November 18, 2024 • 34 mins
For many years, writer Jennifer Romolini prided herself on her work ethic. She climbed to the top of every corporate ladder and worked 60 hours or more every week. But after an unexpected health crisis, Jennifer realized her ambition had turned toxic. Maya and Jennifer discuss the perils of aiming for a one-size-fits-all version of success and the benefits of redefining ambition for yourself.
For more about Jennifer, check out her memoir, "Ambition Monster."
You can follow Maya @DrMayaShankar on Instagram.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Ambition is a force, and you can harness that force
for good, or you can harness that force in a
way that takes you away from yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
For so long, writer Jennifer Romalini prided herself on her
work ethic. She climbed to the top of every corporate
ladder and worked herself to the bone. But after years
of burning herself out, she realized her ambition had turned toxic.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I've really looked to the outside world like I had everything,
but I was already at the top of that going wait,
is this it? Because I had not been building in
my personal and life resume at the same pace that
I had been building my professional resume.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
On today's show, rethinking ambition and what we can be
ambitious for, I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change.
(01:47):
I first came across Jennifer's story when I read her
memoir Ambition Monster. The book covers a lot of ground.
She dives deep into unresolved childhood trauma, romantic relationships that
turn sour, and the costs of chronic overwork. I was
most struck by the way Jennifer writes about ambition and
how a big and unexpected change can make us rethink
(02:09):
our relationship with it. Jennifer grew up in a working
class family just outside of Philadelphia, and in her family,
ambition meant one thing survival.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Both of my parents did not graduate high school and
they worked to survive. My dad was in the produce business.
He started out working as in a grocery store in
the produce department, and he then was like, oh, you know,
there's a big markup here on lettuce. I think I
could sell it for cheaper and still make a profit.
(02:44):
So he started out selling cases of produce on a
stand on the street. He built that business into a truck.
He eventually turned that into a store, and he turned
it into force stores around South Jersey and Philadelphia. It
took effort and force to build that business and to
(03:06):
get us out of what was, you know, poverty. So
I saw work as an act of force. I saw
work as survival. I saw work as something that made
you feel safe. This was all wrapped up in ambition.
For me, ambition was wrapped up in survival. So the
(03:30):
idea of work and compulsive work and never stopping work
and having an incredible work ethic and never letting anyone
down was just built into my bones.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah. I read that you grew up loving Sassy magazine
and it's what made you want to become a writer.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yes, If you were a girl in the eighties and
the nineties, Sasse was just this life raft. It was
so different than like seventeen or teen magazine because it
really was teaching you independence, and it was teaching you
like a sense of autonomy that nothing else really was.
I didn't want you to be there just for sort
(04:12):
of the male gaze. It wasn't teaching you makeup tips
per se. You know. It was about music and culture
and issues that girls were dealing with and I and
also it really put forward the personalities of its writers,
and so I became obsessed with those writers. And you know,
they all lived in New York, which was a place
I kind of knew I wanted to live. I was like, Oh,
(04:35):
I'd like to be a magazine editor someday or writer.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I know that you started working in restaurants when you
were thirteen, and you ended up working in restaurants for
a decade, but you held on to this hope, right
like in the back of your mind that one day
you might want to become that writer, the one that
you had read about in Sassy magazine. So tell me
how you started on the path towards that dream.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
If there's no model in your life for the life
that you want, it's so difficult to conceive of it
because you cannot conceive of how you get from where
you are to where you want to be. Because I
had no context for white collar work, creative work, I
(05:22):
just had no context for it. Everyone I knew was
a blue collar worker, you know, that was just what
we surrounded ourselves with. That was who my parents knew
and I didn't have. You know, my childhood home was
very chaotic. My parents weren't They did the best they
could with the tools that they had, but they were
(05:43):
not very intentive. And my parents were teenagers when they
had me, and like most teenagers, they were reckless and
irresponsible in a lot of ways. And you know, I
was witnessed to a lot of things I shouldn't have
been witnessed to. There was violence in our home. There
was some abuse, but more than anything, they just did
(06:07):
not have the capacity to to my emotional needs, and
I often felt like I was on my own. I
was a really sensitive kid. I was a really creative kid.
