing what I felt were the “beautiful solutions” to such a pressing problem.

For funsies, here is the intro I wrote to that book:

Have fun! We say this and hear this all the time, but do we really know what fun is and how to have it?

I thought I did, but to be honest, I hadn’t given the question much thought until I realized that my partner was having a lot more fun than I was, around the time our baby entered this world.

By any measure, I had a great life: a supportive partner, a healthy child, wonderful friends, an interesting career, and sufficient free time to enjoy a few hobbies.

I would call myself happy, both by nature and design. And yet, deep down, something had long felt like it was still missing.

I tried new jobs. I tried new hobbies. I tried new cities. I tried all the happiness and productivity and career advice that was fit to print in the New York Times. None of it tangibly filled this nagging gap.

My partner meanwhile wasn’t experiencing any of this existential angst. He was simply enjoying his life. No matter where we were or what we were doing, he found a way to have fun.

So I started studying him. Why was he able to enjoy waiting in a line while I grew more and more impatient? Why did he claim to be having fun even when he didn’t look like it? How is it that he found putting our baby back to sleep in the middle of the night—an ordeal that could easily take over an hour—to be fun? (Yes, he seriously claimed this, and still maintains he enjoyed those sleepless nights.)

I figured a sample size of one might not be enough to teach me how to have more fun, so I started studying other what other people had to say about “fun” too (some of which I’ll cover in this book). To be completely honest though, I learned more from my partner than from all the books and research and interviews combined.

Over the course of my “studies,” I did my best to intentionally apply everything that I learned. These experiments, which I’ll touch on more throughout this book, had varying degrees of success.

Today, I would say that I’m far from the most fun person in the world, but I’ve learned a lot about what fun is and isn’t, what blocks it, and most importantly, how to have more of it (no improv, travel, fat paychecks, or costumes required!).

Fun is not silly, it is serious business. It can guide us to more fulfilling careers and relationships. It holds the power to resolve conflict and bridge divides. It is critical to our well-being. Yet most of us are approaching it in ways that makes having it less likely, if we’re trying to have it at all.

My hope is that this book will not only persuade you to prioritize having more fun in all areas of your life, and will provide you with the tools to do so.

"Do anything, but let it produce joy." - Walt Whitman

I continued to organize my thoughts and write in earnest. There was just one problem, and it was a big one considering the topic: I wasn’t having fun.

If I wasn’t having fun writing a book about fun, who was going to have fun reading it? No one.

That’s when it hit me: if I was going to expect the world to understand what fun was, I would have to embody it. It was time to break out of my comfort zone and try a different approach (that’s my egg-to-caterpillar metaphor, get it?).

🐛 Stage 2: Caterpillar [Thailand: Nov & Dec 2023] 🐛

I arrived in Thailand asking myself how I could produce a work of art that would embody fun. I knew for sure that writing a prescriptive sort of book and following an outline was not only not fun, it was quite simply not me.

I decided that any book I write should reflect how my brain works when I let it run free.

My vision for this new book was wild (like my brain!). I wanted it to feel like a choose your own adventure novel. More like an artsy zine than a novel. A mix of poetry and personal essays and short fiction and photography and reflection exercises and wacky challenges. Fun!

Here is the rough intro I wrote to that book (notice how different it is already!):

Of the 37 years I have been alive, my best estimate is that I’ve spent roughly four cumulative years watching TV.

While I’m certainly not proud of this, I’m not exactly ashamed either.

In part because at least one of those years was spent watching shows that were classically educational. I learned how fish sleep from the Nature of Things, how much a Chinese cup made of rhinoceros horn is worth from Antiques Roadshow, and how to masturbate from Sue Johanson’s Sunday Night Sex Show.

Another one of those years was spent watching shows that would lift my mood when it really needed lifting, like the marathons of Say Yes to the Dress when my mom was in hospice, or of Rick & Morty when the pandemic turned our world upside down.

While the two years I just described engaged my brain, the third year was spent trying to disengage it. I watched any reality show from Bravo or Netflix after a draining day at work and Broad City when I was feeling particularly lost and lonely after a move to Toronto.

Despite all the ways these shows (and others) have helped me over those three years, it is the way I spent the fourth year that was the most formative. The most important and impactful hours I have spent glued to the TV were spent watching nothing in particular.

