The last few mornings, I’ve been waking up with my hands feeling numb. They’ve been sore the last week, likely because I’ve been spending more time video editing, which means more time at the computer on top of already being on a computer most of the weekdays for work. The upside of COVID-19 quarantine is that I’ve been spending more time shooting cooking videos and editing. The downside of the quarantine, other than the obvious, is that the more editing I do, the more time I spend on a computer, which means the more my hands and wrists get sore and angry at me for abusing them. I did a quick Google search for “waking up with hands numb” and found that most of the results I got were around early onset carpel tunnel symptoms.

That’s exactly what I need to hear. Granted, I’ve been able to handle wrist and hand pain from computer use with my dyna-flex power ball and stretching, so it’s been manageable for all these years in front of a computer. But I hadn’t needed to use the power ball in months now. More physical therapy is needed for my body and me during shelter-in-place.

One of my colleagues, who recently started just this past December, has resigned. It was really sad to hear this, particularly since most of the people I’ve gotten along with well and trusted have all been leaving. I can count on a single hand the number of people I genuinely care about and can trust at work now. She said she had a bad feeling from her very first day here, that there was some eerie vibe, that a toxicity was just seeping through the walls. It got to her more and more each day, and last month, it really came to a turning point where she would wake up feeling sick about going to work. It was affecting her mental and physical health. Just the mere thought of work on an evening or weekend would make her stomach churn. So she resigned and is leaving for another job effective two weeks from now.

It’s sad to see how things have evolved where I am where people can “feel” hostility, tension, and toxicity on their very first day in the office. Is this what work life should be in the corporate world, in the year 2020? Why does it have to be so hard?

I was looking at the calendar today and realized that if the COVID-19 pandemic did not hit, in ten days, we would have been leaving for Honolulu to attend our friends’ destination wedding. I had meticulously made a list of restaurants and hole-in-the-wall spots to potentially film food videos at, and we had already booked our flights and hotel months ago. All of that has been cancelled. The food list has been de-prioritized in my bookmarks list for perusal. I ended up cancelling my planned days off for the wedding/Hawaii long weekend.

My manager has been strongly suggesting that we take at least a day or two off in April, just to unwind and not think about work given the pandemic. I’m not even sure I’ve ever done that — taken a day off just to stay in the city and not travel. That feels like a very foreign idea to me, especially since it’s not like I have kids or elderly parents to take care of. What would I do all day — just cook, read, and walk around the block?

Today marks three years that I’ve been working at my current company. In June, I will mark 12 years being employed full time after graduation. It’s strange to think in some ways about how far I’ve come. It’s not as though I’ve aggressively climbed the corporate ladder (I haven’t), but I think more about how green and naive I was when I started 12 years ago, and how jaded and skeptical I am now. Three years ago, I knew very little about the real SaaS world since this was the first real SaaS company I’ve ever worked at. I’ve learned more about the software space, more about how internal politics works (that’s not necessarily a good thing), and more about how fragile work relationships are. You come in thinking you can remain friends with people once they leave, but for so many of us, once you leave a company, you leave behind everyone there, as well. You say you will be friends with these people, but the odds are against you. In the last three years, endless colleagues who I was friendly with have left, and I’ve only genuinely stayed in touch with maybe three of them. That means I’ve stayed in touch with one a year, which is more than I can say for all the other places I’ve worked at.

After all these years working in digital marketing and SaaS, I feel a lot more empathy now, more than ever, for working moms, for stay-at-home moms, and for women in tech who eventually leave the tech world permanently. It’s really hard being a woman in tech, and even harder being a woman of color in tech, because you have no idea how much your last name, your face, your gender, play into whether you are liked or disliked, promoted or given a raise, or pigeon-holed into certain stereotypes and roles. And as a woman of color over the last 12 years, I oftentimes feel misunderstood or betrayed by white women in the workplace. And it’s not like you can openly question it that way because then you’ll be accused of using the “race card or “gender card,” which for really perverse people, they believe that you have a leg up as a Asian or as a woman (because, as Ali Wong once said, that’s always been a winning combination in this world!).

But I do recognize I’m far luckier than so many people I know. And I’m grateful for that. But I do not feel like the tech world is changing at a rate I am comfortable with. It seems more like every day, I have to choose from a crappy situation to a crappier situation, as opposed to a situation that I actually feel is good for me, or good for future women in tech who come long after me.

Yes. This is 2020.