It was probably clear very early that I was going
to take a different path than they did, that I
was not going to be satisfied with the lives that
they had, which is already a sort of alienating feeling
(06:30):
when you feel different from what you grow up around.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Absolutely right, Yeah, And I wonder whether in making that clear,
either implicitly or explicitly, they felt rejected by you because
you were saying the life you're living isn't going to
be enough for me.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Of course, and I think that for me, what I
did was I tried to live the life I thought
they wanted me to live. I married young. I married
a man who was working class. I married a man
who I didn't have a lot in common with, but
I felt like I should marry. He was a nice man,
he had a good job. But I felt so suffocated.
(07:08):
I felt so oh, like there was like a cloak
over me because I wasn't living the life that I
really wanted to live, and that I somewhere like in
the back of my mind, thought maybe I could live. Finally,
I managed to get out of that marriage. And getting
(07:29):
out of that marriage if you come from any kind
of traditional background, you come from immigrant family, if you
come from a Catholic family, religion, all sorts of things.
Getting a divorce young especially, it's like, you know, what's
wrong with you? What are you doing? You know? So
it took so much courage to make the move to
(07:52):
get out of a marriage that was not right for
me in my mid twenties, And at that point I
was like, Okay, I'm all in because I already feel
like such a failure. I had already dropped out of college,
I had already gotten a divorce. So by the time
I'm twenty five, I'm a college dropout and a deva
or say, I have no money to my name, I'm
waiting tables. I feel like my life is over, which
(08:15):
is ridiculous at twenty five, but that's why I felt.
I think the fact that I had sort of made
what I thought were so many mistakes at that point,
and I felt so messed up. I was like, well,
I'm just going to go for it because I had
nothing really to lose. I think I had like less
than one hundred dollars in my bank account when I
(08:36):
left my husband. So I did. I put myself through school.
I waited tables full time at night, I went to
school full time in the day. I had two internships.
At all times, I was trying to catch up. I
was just racing and racing and running and running. And
I knew what I wanted. I wanted to get to
New York and I wanted to work for a magazine.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
You did dozens of interviews and were rejected from them,
all right, yes, and so eventually you ran out of cash,
you had to move back home, live in your parents' attic.
But then you got your first media job. Tell me
the story about how that happened.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
So I didn't know how I was going to be
perceived by this elite you know, extremely white. I'm white,
but this is like an extreme like elite white, you
know environment, you know, publishing is built on connections and
(09:36):
on pedigrees, and I didn't have either of those things.
So at this point, I've been through, you know, dozens
of interviews, and I get this call about this job
interview in New York for this business magazine. I take
the train up and the interviewer said, what school is this?
(09:58):
And he pushes my resume over to me, and I
was like, just because you haven't heard of it doesn't
mean it's not a good school, and pushed the resume
back to him and he he had interviewed like ten
people before me, but because I had such an attitude problem,
he just wanted that as his assistant. And that's how
I got the job. It was like a miracle happened.
(10:20):
I was so myself, I was so over it. But
I also clearly like what I had was I had
been around, I knew how to deal with like customers
in a restaurant, like I had a lot more experience
of being alive than most of the people going for
an assistant job. I was twenty eight years old. He was,
you know, interviewing all these twenty two year olds, And
(10:41):
to be somebody's assistant, you have to put out a
lot of fires that I was actually perfect for that job,
even without a pedigree.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So, Jennifer, after that job, you started working for the
publisher Conde Nast. Right, Yes, you were an editor at
a fashion magazine called Lucky, and at this point you
were hobnobbing with celebrities. You're interviewing actresses for photo shoots
that your dream of what you thought this job would
be like did not actually match your day to day reality.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So, because entry level jobs pay so little in publishing
across the board, and I think this is important to know,
most people who work in these jobs come from some
level of generational wealth, because you can't really afford to
take these jobs and have a life in New York
City unless you are subsidized in some way. I was
(11:39):
subsidized by credit cards and taking on as many side
jobs as I could, you know, writing for the Kitchen
and Bath magazine, I wrote for the Target in House magazine.
I was always working three or four jobs just to
support my main job. So the level of wealth at
Conde Nast was something that I had not prepared myself for,
(12:05):
and I was really a bad fit because of that.