Which is all to say, I have spent roughly an entire year of my life mindlessly shuffling from one show to the next, trying to find something I like.

Why does that matter?

Well for one, none of those other three years of much needed enlightenment and distraction would have been possible without this year spent searching. But more importantly, that searching was as good a window into my subconscious as any mushroom trip. Who and what caught my eye? Why?

Time spent searching, questioning, may feel like superfluous fat that should be minimized, if not cut altogether. But the chef Samin Nosrat will tell you a balance of “salt, acid, heat, and fat” is required to make a meal delicious. Fat isn’t just necessary in your diet, it makes life worth living.

Most importantly though, the act of channel surfing itself, especially in those precious few decades between TV antennae and online streaming—the era of paper TV Guides folded into your Saturday newspaper, when there was no other option but to channel surf—was a better predictor of how my life would actually be than any episode of Sex and the City ever could be.

My life has been more like:

• a Sunday morning of televangelism and football pre-games—neither of which I start the day interested in, yet both of which mysteriously draw me in—than it is like an algorithmically curated and personalized list of shows I “Might Like.”

• being a car-less woman subjected to Geico and Cialis commercials that I can’t skip or block or upgrade to avoid, than it is like a full episode of Modern Family where all conflicts have a neat beginning and end.

• stumbling on an episode of House of Cards, where I stand no chance of orienting myself, than it is like a new season of Love is Blind dropping, where I can follow the entirety of a couple’s relationship.

Life is not having the option to pause when my baby wakes up an hour after he went to bed, to rewind when I overhear a juicy conversation after all the crucial details were exchanged, or to fast forward when I am laid off from a job after I just signed an outrageously expensive new lease.

The thing is, my life is more fun when I let it unfold like a journey through 37 cable channels.

Channel surfing taught me how to quickly move between worlds—each of which is valid and promising,—how to get comfortable with ambiguity, and how to delight in the grand mystery of it all.

When done right, channel surfing is an art of suspending judgement. It should surprise me. It should remind me that my preferences aren’t always known or static. Who knew I would end up enjoying Storage Wars or Sports Center? Who knew I could learn so much about conflict resolution from Jersey Shore or The Amazing Race?

I want this book to feel like channel surfing, in particular the good ol’ days of channel surfing, during that special, fleeting time of your life when watching TV wasn’t yet a guilty pleasure, just pure pleasure; when you didn’t know what you were looking for and you were ok with that; when you let yourself linger on anything that caught your eye, even if it was just The Weather Network.

May you find what you are looking for. May you find something that interests you when you least expected it. May you linger on something that doesn’t long enough for it to surprise you. May you rejoice in using your imagination to fill in the blanks. May you marvel at all that you don’t know, and wonder yet at all that you do. May you laugh at any incongruities and not lose sleep over any offenses. May you move on without shame when it feels right to do so.

May you feel seen. May you feel heard. May you feel a little less lonely, a little less crazy, and a little more free.

May you ride the waves and not ask where they go.

Like a voracious caterpillar (gotta keep the metamorphosis metaphor going!), I plowed through a near complete first draft of this “book” in just a couple months. It was pretty easy when I could do whatever I wanted!

This is when I started to solicit feedback. I am not normally great at accepting feedback (correction: I don’t ever seek feedback, let alone take it), but I knew that there was enough of a gap between what I had produced and its potential to require it.

Would you believe that approximately 0% of what I wrote for Book 1 (fun) and Book 2 (choose your own adventure) are part of Book 3 (pollinators)?! So what happened?

The pupa stage.

🇻🇳 Stage 3: Pupa [Vietnam: Jan, Feb, Mar 2024] 🇻🇳

As the above quote suggests, the transformation that occurred in this “cocoon” phase of my book was extraordinary and dare I say, totally unpredictable.

I owe a huge, heartfelt shoutout to Dany, Mitch, Geoff, Beth, Jenny, and Tes who so generously dug in to the earliest, roughest, drafts of Book 1 & 2, and shared enough food for thought for me to spin a cocoon with 💗.

This is where and when things got really interesting. I had successfully let my brain roam free and now, not only was I finally having fun, it was as if the book took on a life of its own, and it was no longer even me doing the thinking/writing.

Fun, it turns out, is quite a spiritual experience (but more on that later…).

Because this post got rather, unexpectedly long, I’m going to finish describing the metamorphosis in a part 2!!

