Essays

June 27, 2024

Is “Making It” a Myth?

Photo by Jonathan Grassi.

By Marquita Harris

In late 2021, journalist Samhita Mukhopadhyay made an astute observation in her essay for The Cut: The Girlboss is Dead, Long Live The Girlboss. In it, she captured the downfall of an era, that for a brief time, held so many of us in a chokehold:

“‘Girlboss’ became synonymous with ‘hustle culture,’” she wrote. “With a feminism-lite twist: the optimistic, almost religious desire to get ahead at work and in life. #Girlboss is the millennial-pink version of Helen Gurley Brown’s Having It All, the living embodiment of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s order to lean in.”  

At the end of the piece, Mukhopadhyay hoped women would find a better model for success. 

Now, in Mukhopadhyay’s latest book, The Myth of Making It, the former Teen Vogue editor digs deeper.

Part memoir, part critical analysis, she is as vulnerable with her own tender story of “failure,” as she is with her scrutiny of Helen Gurley Brown’s enduring ideology.

I spoke with Mukhopadhyay about ambition, vulnerability, and the freedom of not having it all “figured out.”

Who did you write The Myth of Making It for? 

I wrote it for women grappling with ambition and that journey from being all bright-eyed, and of the belief that if you work hard and keep your head down and do everything you’re supposed to do, you’ll find happiness and success. Then you get to the middle point of your career and you ask, Why am I actually working this hard? I wanted to create something for women who feel like they’re stuck between all of those narratives. They’re skeptical of the ‘girl boss,’ they’re critical of Lean In culture, but they’re still ambitious and don’t have a path to move forward.

Although it’s a memoir, there’s also so much career advice. Was that balance intentional? 

Career books often speak in generalizations and don’t personalize some of the experiences we have, which are deeply nuanced. It’s easy to say, ‘Capitalism is bad, and neoliberal feminism is good!’ and fall into black-and-white thinking. I wanted to do something more complex and textured, and it felt like my own story was a place to really ground that. 

There are some rough parts in this book, particularly when you discuss suffering a nervous breakdown after a difficult layoff. If you don’t mind sharing, how did you protect your mental health during the writing process?

It actually took a while to get to the point where I was ready to share that story. It was connected to a lot of shame and embarrassment for me. Ostensibly, I was laid off. While it’s a normal experience in digital media, I still internalized an ethos of meritocracy and this [felt like] a referendum of who I was, my intelligence, and what I was capable of doing. [The layoff] was a breaking point. 

So many of us have been there. It’s never just about the layoff. 

Exactly. It’s easy for that experience to metastasize and you’re like, I hate this person and I hate this company. When it first happened, I was completely traumatized. As I write about in the book, I had the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. I struggled with mental health issues after that. A lot of people were like, What’s the big deal? You get a little break. Well, this was my entire identity. 

What helped you heal?

I did intensive EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) on the experience, which is a form of trauma-based therapy. I asked myself, Is this really trauma? But those job experiences were encoded in my body as a form of trauma and deep rejection. I was through processing everything when I finally wrote about it three or four years later. Otherwise, this book would’ve been a lot more petty, you feel me? 

What do you want the reader to get from this book?

My hope, first and foremost, is for women and non-binary people in particular, to feel seen in their isolation in the workplace. We often internalize the myth of meritocracy, and hustle culture suggests that everything is on our own shoulders. I hope this [helps generate] a philosophical and spiritual shift by examining how we’re connected to the people that we work with. Also, I think right now we’re in this moment where there’s deep workplace skepticism. On some level, it’s healthy, but ultimately not giving a shit about your job and phoning it in doesn’t make you happy either.

Can we discuss the “Nurture Tax” — that invisible emotional work women are often tasked with and how it contributes to burnout? 

Women’s expectations are split, right? You’re supposed to be good at all of it, and most people just feel like they’re bad at all of it. And that’s why there’s so much burnout. 

Burnout is the idea that no matter what you do, you’re never satisfied with the outcome. And it has been positioned as an either/or. Either you’re a nurturing person and you prioritize caretaking (so your career ambitions are on the back burner) or the other way around. Your career ambitions are your primary driving force, and family and all of that comes secondary. 

What advice do you have for people who feel like they have to choose between being a provider or a caretaker?

When we’re forced to choose, we make choices that aren’t in alignment with how we want to live. I have thought a lot about why I don’t have children. I never saw it as a choice. I was just responding to a set of circumstances I had experienced. [Such as] seeing my girlfriends who had kids on their own, and what they went through to do that. I realized that I don’t have the capacity to do that. It’s hard to say this is all a choice, it’s more of a response to conditions.

We’re also often blamed for our choices.

Yes! It’s, Well, you chose the career path, so that’s why you’re grappling with all of these issues. Rather than thinking, Wow, wouldn’t it be great if men took on more of a role in child-rearing? So when I decide to go into the workforce, it’s not this huge sacrifice for me and my family? That’s the question a lot of people are rubbing up against right now. There are a lot of mothers in my life who are like, I don’t want to fucking work all time. It’s killing me, and I have to parent. I can’t get out of parenting. I can’t not do it.

Motherhood was never an option for me either. So to hear you explain it like that resonates hard.

Totally! To me, this is where the rubber hits the road: How can we create work environments that are truly beneficial to our society and to families without this trad wife shit?

You now have all of this wisdom. What does life look like after processing everything? How do you feel about where your career is headed?

(long pause.)

Oh no, I can move on to another question.

No, no leave it! (laughter). Becausethat’s a piece of it, right? I haven’t figured it out. I’ve [launched] a new book that could change things for me and we’ll see what types of work I get to do after this, which could be really exciting.

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