Instead of looking at this environment and thinking, oh, this
isn't for me, this doesn't work for me, instead I
thought there was something wrong with me, and I had
to contort and make myself acceptable to a place that
(12:27):
I didn't respect.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
What do you think prevented you from stepping away in
that moment? Why didn't you leave?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
At that point, I was so far into the tunnel
of success and those foundations of scarcity and survival, my
father's work, ethic and NonStop work. It was just so
foundationally who I was. I had not unpacked any of
(13:02):
it right, any of that, And I think that what
happened was I was applying that sense of scarce city
and survival onto work that didn't really didn't matter. I
was writing about shoes and belts and lip gloss, right,
but I had that same survival intensity. It was really
(13:25):
about how do I get to the next level, how
do I get a promotion, how do I make more money.
I was in it. I was in it so hard,
and to have walked away it wouldn't have made sense
for a resume. And I needed that resume to make
sense because I was climbing a ladder and I was
very strategic about climbing that ladder.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
You kept climbing the ladder, and you ended up achieving
management roles like you were very successful, and eventually you
got married, you had a child. From what I've read,
it seems like it was during this period of your
life where your workaholism took a turn for the worse. Absolutely,
(14:08):
can you paint me and pay picture of what an
average day looked like for you, So, your your mother,
your spouse, and you're also working. What you say like
sixty hours a week? Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Sixty sixty more and more as much as I could work.
I was working. So an average day looked like, wake
up at five am, breastfeed, shower, change, check my email,
answer emails, breastfeed again, take the child to daycare, head
into work, work, work, work, work, work, pump breast milk like,
(14:46):
take the train home, pick the child up from daycare,
breastfeed work, bathtime, breastfeed work, take out, sleep. It was
NonStop and I probably should have And again this is
(15:06):
all gets into class things, right, I was, so I
resisted help. I didn't want to bring a nanny into
my house. I didn't know anybody who had nanny's I didn't,
you know, I didn't. That felt so wrong to me.
But I needed support so badly, and I was making
enough money that I could have had support, but I
(15:27):
just didn't understand what that kind of support looked like.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, I actually think this is an important moment to clarify.
You know, some people actually just do have to work
that much or even more to make ends meet, and
something you clarify about your story, is that you were
working beyond what you would have needed to work to
be financially secure.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yes, so what we're talking about here is an exceptionally
privileged position to be in, and we're talking about going
beyond basic survival. Because yes, I could have had to
have worked like I had throughout all of my twenties
two jobs. I was no longer in that position. I
was making six figures, which was beyond my conception of
(16:11):
money I should have. I just couldn't even I was like,
I probably could have afforded to get help, but I
didn't really understand that. I didn't understand that that's how
systems like that, that's how people work, you know, they
have support. I didn't understand that my mom never had help,
you know. Yep, So this ignorance was really a problem.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
You know. Eventually your body issued a wake up call
for you. You developed chronic laryngitis from over using your voice
right giving all these presentations and talks as an executive.
The doctor told you that you needed to go on
vocal rest. You had to get vocal cord surgery. And
it sounds like this was a rare moment where the
(16:55):
universe kind of intervened and was like, Jennifer, you got
to slow down.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
What happened with my voice and let me just say here.
I had had so many physical issues around work. I
had a guesst ulcer, I had massive stress, I had
panic attacks, I had headaches. I had so many physical
symptoms brought on by overwork. But the one that shut
me down was the one that had to shut me down.
(17:25):
Like I couldn't speak. My vocal cords were bleeding. I
was going to have to get surgery, and I understood
that I might not ever be able to speak again
if I spoke during this two week vocal rest. So
I took it seriously and I would sit in meetings
(17:46):
and just listen and watch. And at this point I
was in the c suite, and I found it to
be an unkind, unproductive, callous environment because I do think
(18:12):
that over time in corporate environments and as an executive,
you make concessions. You do things that in your regular
life you wouldn't do. You tow the company line. You
fire people in ways that you are not comfortable with,
but you know this has to be done. You cut
(18:33):
budgets when you know you shouldn't cut budgets, you do
things that go against your values. And when I really
was observing it, I thought, this is no longer scratching
whatever itch I originally had. I don't belong here anymore.
(18:55):
This isn't for me. And even having that thought was terrifying,
because what happens if I don't want to do this anymore.
My entire identity was wrapped up in what I did
for a living, I mean, beyond motherhood, but I had
(19:15):
room for nothing else. I didn't have any real friendships
in my life. I had an entirely unbalanced life, and
most of my energy went into my career. And at
this point, my career was public like I had magazines
at this point like doing interviews with me asking how
to get my life? You know, I had to the
(19:36):
outside world an absolute dream job. I had this precocious
child that you know, people saw pictures of on Instagram.