STAY TUNED!!!

After ~5 months of living under a rock, I finally have a complete, coherent, clean manuscript of my book. (!!)

I’m calling it my third draft. Very little from my first draft (November + December) has made it past the cutting board. The second draft (Jan + Feb), I worked closely with an awesome editor (hi Geoff!), as I wrote what …

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It’s been a minute! I’m still plugging away at my book, which has had me reflecting a lot on (fraught) my relationship with work. I keep wondering where this concept of a career “path” originated, and why we’ve somehow all internalized that even if it has detours and peaks and valleys, it should be free of debris and with an ultimate destination in mind. Why?

We know that a thriving ecosystem needs biodiversity, yet we somehow think we humans are exempt from this law of nature.

It’s not just that we are as dependent on bees as squirrels are on trees or fungi are on leaves (ie no accomplishment is ever truly our own); it’s that our lives are naturally as messy as a path through the Amazon jungle (ie full of swarms of mosquitos, thorns, and dead ends).

The harder we try to keep our (career) path through life free of weeds and puddles and spider webs, the more it starts to look like a plantation and less like a jungle that could sustain jaguars and toucans.

One path smells like fresh air, the other like Deet. One tastes like organic, locally grown strawberries, the other like a banana ripened in plastic. One sounds like crickets and birds chirping, the other like tractors mowing.

I know which path I’d rather take.

As we head into a new year, I can’t help but wonder, what if our resumes looked more like the Amazon jungle than an accounting of the palm oil produced in its wake?

What if they showcased the help we receive instead of weighing the logs that once were trees?

What if they celebrated a wide range of experiences, not how neatly we fell into line?

What if they measured success by how much fun we were having and not how much pesticide we needed to spray to stay within those neatly cropped lines?

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2023 Round-Up

Because I have a terrible memory, I pretty compulsively record what I do (watch, read, listen to..), whether through photos or apps. It doesn’t bring back the details per se, but it does help me recall the feelings.

Once a year, I think it’s fun to look back at all that I consumed and see what elicits the strongest feelings in me. Here’s a shortlist of what got me in my feels in 2023:

Favourite Essays of 2023

• The Sterile World of Infinite Choice by Anne Helen Petersen of

• Eating the Banana Peel by Anne Kadet of

• A 50/50 Custody Arrangement Could Save Your Marriage by Amy Shearn

Favourite Show of 2023

Shrinking (Apple TV): so goooooooooooood. Funny, fresh, evocative, heart-warming.

Runners Up: alllllllllll the reality dating shows; Dave (FX); White Lotus (HBO); Platonic (Apple TV); Afterlife (Netflix); but mainly all the reality dating shows.

Favourite Documentary of 2023

This is a tie between Of Fathers and Sons (Netflix), a fascinating look into how we’re shaped by our families and the disturbing roots of terrorism, and Trip to Infinity (Netflix), a mind-blowing and nerdy examination of what it really means if infinity exists.

Favourite Book of 2023

I absolutely love what Ross Gay does with language in Inciting Joy. I also love the message. Take this excerpt:

“One thing I want to be cautious of—by which I really mean refuse—are the ways we sometimes consider, for instance, gardening (or health or healthcare or potable water or clean air or pleasant and stable housing or decent jobs or good schools or libraries or living relatives or being unabused or having “free time” or not being imprisoned or not living near a power plant or an incinerator or a landfill or a million acres of corn or soybeans sprayed with toxins) a privilege, which actually obscures the fact that to be without a garden, or to be without green space, or to be without access to a park or clean water or the forest or fruit trees or birdsong or shade or a deep and abiding relationship with a tree, or to be without health care, and so often to be without health, is violence, it is abnormal (even if it is the norm), and it is an imposition of precarity that is not natural.

Which is to say: life, though it is a gift, is not a privilege.

Rather than indulging in virtue signaling that simply reifies or maybe even enjoys the guilt—guilt can be titillating, let’s admit that; bathing in it oneself or dumping it on others—of so-called privilege, rather than wading around in that little impotent, indulgent cesspool of hand-wringing regret, how about instead we figure out how to get rid of disprivilege, which we could do.

What would happen if we acknowledged that none of this is privilege, but rather it is as it should and could be? And what if we figured out, together, in a million different ways, how to make it so? Or to say it another way: rather than cursing the darkness, what if we planted some seeds?

