Why 2016?

Ruminations on the 2016-as-meme trend, with memories of leaving xoJane, and some of the divorce year.

“As long as we believe that there is something that will permanently satisfy our hunger for security, suffering is inevitable.”

― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

In 2016, I joined my 39th year standing at a crossroads. After nearly five years at women’s media enfant terrible xoJane dot com, I gave notice on January 2. I’d been planning it since November. I composed a series of emails to send on a carefully planned timeline to control the narrative; I had reason to believe quitting might put me out of women’s media entirely. Which it did. But at the time I wasn’t sure I was ready to shut the door on that option. I quit mainly as a result of the site being sold to the now dissolved Time Inc (rest in shit, lol) and the shenanigans that followed.

Me in 2016.

There were some wonderful people at xoJane, people I still talk to today. There were also some loathsome, vainglorious assholes, whom I can only hope I never meet again. Not because I fear them now; because I know what I would say. I was already steady on my feet back then, but the years between have destroyed any hesitation to speak that I might have once had, to preserve the peace. Fuck the peace. Monsters, we all know by now, ought to be named, if not publicly, then at least to their faces.

So I gave notice. The quiet departure I’d intended did not materialize; I would continue as a freelance editor for another six months before my services were no longer required amidst the devastated staffing landscape that remained after the acquisition. When I got the email, so smugly telling me I was no longer needed, I felt relief. The freelance situation wasn’t too awful; I was mostly left alone, was not expected to participate in endless and unproductive meetings (meetings that could have been emails are my special room in hell), and it was extra money when I was, after all, newly unemployed. I didn’t quit with another job lined up. Apparently I don’t do that. So it took a few extra months, but I was free. They never even made me sign an NDA, and the basic incompetence of that still makes my head spin.

Quitting that job was the first step in a transformative year. A few months after leaving xoJane, I got a call from Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, asking if I wanted a job on the Netflix reboot of the show. I had worked on the Kickstarter campaign that enabled said reboot the previous fall, and as a fan of the show since childhood, I was delighted. I wrote on the eleventh season in the spring, riff-produced half the scripts with Joel that summer, and had the incredible privilege of being on set for production in Los Angeles in September.

While I was in LA for a few weeks, living my literal dream as a film school grad, my recently laid-off spouse did and said some awful things. I still wonder if I could have been more sympathetic, but I can also attest that I would never have done the things my spouse did, if someone I claimed to love was off achieving their loftiest, most insane aspirations. Our situations reversed, I would have been happy for them, even as I might have been privately miserable for myself. Plus, it wasn’t just those things, at that time, it was a cumulative effect of many years – it just happened that I was standing in the wood-paneled bathroom of a Laurel Canyon guest house when I first thought: Maybe I should get divorced.

I went home at the end of September and shared this idea with the person I married. I started individual therapy, and we started couples therapy, and the rest of the year was spent watching the comforting prison I’d built for myself fall down with excruciating slowness, one brick at a time. I had genuinely hoped that therapy would help me figure out why I shouldn’t get divorced. I went in expecting to fix a marriage. That didn’t happen. Instead, the issues I’d spent years patiently acclimating to become glaring and unavoidable. For a decade, I had erased my own needs and humanity in the service of trying to be Wife in a way that I was doomed to fail. There was grief – for the time I’d lost, for my dogged pursuit of comfort and contentment in a place they would never be found – and like all grief, it still surges occasionally, but it’s also softer now, and with distance, those years fit more cleanly into the bigger picture of my whole life. Grief shouldn’t be confused with regret; I believe things unfolded the way they needed to, even if the experience was devastating. Bad things will always happen, but so will good things.

I would get divorced. I would make a plan to move, alone, to Los Angeles. But that didn’t happen. Yet, anyway. Maybe someday I still will.

All of that is a much longer story.

The annual birthday selfie, 2026.

Just over a week ago, I passed into my 49th year. Historically I celebrate the big round decades, but I mourn in years ending with 9. I am, again, at a crossroads. Mystery Science Theater 3000 as I knew it is effectively dead; my job at MST3K’s production company ended at the beginning of 2024 when the company closed. I have since done contract and freelance work and mainly just been really broke – this is not so bad, as it’s always useful to be reminded that while money (or the lack of it) can make you miserable, it can’t on its own make you happy. I have pondered business ideas, developed them, abandoned them, taken them back up again months later with a fresh perspective. I have, possibly most importantly, dismantled my need to rely on work to define myself. I have been lucky to have some amazing jobs, but I have also put too much of my self-worth into whatever I was doing for work. Like ending my marriage taught me not to root my whole identity in my ability to be useful to others, being extendedly unemployed has taught me to separate my value from the work that I am (or am not) doing.

2016 is on everyone’s mind lately. I don’t know if it’s because for most people, that was a good year, or at least a better year than many of the years since. I don’t know if it glistens with pre-pandemic promise, or if we were less terrified of the future because we couldn’t imagine how bad things would be allowed to get. Is it nostalgia for a time that never was?

Goaded on by peer pressure, I have dug through archived social media posts to discover how I felt about 2016 as it happened. Inside my memory, 2016 is a heady mixture of excitement and uncertainty, the final third of the year ultimately descending into a fugue state of horror. But my photos then look normal, smiling, even happy. My social media posts were banal, with occasional references to difficult days, and challenges, but always drawing a neat circle back to a broad optimism for the future. I never learned how to write about hard times without finding a trim button to put on things at the end. I still haven’t learned. I only survived 2016 because I could circle back to hope, to the belief that all the decisions I was making were in the service of a better future for myself. I will survive this year, and the next and the next, because I can circle back to hope.

Where did I expect I’d be when I reached 2026? In 2016 I knew my dream job (I may not have dreamt of labor, but I did dream of making something I loved, with other people also working from love) wouldn’t last forever; dream jobs never do. I’d had one dream job already, at xoJane, and watched as it turned into a job I couldn’t bear to continue, and so I left it. I saw a mildly troubled marriage turn into a gaping collapsing void, and I escaped it. I also saw a bright opportunity to do something meaningful in the midst of all this, and I accepted it. I knew nothing stays the same, and that even the most magical times are finite. I have always been lucky. I have been lucky, and in the right place at the right time, and enthusiastic about change. My life today – aside from the aforementioned unemployment, and the ever-multiplying political horrors – is as comforting and loving as it’s ever been. Better even than I thought it could be.

I did a lot of driving, in 2016. I went on long road trips. I went to concerts and coffee shops and theaters. I just went out. My car was the only place I felt both safe and free. It could take me places. I got in my car and drove away from the home where my failing expectations still lived, pale and ghastly, struggling for every arduous breath. It took them so long to die. Sometimes when I came back I would sit in my car for an hour, doing nothing, just working up the energy to go inside. The problem with achieving your dreams is that they end, and then you need new dreams. You need to remember how to dream. Slowly, I dreamed of a different life. Ten years on, I have to dream, still.