I lived in a nice home in Los Angeles. I've
really looked to the outside world like I had everything,
but I was already at the top of that going wait,
(19:56):
is this it? My life did not feel like my own,
and the worst part of it was I had zero
connection to myself because I had not been b my
personal and life resume at the same pace that I
had been building my professional resume. So my life was
(20:19):
completely unbalanced and it was very scary.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. After years of climbing the corporate ladder, Jennifer
Romalini had finally made it to the c suite. She
(20:48):
was an executive at a celebrity owned website for women.
But less than a year into the new job, she
developed an issue with her vocal cords. A doctor told
her she needed surgery and a two week vocal rest,
and it was during this period that Jennifer began to
see her workplace as quote a great dance of winner
take all dysfunction.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And so following that surgery, I did the job. I
showed up to everything. I put in good work, but
I stopped going above and beyond. I stopped meeting unrealistic demands.
If I got an all caps slack tirade at four
in the morning, I didn't answer it. As soon as
I woke up, I let go of work a little bit.
(21:35):
I took like my white knuckles off the steering wheel.
I still was working and I had not let any
balls drop, but I wasn't available for anybody's whim at
any time. So about six months after this, after not
(21:55):
answering every just ridiculous call, after six months of not
treating everything with like a level of like life and
death urgency, it turned out that the person they had hired,
who had done all of that versus the person I
(22:16):
was now I was no longer a good fit.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
You got a knock on your office door, tell me
about that that day.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So it's Monday afternoon. It's about four o'clock. So I
have two people come into my office and they tell
me that they're going in another direction. They don't say fired,
and I say, so, you're firing me because I want
to disrupt the script, like I was such an asshole
brought this whole process. But I was in shock.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I couldn't fathom that I would be fired after how
hard I'd worked. Yeah, and I felt so ashamed that
I had not held it together. I felt like I
had really let my family down. There was so much
to process after getting fired. It was a real sense
(23:09):
of grief, and I know people go through grief much
heavier than this. But I really grieved so much after
getting fired. I grieved the life that I had given
away to various toxic jobs. I grieved the time I
would never get back. I grieved the person that I
(23:33):
wished I had been in different situations, the concessions I
had made, and I found after I got fired. I
had always been able to like talk myself up, you know,
just get over it, pull this shit together. But I
was just fried, Like I no longer had like the
password to my brain. I was just kind of broken
(23:57):
by this experience, and I needed to process it. I
was in absolutely no shape to go back to work.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
In the aftermath of your being fired. How did you
put the piece is back together?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I didn't take any jobs that we're going to have
any kind of high profile, and I was offered a
lot they start They just kept coming, and I had
to reject them, and I had to say, we're going
to make a lot less money in this house. And
I reconnected with my life. I started taking like I
took a woodworking class, Like I just started doing things
(24:34):
out of curiosity. I flexed like creative muscles that I
forgot that I had, and then eventually I said, okay,
I think it's time to get a job that has
health insurance. I think we need some more stability here.
This is not feeling sustainable and stable. And I made
(24:56):
a very intentional choice about the kind of job I
would go back to. I was so thoughtful about the
peace that I had gained and protecting it. So I
started thinking about what I like about work, because I
love work like I love it. It brings me so
much pleasure. I love mastery. I love learning new things.
(25:19):
So I started to think, well, what did I love
and work? How do I work so it serves me
not some external idea of me.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
But how do you actually practice that. It's not like
there's a switch in your brain you can just flip.
That's like, I don't care anymore about how I'm perceived
externally or where I am on the ladder. So what
advice would you give to people who want to train
their brains to get to the place that you're at?
What does that look like?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I'll tell you exactly how this all changed for me.
I sort of pursued this what I thought was going
to be a freelance job, and it was a cannabis website,
a website that was about weed it was run by
these like twenty five year old Irish kids. This job
was the dumbest job I've ever had. Okay, it didn't
(26:12):
even pay that well, but it paid enough to pay
my half of the monthly bills. Everybody in my life said,
this is a joke job. You're going to go be
the editor of a weed site?
