Yesterday I did something kind of scary. I posted publicly that this blog exists.

That should not be scary. It’s a blog. People have blogs. But my marketer brain immediately started cataloging everything wrong — feature images rendering weird, a site that’s not quite right, ten things I’d fix before “launching” if this were a launch. And underneath all of that, the part that actually makes me squirm: the “hey, look at me, look what I’m doing” of it. I don’t love self-promotion. It feels like standing in the middle of the room waving.

I hit post anyway. Waiting until it’s perfect is a trap, and I know that trap. It’s never going to be perfect. It’s something. Show it.

Here’s what I’m noticing: I actually like this. I like having a point of view. I like being a little opinionated. I like the idea of my friends and family getting a peek at what’s going on in my head, because the truth is, I talk a lot but share very little about how I’m actually doing. This isn’t a feelings dump. It’s a record. A retrospective. What was I doing? What was I thinking?

That felt worth being scared for.

The Scary Things Built the Career

I’ve been thinking about how I got here — to a job I actually like, at a company I want to be at — and the path was not a straight line. It was a series of scary.

I started in sales. I did well. I worked at Yelp, got all the sales training, worked the program hard. I also ate spaghetti with vegetable oil and salt because the salary wouldn’t stretch. I was determined to live on my own. I got shingles at 22 from the stress.

From there I took a leap to a small startup — the same one I’ve now boomeranged back to, except now it’s been acquired. I started as a BDR and worked my way up into event marketing, and then into a whole bunch of other kinds of marketing. I honestly don’t know why I ever left. If I had to pinpoint it: new leadership came in and I started to feel very undervalued. I was okay with not making a lot of money, and let’s be clear, I wasn’t, but I wanted to feel like the work I was doing was appreciated. Instead, I was told they were taking away all of my commission opportunities (a huge chunk of my pay), no salary bump was coming with it, and oh, they were also changing the line on the remaining commission. It sucked. It honestly felt like a heartbreak, because I had loved that place and used to say they’d never be able to make me leave. Now look at me. I’m back. And he’s not.

Then I went to another company I genuinely loved and cared about — a WYSIWYG for email, basically the WordPress for email. This was prime COVID. I got to work with the founder and a group of amazing people. And then, like the company before it, new leadership came in, and things changed. At that moment, a health tech company reached out on LinkedIn with a 70% pay bump. I took it.

There was nothing wrong with the company. My colleagues were amazing. Then the layoffs came, and there I was — jobless. Oh, and four months pregnant.

The Hospital Bed Interview

The next day, I started looking. I did the calls. I took the meetings. One recruiter told me not to bother because I was pregnant and no one was going to hire me. I was chasing roles that would have required more days in New York when even one day a week was already more than I wanted.

And then John Levitt reached out.

I interviewed. I did a project. I interviewed more. And then my water broke. Five weeks early, immediately after my interview with the division’s CEO. I took my final interview, over Slack, from a hospital bed, two days after giving birth.

And it all worked out.

Scary Is Actually Good

I know “do the scary thing” is the most recycled advice on the internet. But good grief, it can be true. The job I love now exists on the other side of a layoff, while pregnant, a recruiter telling me to give up, and an interview I took while still in recovery. None of those were pleasant. All of them mattered.

Posting about this blog isn’t on the same scale as any of that. But it’s in the same family. A small scary thing. A small “what if no one cares, or worse, what if they do” thing.

I’m choosing to be exhilarated instead of embarrassed. I’m choosing to let people in a little. I’m choosing to look back in a year and actually have something to look back on.

And I’m really, really grateful for the group of people walking this part with me.

The best things come when you’re a little bit scared. Hit post anyway.