Unbreakable Me
I just finished watching the fourth season of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and I am Kimmy Schmidt. Was I kidnapped and trapped in a bunker for decades? Not really, but I was educated and trapped in a physics laboratory for decades.
Like Kimmy Schmidt, I know what it feels like when something snaps inside of you and nothing will ever be the same. After I had spent 20 years studying physics, I stepped out of a metaphorical bunker. I just couldn’t keep doing what I had been doing, but I didn’t fully understand why. All I knew was that I needed to fully disengage from the machine I had been a part of.
There was a moment when I decided that if no one listens to you, there is no point in existing within an organization. You could do a great job as a researcher but if everyone is so self-absorbed or absorbed in the hunt for funding that no one will even look at your results, you are wasting everyone’s time and energy. Ironically, I decided that the solution to this problem was to quit physics and start writing novels that few people will ever read.
Like everyone else in my discipline, I had been training myself to play the game of science and I had hoped to play in the big leagues, but there came an awful moment when I realized that no matter how strong I became, no one would pass me the ball. They would pass it to a man who was younger than me.
I would invent something and spend years developing it only to have it handed off to a younger man whom they were grooming for a leadership role. I would say something in a meeting and it would be ignored. A younger man would say the same thing and it would be adopted. It was institutional gaslighting and it caused me to constantly doubt myself.
What was worse was the sudden feeling that everything that I had ever worked on had been a waste of time and that the progress we were making was illusory and based on false advertising. When Kimmy stepped out of the bunker, she suddenly saw that hiding underground had been a pointless exercise driven by a madman’s sick fantasy. After disengaging from my work, that was exactly how I felt about physics.
This sudden feeling of profound alienation from work is not unusual and it is not unique to women. According to this survey of 11,000 people, 60% of tech workers are absolutely miserable and suffering from career burnout.
How could 60% of the tech workers be burnt out and miserable?
These jobs are supposed to be the ones that everyone wants. These are the jobs for which we are supposed to be training our children!
What is happening at these places? For the first 40% of your career, you are an enthusiastic zealot..a true believer in the cause of progress and then at some point, you snap and realize that you are trapped in a velvet coffin? Is there a better way to structure our lives? Why do people lose their sense of meaning and purpose at these places? Are they awakening to a sense that their products tie us to a treadmill of consumption? Do they suddenly awaken to a desire for an ideal which is difficult to monetize?
I needed answers to these questions and I needed to find meaning in my work.
I knew that I had to get away from physics if I was ever going to feel that my life was meaningful to anyone other than to myself and my children, so I quit my academic job, and like Kimmy Schmidt and so many other disillusioned people, I stayed home and wrote a novel — a caricature of what I saw and what I feared. Fictionally speaking, I hopped on one leg, I hung upside down, I doused myself in cold water, I turned myself into a clown in the hope that someone would hear me. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for psychiatric disorders, I had contracted what will someday be known as ‘novel writing disorder’.
Why should I think that what I have to say is any more important than what anyone else has to say? That is delusional! If people ignore you, there must be a good reason for it. At least, that is what we tell ourselves when we are certain that life is fair — but things are never fair for people in the minority.
I was born white in a mostly white community and I had never expected to end up as a minority, but life doesn’t play to our expectations. When I moved abroad, I became a foreigner — a minority. When I chose to become a physicist, I became the only woman in the room — a minority.
Despite the disadvantages and heartbreak associated with this, being in the minority allowed me to see my community from the outside. That is where I found my value. I thought, I can give this perspective to people in the majority and they can use it to make things better for everyone! That is Kimmy’s logic too.
If only it was so easy. Minority voices are often seen as unpleasant distractions. In a culture of information overload, who has time to spare?
People like Kimmy Schmidt have time to spare. They have nothing but time and what they do is send out a warning message to everybody out there with their heads buried comfortably in the sand. People like Kimmy Schmidt give healing words to the sense that something isn’t quite right with how things are working.
Kimmy gets angry at the message that kids are getting from the Beauty and the Beast story. She suffered as a result of that story, yet no one listens to her. There is something really timely and resonant about her story. When I watched the 4th season of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, I realized that my novel had traced out the same story arc. My protagonist is trapped by a mad machine. She breaks free and uses her story to help others.
Maybe I’m wrong, I’m not Kimmy, I’m Titus Andromadon, desperate for attention and validation. I hope that is not the case. Titus lent his talent to something he didn’t believe in: ‘Boobs in California’, and it brought him nothing but sadness. I believe in what I wrote in my novel and I know that someone out there will find it helpful. Even those who don’t will at least enjoy all of the silly fireworks I packed into the text: exploding heads, strangely sexy physics, deviant twins, disastrous romances, madness, mayhem, catharsis, and laughter.
For those who hunger for a new window on the truth of the absolute, read: My Adorable Apotheosis: Don’t Look Back, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
You won’t regret it.
(Don’t be fooled by the first few pages. It is a post academic fever dream masquerading as a young adult novel and it will dystopia you to within an inch of your life!)
Yours truly,
