walking through and out of the forest
You suddenly wake up in a dark forest. You don’t know where you are or why you’re there. What do you do?
A friend asked me this and my answer was — if it’s night out, sleep, since I won’t be useful for anything anyways. But as soon as daylight peeks in, choose a direction and walk. This answer seems pretty straightforward. There might be some alternatives (yell for help, set up camp, find a hiding place, etc.) but it’s likely no one will be able to save you and the only way out is through.
My friend then confessed that this question was a hidden psychoanalysis inquiry meant to reveal how I get through tough situations in real life. I’ve thought about this since. The forest solution is clear, but while navigating hard times in real life, it’s much easier said than done. There’s also a lot of opposing ideologies that people preach, such as — be intentional about where you’re going, plan how you’ll reach your goals, be patient with yourself, or focus on self care. I think all of these other things are important, but the priority for me is always to keep moving.
Walking is a coping mechanism
At the moment that a transition happens in my life, my emotions tend to take over, but continuing to stay busy and distracted is my best way through. When I graduated college and moved to NYC, most of my experience was wonderful — kind roommates and acquaintances, sunny bikes to work, and city surroundings radiating energy and possibility. But I had no close friends nearby or any familiarity with the city. Prior to moving to NYC I knew what my long term goals were, but I had no clear vision yet on a routine to accomplish those. There were many nights I would come home from my new job to an empty apartment and feel like I had been dropped into a dark forest.
The first thing I did was nurture myself with a nightly yogurt bowl with strawberries and honey and good sleep. Next, I set a set of baby step goals for myself and focused on just accomplishing those. Check out my local library, learn my local grocery cashier’s name, buy some curtains, follow up on that intro to a possible friend in the city. Of course, I allowed myself to process my emotions in conversations with friends and family about how my move was going, but I didn’t allow for large expanses of quiet. I barely stayed home without keeping busy. Instead, I found comfort in the simple motions and tasks that slowly helped me gain my footing in this new NYC life.
After a couple weeks or so, I finally felt empowered to step out of my comfort zone in NYC. I signed up for Portuguese lessons, joined a piano group, and started going on runs along the Hudson river. Building a life in the city wasn’t easy though, especially when it came to creating close friendships. I went to events and house parties but struggled to find my people. Some social interactions left me feeling small, like I didn’t think fast enough or have enough social competence to be a thriving young person in New York. The city in general gave me a tough time; I got lost on the subways, got peed on by a guy on the street, and almost got hit by a car while biking in the rain. I also ended a long term relationship that wasn’t doing well, and I launched myself into an era of independence in which I had to re-learn how to be happy alone.
On days with multiple blows in this new life, I felt defeated, but I kept my head up and continued walking. I realized keeping busy with simple things is my coping mechanism. If I had stopped to take shelter as a homebody or retreated to visit home, I would have gotten consumed by the overwhelming awareness of not having a home yet in New York. This doesn’t mean cramming my schedule with energy intensive social outings or high pressure work, but rather it means picking myself up and pushing myself to cook, or do groceries, or visit a friend even when I’m not feeling at my best. Those small tasks are the steps that help me “exit the forest.” Due to my pushing through those initial months, I felt settled earlier than expected. Six months into my life in New York, I wrote a list of ambitious goals and shared them with my roommate for her to keep me accountable, and I’ve been tackling them with full force.
Walking is an efficient way to solve problems
In my job at Alza, I’ve learned the best way to do anything is to choose a direction and start walking, and then run. You don’t stay still for too long thinking about which direction to go in, and you don’t immediately start running in a direction. Every day that I show up to work, opening up my computer is daunting. There are a myriad of notifications from our system monitors, Slack messages, and user feedback tickets. As a lean team in the early stages, we individually have to check whether our current work focus is reasonable or whether we have to pivot to support other feature work or fix a bug. In addition, we’re only a few engineers doing a bit of everything and therefore often have to ramp up on new tools or frameworks or work in unfamiliar parts of the codebase.
One of my mentors has taught me a couple of things that I try to apply daily. First, jot down what you want to get done today. This is helpful for me because it’s the easiest way to start getting to work. It’s easy to dive in when I know everything has been “sorted away,” meaning I won’t forget what I need to do later and I’ve prioritized (not perfectly, but well enough). Some of the bullet points might be vague (e.g. check on system notifications) and might expand based on later findings, but I know it’s a rough checklist and can be changed whenever needed. It’s also helpful in the same way journaling about feelings is; it helps to demystify daunting tasks by chunking them into digestible bullet points. Most days I’m so locked into work that I don’t end up looking at it again at all, but it’s the motion of creating it that helps me the most.