Speaker 1 (26:22):
What are you?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Twenty three? This is the death of your career. Like
people I trust and advise, they're like, what are you doing?
How are you going to explain this? And I was like,
I don't know, it seems like fun. So I took
this stupid weed job and I worked it for a
year and it was the best thing I ever did.
And so after that ended, I was like, well, what
(26:46):
do I like? What do I want to do?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
What did you want?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
I wanted stable, contained work. And while I had enjoyed
being a manager solving other people's problems, was I felt
like I had done my time for that. So I
very intentionally climbed back down the ladder. I was at
the top. I was in the C suite, and I
started applying for jobs that were mid level jobs with
(27:13):
mid level salaries. But you know, I could handle a
mid level salary I'd handled much less. It took a
lot of convincing because I had to people would I
would be in interviews and interviewers the recruiter would say,
you know, you're overqualified for this, and I'd say, yes,
I know I'm overqualified, but this is the kind of
job I want. It took a very long time. It
took like six months to finally convince somebody that I
(27:36):
just wanted to be in the middle again. But I
have a job now that I I just write about
beauty products all day and I love it, and I'm
excellent at it, and I'm respected, and I have a
lot of autonomy, and I have a lot of free
time after I finish my job to pursue creative projects.
(28:00):
If I choose to spend time with family and friends.
The job does not fill up my whole brain because
it's not I'm not thinking of high level strategy all day.
I don't have executives coming at me from every direction.
The job is very focused, which allows me to do
it very well in the hours I do it each day,
(28:23):
and then to leave it behind. And that was what
I wanted.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
You know, you write about how ambition can be so
toxic that at the same time, you're not repudiating ambition.
You say you love ambition, And so it really just
becomes a question of how we channel our ambition. Yes,
and I'm curious to hear from you how, especially as women,
(28:51):
I don't want us to do away with our ambition
because there's already factors working against that. Right, So, how
do we channel our ambition in ways that are maybe
healthier or make us happier, or are more sustainable.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
You pair ambition with self a way awareness. You stay
aware of what is happening. You don't use work to
stuff things down, to bury your feelings in. You don't
hide in ambition. You use ambition to bring your life
(29:30):
into color, into fullness. Ambition is a force, and you
can harness that force for good, or you can harness
that force in a way that takes you away from
yourself and the things that you actually care about. We
(29:53):
think success has to be big, when it's so often
like the most satisfying success is quiet and small.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Tell me what small and quiet looks like for you
in your day to day life.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I've designed my life in such a way that nothing
is neglected. My relationships aren't neglected. I'm not neglected. Work
is not neglected. Everything is in balance. And I'll tell
you my cat died over the weekend, and I had
(30:28):
to make a decision last week. She got very sick
last week. And she was my cat for sixteen and
a half years, and I was very close to this animal.
She was a companion. And because of the way I've
designed my life, I was able to be present and
non stressed to make decisions about the end of this
(30:50):
animal's life, to take a full day to grieve, to
tell my boss I'm I might not be working a
one hundred percent the next couple of days. I'm in
some pain. And because I've done that, I'm going through
(31:14):
the challenges of life. I'm riding them like a wave
much more naturally because I'm not gripping, because nothing requires
that kind of hold on me. And I think that
that was a success because I got to see this
(31:35):
cat off in this very peaceful and quiet way, and
I had the luxury of work not intruding in that space.
And that's what I want for everyone, is to have
a spaciousness. I think that that is success. And when
(31:59):
work is all consuming and doesn't have boundaries and when
you are chasing something inside of work that you're honestly
never going to find, you lose all of this other beauty,
which is what a successful life really is.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Coming up on A
Slight Change of Plans, I speak to David Yaeger, a
professor of psychology and an expert on adolescent development. If
you've ever wondered how to better support the young people
in your life, or if you're a young person wondering
why on earth older people just can't seem to understand you,
this is the episode for you. David bus cultural myths
(33:06):
about the young adult brain and share some amazing science
about what's really going on.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You can think of the adolescent brain as like this
social R and D engine of our culture. Something that
looks like risky and idiotic to us is maybe their
way of creatively trying to solve the problem of having
more of the thing that brings you social success and
fewer of the things that bring you social failure.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
That's of next on A Slight Change of Plans. A
Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced
by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes our
showrunner Tyler Green, our senior producer Kate Parkinson Morgan, our
(33:54):
producer Brianna Garrett, and our engineer eric I Wwang. Louis
Scara wrote our delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped
arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a
production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there,
and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
(34:16):
at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Ambition is a force, and you can harness that force
for good, or you can harness that force in a
way that takes you away from yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
For so long, writer Jennifer Romalini prided herself on her
work ethic. She climbed to the top of every corporate
ladder and worked herself to the bone. But after years
of burning herself out, she realized her ambition had turned toxic.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I've really looked to the outside world like I had everything,
but I was already at the top of that going wait,
is this it? Because I had not been building in
my personal and life resume at the same pace that
I had been building my professional resume.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
On today's show, rethinking ambition and what we can be
ambitious for, I'm maya Shunker and this is a slight
change of plans, a show about who we are and
who we become in the face of a big change.