Favourite Standup Comedy of 2023

Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares (HBO): so refreshing to see a Gen Z comedian finally take the stage like this!

Favourite Movie of 2023

Past Lives gave me the most feels and learning about inyeon, the Korean philosophy of how relationships form over many lifetimes, has changed how I see the world.

Honourable mention to Barbie for bringing so much life and joy to the streets, but that one is obvious! Also obvious: anything Timothée Chalamet.

Favourite Podcast of 2023

We Can Do Hard Things had the most eye opening conversations of any podcast for me. In particular:

• Carson Tueller on Disability

• Aubrey Gordon on Freedom from Anti-Fatness

• Everything from Becky Kennedy on Parenting

What are your favourites from 2023?! I’d love to know!

“What about the documentary you were making?”

“Are you still consulting though?”

“So you’re studying trees now I heard?”

My whole life I have been giving my friends whiplash. If you asked my own brother what I do, I am sure he would laugh and change the subject, unable to answer. 

He has had one job for the last 10 years while I’ve had about 10 jobs in the last one year. Across relationships, hobbies, and homes, I dabble, he commits.

He’s the type of guy to buy a dozen roses. Roses are nice, but I want a colourful spring bouquet. I want roses and lilies and sunflowers and orchids and tulips.

I have tried to be more like my brother1 but, despite our shared upbringings and genes, a life like his feels utterly against my nature. 

I wake up each morning feeling like a bee, driven to get to work, even if I don’t quite know what that work will be. I just know that I want to fly.

Did you know only 2% of wild bee species are responsible for 80% of pollination visits around the world? Or that not all bees within a species pollinate? Male bees (drones) don’t pollinate, neither do the queens.

Just as we can’t expect all bees to pollinate, it’s simply not in their nature, we can’t expect all humans to drone.2 

While some, like my brother, are quite content living a life of routine,3 I am not.

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For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I wanted to try every ice cream flavour sold at our local market (I didn’t want to hurt any of their feelings). I didn’t understand how my friends could have favourite colours; I declared mine to be rainbow. I was determined, determined!, to know every person in my hometown of 650,000 people. My hobby has always been trying new hobbies.

I am a pollinator.

I’m sometimes accused of being impatient, or lacking focus, but I believe I was meant to move from one flower to the next.

I wish I could tell you that my career looked like a fresh spring bouquet, but it’s more like a weekly box of fruits and vegetables from your local farm share. Too many zucchinis and turnips, a bunch of spinach with worms in it, a few apples you’d rather weren’t there, and, finally, the reason you signed up for this overpriced organic chore in the first place, a handful of perfectly ripe strawberries.

Pollinators like me are often diagnosed with ADHD, and labelled for all the things we don’t have, ignoring what we do have, in abundance: a drive towards the unknown that benefits everyone in the colony.

Even if a single flower, hypothetically, offered all the nourishment we could ever need, the health of the overall garden would suffer if we didn’t trust our pollinator instincts. We would suffer too.

And we do.

Under immense social pressure, we focus on a single career path; we take medication so we can maintain that focus; and we gag that little voice inside us that just wants to be free.

I briefly looked like I had my life on a coherent track. I leveraged my Ivy League MBA (talk about a healthy bunch of spinach!) to get a coveted job in tech that I even managed to hold on to for five years! Like my ambitious MBA classmates and my talented colleagues, I tried to care about the money being added to my account every two weeks and the OKR meetings and product updates. I promise you, I tried.

I wrote lists of pros and cons to convince myself to hold on, but there were no cons to speak of. The job was great, all strawberries. It just wasn’t me.

Many people, especially of the drone variety, don’t know what to do with you if you say you do “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” They feel the need to give you advice, to help you get back on track, mistaking your wandering path for being lost.

I’ve never been lost. I have just been misunderstood. Like the poor turnips in my farm share box that I don’t know what to do with.4

But I see some promising signs that the “future of work” will embrace us pollinators. Our skills have never been in higher demand: we are adaptable, flexible, quick learners, excited by new technologies and challenges, curious, and creative. We love to experiment and explore.5 I’m just waiting for the day when companies start hiring full time Dabblers.

Until then, please don’t feel bad for us if it looks like we don’t know what our purpose is. Not knowing is our purpose.6