Secondly, when ramping up on something unfamiliar, take a few nibbles before biting off a large chunk of work. When I’m diving into any new project, I design a starter project for myself. It should help me make progress towards the project goal, but most importantly it should help me get to a place where I’m ready to take on the rest of the project. It ideally has few moving parts, low complexity, and a combination of components I’m familiar and unfamiliar with. Or, if I’m digging into an incident, I define a small set of assumptions that help me secure my understanding before I start answering the large questions. These starter exercises serve as a primer for whatever I’m about to take on afterwards. They don’t have to perfectly cover the foundations of the space I’m entering, like a professor’s syllabus would be, but rather help me gain momentum so that everything afterwards feels easier.
I sometimes forget to do these things, and I end up recklessly going down an unnecessary rabbit hole or spiraling in work frustration. For me, efficiency isn’t about optimizing myself as a machine, but rather as a human. This means managing my emotions by engineering my workflow in order to achieve my highest output. Though the small walk before you run is important, the priority is starting to walk in the first place. Even for everything outside of work, I notice how much just doing things makes it easier to do even more. Just talk to a New Yorker and you’ll realize that our constant walking lowers the activation energy barrier to do a myriad of things on a daily basis.
Continuing to move can set you exponentially ahead of others
Another learning that’s stuck with me from Alza has been about what it takes to do hard things: perseverance and grit. Before I joined, the team worked for tirelessly for a couple of years stitching together the foundations of a neo-bank, from the debit card processor partner to a compliant system for approving customers. They did things no one had done before, in developing a bank program that offers the longest list of permissible document alternatives to an SSN and offers 5+ core banking products already in its first two years of existence. Why did no one do this before? There were likely other brilliant teams with the strategic knowledge to do it, but I believe it’s mostly that no one commmitted the time required to do it.
I tend to overthink and this makes me worry about all the little things we’re not doing well as a company, but I push through this by continuing to move. The suboptimal UX experiences that still haven’t been fixed, the email marketing that could use some polish, or the numbers of users that mysteriously drop off all haunt me. It’s the perfectionist inside of me that yearns to stay up all night tidying up everything and writing those users to ask what we could do better. Of course, these are important to pay attention to, but after they’re acknowledged at a meeting or in a linear ticket, I ignore them. I become a devout optimist, convincing myself that we’re doing great and we just have to keep going. Most of the time day to day, I focus on the user feedback we already have and the high level priorities we’ve already aligned on, and don’t think, just do. Continue for a few weeks, stop, analyze, then iterate and repeat.
In the forest, stopping for a minute to wonder if you’re going the right way isn’t necessarily a significant loss of time, but of momentum. If you’re running, and you stop, you’re lured into the sweet release of pain as your breaths slow and everything quiets. Starting to run again feels so hard. I constantly remind myself to keep going, rather than to take breaks, because I avoid losing my inertia this way. Not only do I avoid large downside, but I gain possible large upside given the potential success that comes with compounding progress on any one thing. I apply this at any time scale, whether I’m reading and intently focused on reaching a goal of chapters without stopping or whether I’m pushing through months of intense work. Whenever I do need to stop to rest, my body tells me, and I listen, but the default is to push through.
Do you exit the forest?
An important remaining question. I think we encounter ourselves in forests all the time, and we may leave one but still be in another. Any hard thing, whether it’s settling in a new city or working on a new project can feel dark and gloomy, increasingly so if there’s many decisions to make, uncomfortable tasks to do, and little certainty to operate under.
The gloomiest for me has been the loss of my dog, Sammy, who I grew up with for 14 years. After learning of the news while abroad in Colombia for the holidays, I sunk into an overwhelming period of grief for a few days. Those days for me were the initial sleep I needed, with no thought about how to move forward. I don’t think I’ve left that forest yet, even after a few years have passed. The grief will hit again out of nowhere and I’ll get pulled back into the shadows for a bit. But it doesn’t help to dwell on the questions that still hang in the fog, since there’s no comforting answers to be found. Instead, I focus on the warm memories and reframe my perspective as a gratefulness for his presence in my life at least for those years. This mentality brings comfort that allows me to continue moving and living. Whatever I’m going through, I remind myself that time heals and that “this too shall pass.”
Despite my prevailing optimist self, I think the dark forests are there for a reason, and I treasure the perspective I gain from the dark times as well. One of my favorite Hozier lyrics is “don’t you ever tame your demons, but always keep them on a leash.” Whenever I listen to Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, I can feel how his inner struggles shaped his music into painful but beautiful melodies. On harder days, I’ll funnel my negative energy into my music or writing, and even in my work, where the chip on my shoulder has helped me get far. But regardless, I remind myself to continue moving, one foot after the other, and that I’ll get through and far in whatever I’m doing.