(01:47):
I first came across Jennifer's story when I read her
memoir Ambition Monster. The book covers a lot of ground.
She dives deep into unresolved childhood trauma, romantic relationships that
turn sour, and the costs of chronic overwork. I was
most struck by the way Jennifer writes about ambition and
how a big and unexpected change can make us rethink
(02:09):
our relationship with it. Jennifer grew up in a working
class family just outside of Philadelphia, and in her family,
ambition meant one thing survival.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Both of my parents did not graduate high school and
they worked to survive. My dad was in the produce business.
He started out working as in a grocery store in
the produce department, and he then was like, oh, you know,
there's a big markup here on lettuce. I think I
could sell it for cheaper and still make a profit.
(02:44):
So he started out selling cases of produce on a
stand on the street. He built that business into a truck.
He eventually turned that into a store, and he turned
it into force stores around South Jersey and Philadelphia. It
took effort and force to build that business and to
(03:06):
get us out of what was, you know, poverty. So
I saw work as an act of force. I saw
work as survival. I saw work as something that made
you feel safe. This was all wrapped up in ambition.
For me, ambition was wrapped up in survival. So the
(03:30):
idea of work and compulsive work and never stopping work
and having an incredible work ethic and never letting anyone
down was just built into my bones.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Yeah. I read that you grew up loving Sassy magazine
and it's what made you want to become a writer.
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yes, If you were a girl in the eighties and
the nineties, Sasse was just this life raft. It was
so different than like seventeen or teen magazine because it
really was teaching you independence, and it was teaching you
like a sense of autonomy that nothing else really was.
I didn't want you to be there just for sort
(04:12):
of the male gaze. It wasn't teaching you makeup tips
per se. You know. It was about music and culture
and issues that girls were dealing with and I and
also it really put forward the personalities of its writers,
and so I became obsessed with those writers. And you know,
they all lived in New York, which was a place
I kind of knew I wanted to live. I was like, Oh,
(04:35):
I'd like to be a magazine editor someday or writer.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I know that you started working in restaurants when you
were thirteen, and you ended up working in restaurants for
a decade, but you held on to this hope, right
like in the back of your mind that one day
you might want to become that writer, the one that
you had read about in Sassy magazine. So tell me
how you started on the path towards that dream.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
If there's no model in your life for the life
that you want, it's so difficult to conceive of it
because you cannot conceive of how you get from where
you are to where you want to be. Because I
had no context for white collar work, creative work, I
(05:22):
just had no context for it. Everyone I knew was
a blue collar worker, you know, that was just what
we surrounded ourselves with. That was who my parents knew
and I didn't have. You know, my childhood home was
very chaotic. My parents weren't They did the best they
could with the tools that they had, but they were
(05:43):
not very intentive. And my parents were teenagers when they
had me, and like most teenagers, they were reckless and
irresponsible in a lot of ways. And you know, I
was witnessed to a lot of things I shouldn't have
been witnessed to. There was violence in our home. There
was some abuse, but more than anything, they just did
(06:07):
not have the capacity to to my emotional needs, and
I often felt like I was on my own. I
was a really sensitive kid. I was a really creative kid.
It was probably clear very early that I was going
to take a different path than they did, that I
was not going to be satisfied with the lives that
they had, which is already a sort of alienating feeling
(06:30):
when you feel different from what you grow up around.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Absolutely right, Yeah, And I wonder whether in making that clear,
either implicitly or explicitly, they felt rejected by you because
you were saying the life you're living isn't going to
be enough for me.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Of course, and I think that for me, what I
did was I tried to live the life I thought
they wanted me to live. I married young. I married
a man who was working class. I married a man
who I didn't have a lot in common with, but
I felt like I should marry. He was a nice man,
he had a good job. But I felt so suffocated.