I’ve used a lot of different video conferencing software during the last nearly 12 years of working full time. I’ve used WebEx, Go-To Meeting, Join.me, Google Hangouts, Clearslide (truly the worst, and of course, predictably, the very worst company I worked at licensed their disgusting software), among others that I cannot even remember now. But until I joined my latest company, I had never experienced the beauty and glory that is Zoom. Zoom is truly everything amazing and everything one can ask for when it comes to video conferencing software. It is so intuitive that it pretty much defines “intuitive.”

You do not need to download any new software or apps; if you simply have the meeting link or dial-in number, you can click on the link, immediately be added to the conference, and listen in via your phone if you prefer phone audio. No stupid plug-ins or applications to install. The app is the most intuitive. Want to screen share? Click the big green “SHARE SCREEN” button on the bottom. Want to end the meeting? Click the red “LEAVE MEETING” on the bottom right. Want to raise your hand to ask a question and not seem rude to to the presenter? There’s that option, too! On top of that, you can even create a white-board, sub-conference rooms. Concerned about not getting enough sleep last night? Well, there’s a solution for that, too: enable airbrushing on your video! And the sugar on top for fun: you can change your video background (in the event you don’t want your colleagues to see what your bedroom looks like if that’s the only available room in your house to take a video call). Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time (or so it looks like) in Newfoundland in my work meetings.

So while it was great news to hear that Zoom decided to make their app free for non-businesses during the current COVID-19 pandemic and allow the world to easily connect with their loved ones while we all self-quarantine, it was frustrating this morning to find out that my meeting quality was not as high; the audio was failing. Other times, the video was not working. Screen-sharing was lagging. I ended up rescheduling a meeting today for another time because of this failure. I don’t think they had enough bandwidth to cover for their extreme generosity, and so now, even if only temporarily, people like me have to suffer a little.

A friend of mine who normally isn’t particularly opinionated and has responded very passively to my comments around feminism has been chiming in more about this in the last couple of years. It’s likely because she’s finally noticing that she’s not getting treated fairly as a female person of color, so she’s feeling the pain directly. At her office, she participates in a book club where they read Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. After she mentioned it, I put it on my NYPL Libby app request list and got to digitally borrow it this weekend.

Here’s an interesting fact that I learned from this book: For most of the 20th century, the New York Philharmonic was nearly 100% men. Then, in the 1970s, the numbers of female players started to go up… due to blind auditions. The hiring committee would not be able to see who was playing in the audition because there would be a screen between them and the player. The screens had an immediate impact: by the early 1980s, women began to make up 50% of the share of new hires. And today, the proportion of female musicians in the New York Philharmonic stands at over 45%.

So, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could do this for all job interviews?! It’s hard in practice given you cannot really give a presentation or even a phone call screen without hearing the person’s voice/seeing the person’s face, but it really brings into question all the biases, whether conscious or subconscious, that we have when evaluating candidates and defining “meritocracy.” The concept of meritocracy is a complete myth in the workplace no matter what any Human Resources team tells you, as anyone who has half a brain knows that women do not get treated the same way that men do at work. We get criticized for our behaviors, emotions, personality at a far higher rate than men do. And the situation only gets worse when it’s a female person of color, not a white woman.

I’m not completely sure this was the best time to be reading this book given that during the day, I’m angry about the failure of our federal government in acknowledging the gravity of the Coronavirus sooner, for de-funding the CDC, and for calling this “Chinese virus” a hoax; I’m also angry about the level of racism/violence against Asians as a result of this global pandemic (I do not recall anyone getting angry and having racist fits at white Americans when swine flu happened?!). So, in other words, during the day, I’m angry about politics and racism against my own kind, and during the evening, I’m angry while reading this book to think that something as basic as the design of restrooms and cars, office temperature settings, and even city infrastructure planning are biased against women (I actually once asked my driving instructor about the design of air bags and whether they would really protect women given that on average, they are smaller in stature than men, and therefore the airbags are not designed for that smaller sized person…), and that the ‘norm’ has and will always be considered “male” and women, as Aristotle once famously said, are just “mutilated men.” To this day, our medical communities across the world do not think there’s a reason to spend more money and time on research to ensure that both men AND women are included in clinical trials… because how on earth can women’s bodies respond differently to drugs and treatments than men’s?

Yep, women are screwed. And women of color are even more screwed in the world. And this is 2020.

Our CEO is in town here in New York this week, which means that all of NYC leadership is going to dinner with him. A colleague commented to me that the entire dinner will be white men, with the exception of one Indian-American man. I shrugged and said I wasn’t surprised, but that’s our company. What are we going to do about it? This is not really a real conversation that is going to go anywhere. I do not know why we are even bringing up such a moot point.

I’ve realized that voicing concerns like this really do not make any difference and prompt no change. When it’s convenient, someone from HR will say something callous like, “it’s diverse on our leadership team: our CMO is Japanese.” Or, “there are two (white) women on this team’s mangers/directors list.” They think they are helping; they are not and only making things worse. They are tokening the entire diversity situation. The most we can do is fight for ourselves and our paycheck, get whatever we can out of the company (which usually means.. trying to outperform as much as possible so that you are not only maximizing your paycheck but also adding a lot of business value for the customer and ultimately the company), and tune out all the politics and the genuine care. We cannot really survive in the business world if we are constantly caring about things that are fully out of our individual control.

A former colleague and I met for smoothies this afternoon to catch up. He left our company last summer after being angry about a lot of the processes and politics he faced internally. The company he went to was a public company but had no New York office, so he was 100 percent remote in his role. Initially, he found it great: he could work from home full time, make a proper breakfast every morning, schedule everything around his gym sessions. But gradually, he got lonely and felt miserable. He felt like all he did was stay at home for work and after work. There was no separation of time. It would be 8pm suddenly, and he realized he was still working and hadn’t eaten any dinner. The work itself plus the remote nature of his role got to him, so he ended up resigning this week.

The grass isn’t always greener when you leave. I thought about this when I was leaving him and going back to my office today. He decided he wanted to leave this type of role completely and is trying something new. But he says he still has no regrets about leaving our company — he couldn’t take the politics anymore.

But realistically, when do you ever fully leave politics? You can leave a company and its individual issues, but then you’ll move on to the next one, and it will have its own set of issues and back talking. It just keeps going.

I realize that this June will mark twelve years of full time work. This feels very strange to me, as it really doesn’t feel like that long ago when I graduated from college, completely green and wide-eyed at the idea of the white collar corporate world. I thought I could do anything then as long as I worked hard. I’ll be fierce and outspoken and prove them all wrong about what an Asian could be. Shrill? I won’t be “shrill” like a woman — I’ll be assertive and lower my pitch so that I’ll be taken seriously. My race and gender won’t hold me back! I’m going to climb that ladder and show them all that I can succeed!

Well, all that got shot to shit. I climbed the ladder… sort of. I started making a lot more money year after year. But none of it really felt that fulfilling at the end of the day. If I knew I was going to die the next day, there’s no way I would look back on my life and be proud of my line of work and felt like I made a true contribution to the world, that I actually made a difference. And to top that off, I had to deal with endless internal politics, perceptions of myself that were just flat out false and fabricated. Oh, and that hasn’t stopped.

Today, I sit at my job, at a company where I know I am deeply privileged and get to experience luxuries like literal free lunch, zero health premiums, the ability to work from home when I want, yet I still feel stunted and like there is more to life than this. I think about my good fortune every single day to acknowledge that I am grateful for what I have, and I am reminded of it even more whenever I meet with friends, family, and acquaintances who cannot believe the types of benefits I get where I work. But I still want to do more, see more, experience more. I want to get away from the politics, the back talking, the gossip, the nonsense of corporations. I just need to keep doing things that are fulfilling outside of work to keep me motivated about life.

After qualifying for president’s club last year, when I found out what the criteria would be for this year, I immediately started crunching the numbers to see if I might get in again (I didn’t really realize I’d become that person, but I started getting addicted to the bragging rights, the prestige, and the free luxury trips). And based on the numbers I did calculate, I would qualify again, but I wasn’t really sure if I’d make it… I always feel like there’s some force out there going against me that is going to randomly make objective qualifications based on the actual data suddenly subjective and based on their own personal opinions. So when they announced my name on stage tonight, my first thought was “wait, those numbers were actually lower than what I calculated.” Then, my next thought was, “fuck them all,” as I walked on stage, to everyone who either doesn’t think my contributions have mattered or is against my success not only here, but overall.

I’ve known this since my middle school years when I was known for being super friendly and kind to everyone that it doesn’t matter what you do or how kind or selfless you are, but there will always be someone out there who not only does not like you, but wants everything bad for you and is even out to sabotage you. There will be people out there who will try to twist your words and actions into something that was never truly your intent. I was recently reminded of this with an unfortunate situation at work, and as I was told by someone close to me in the organization, “You are going to rise above it.” I have, and I’ve done it quietly and without much fuss. But that does not mean that when I succeed and can speak to my successes that I won’t be thinking about them in the back of my mind in glee, knowing that I’ve proven all of them wrong. Screw the haters.