(07:08):
I felt so oh, like there was like a cloak
over me because I wasn't living the life that I
really wanted to live, and that I somewhere like in
the back of my mind, thought maybe I could live. Finally,
I managed to get out of that marriage. And getting
(07:29):
out of that marriage if you come from any kind
of traditional background, you come from immigrant family, if you
come from a Catholic family, religion, all sorts of things.
Getting a divorce young especially, it's like, you know, what's
wrong with you? What are you doing? You know? So
it took so much courage to make the move to
(07:52):
get out of a marriage that was not right for
me in my mid twenties, And at that point I
was like, Okay, I'm all in because I already feel
like such a failure. I had already dropped out of college,
I had already gotten a divorce. So by the time
I'm twenty five, I'm a college dropout and a deva
or say, I have no money to my name, I'm
waiting tables. I feel like my life is over, which
(08:15):
is ridiculous at twenty five, but that's why I felt.
I think the fact that I had sort of made
what I thought were so many mistakes at that point,
and I felt so messed up. I was like, well,
I'm just going to go for it because I had
nothing really to lose. I think I had like less
than one hundred dollars in my bank account when I
(08:36):
left my husband. So I did. I put myself through school.
I waited tables full time at night, I went to
school full time in the day. I had two internships.
At all times, I was trying to catch up. I
was just racing and racing and running and running. And
I knew what I wanted. I wanted to get to
New York and I wanted to work for a magazine.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
You did dozens of interviews and were rejected from them,
all right, yes, and so eventually you ran out of cash,
you had to move back home, live in your parents' attic.
But then you got your first media job. Tell me
the story about how that happened.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
So I didn't know how I was going to be
perceived by this elite you know, extremely white. I'm white,
but this is like an extreme like elite white, you
know environment, you know, publishing is built on connections and
(09:36):
on pedigrees, and I didn't have either of those things.
So at this point, I've been through, you know, dozens
of interviews, and I get this call about this job
interview in New York for this business magazine. I take
the train up and the interviewer said, what school is this?
(09:58):
And he pushes my resume over to me, and I
was like, just because you haven't heard of it doesn't
mean it's not a good school, and pushed the resume
back to him and he he had interviewed like ten
people before me, but because I had such an attitude problem,
he just wanted that as his assistant. And that's how
I got the job. It was like a miracle happened.
(10:20):
I was so myself, I was so over it. But
I also clearly like what I had was I had
been around, I knew how to deal with like customers
in a restaurant, like I had a lot more experience
of being alive than most of the people going for
an assistant job. I was twenty eight years old. He was,
you know, interviewing all these twenty two year olds, And
(10:41):
to be somebody's assistant, you have to put out a
lot of fires that I was actually perfect for that job,
even without a pedigree.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So, Jennifer, after that job, you started working for the
publisher Conde Nast. Right, Yes, you were an editor at
a fashion magazine called Lucky, and at this point you
were hobnobbing with celebrities. You're interviewing actresses for photo shoots
that your dream of what you thought this job would
be like did not actually match your day to day reality.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
So, because entry level jobs pay so little in publishing
across the board, and I think this is important to know,
most people who work in these jobs come from some
level of generational wealth, because you can't really afford to
take these jobs and have a life in New York
City unless you are subsidized in some way. I was
(11:39):
subsidized by credit cards and taking on as many side
jobs as I could, you know, writing for the Kitchen
and Bath magazine, I wrote for the Target in House magazine.
I was always working three or four jobs just to
support my main job. So the level of wealth at
Conde Nast was something that I had not prepared myself for,
(12:05):
and I was really a bad fit because of that.
Instead of looking at this environment and thinking, oh, this
isn't for me, this doesn't work for me, instead I
thought there was something wrong with me, and I had
to contort and make myself acceptable to a place that
(12:27):
I didn't respect.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
What do you think prevented you from stepping away in
that moment? Why didn't you leave?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
At that point, I was so far into the tunnel
of success and those foundations of scarcity and survival, my
father's work, ethic and NonStop work. It was just so
foundationally who I was. I had not unpacked any of
(13:02):
it right, any of that, And I think that what
happened was I was applying that sense of scarce city
and survival onto work that didn't really didn't matter. I
was writing about shoes and belts and lip gloss, right,
but I had that same survival intensity. It was really
(13:25):
about how do I get to the next level, how
do I get a promotion, how do I make more money.
I was in it. I was in it so hard,
and to have walked away it wouldn't have made sense
for a resume. And I needed that resume to make
sense because I was climbing a ladder and I was
very strategic about climbing that ladder.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
You kept climbing the ladder, and you ended up achieving
management roles like you were very successful, and eventually you
got married, you had a child. From what I've read,
it seems like it was during this period of your
life where your workaholism took a turn for the worse. Absolutely,
(14:08):
can you paint me and pay picture of what an
average day looked like for you, So, your your mother,
your spouse, and you're also working. What you say like
sixty hours a week? Is that right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Sixty sixty more and more as much as I could work.
I was working. So an average day looked like, wake
up at five am, breastfeed, shower, change, check my email,
answer emails, breastfeed again, take the child to daycare, head
into work, work, work, work, work, work, pump breast milk like,
(14:46):
take the train home, pick the child up from daycare,
breastfeed work, bathtime, breastfeed work, take out, sleep. It was
NonStop and I probably should have And again this is
(15:06):
all gets into class things, right, I was, so I
resisted help. I didn't want to bring a nanny into
my house. I didn't know anybody who had nanny's I didn't,
you know, I didn't. That felt so wrong to me.
But I needed support so badly, and I was making
enough money that I could have had support, but I
(15:27):
just didn't understand what that kind of support looked like.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah, I actually think this is an important moment to clarify.
You know, some people actually just do have to work
that much or even more to make ends meet, and
something you clarify about your story, is that you were
working beyond what you would have needed to work to
be financially secure.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yes, so what we're talking about here is an exceptionally
privileged position to be in, and we're talking about going
beyond basic survival. Because yes, I could have had to
have worked like I had throughout all of my twenties
two jobs. I was no longer in that position. I
was making six figures, which was beyond my conception of
(16:11):
money I should have. I just couldn't even I was like,
I probably could have afforded to get help, but I
didn't really understand that. I didn't understand that that's how
systems like that, that's how people work, you know, they
have support. I didn't understand that my mom never had help,
you know. Yep, So this ignorance was really a problem.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
You know. Eventually your body issued a wake up call
for you. You developed chronic laryngitis from over using your voice
right giving all these presentations and talks as an executive.
The doctor told you that you needed to go on
vocal rest. You had to get vocal cord surgery. And
it sounds like this was a rare moment where the
(16:55):
universe kind of intervened and was like, Jennifer, you got
to slow down.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
What happened with my voice and let me just say here.
I had had so many physical issues around work. I
had a guesst ulcer, I had massive stress, I had
panic attacks, I had headaches. I had so many physical
symptoms brought on by overwork. But the one that shut
me down was the one that had to shut me down.
(17:25):
Like I couldn't speak. My vocal cords were bleeding. I
was going to have to get surgery, and I understood
that I might not ever be able to speak again
if I spoke during this two week vocal rest. So
I took it seriously and I would sit in meetings
(17:46):
and just listen and watch. And at this point I
was in the c suite, and I found it to
be an unkind, unproductive, callous environment because I do think
(18:12):
that over time in corporate environments and as an executive,
you make concessions. You do things that in your regular
life you wouldn't do. You tow the company line. You
fire people in ways that you are not comfortable with,
but you know this has to be done. You cut
(18:33):
budgets when you know you shouldn't cut budgets, you do
things that go against your values. And when I really
was observing it, I thought, this is no longer scratching
whatever itch I originally had. I don't belong here anymore.
(18:55):
This isn't for me. And even having that thought was terrifying,
because what happens if I don't want to do this anymore.
My entire identity was wrapped up in what I did
for a living, I mean, beyond motherhood, but I had
(19:15):
room for nothing else. I didn't have any real friendships
in my life. I had an entirely unbalanced life, and
most of my energy went into my career. And at
this point, my career was public like I had magazines
at this point like doing interviews with me asking how
to get my life? You know, I had to the
(19:36):
outside world an absolute dream job. I had this precocious
child that you know, people saw pictures of on Instagram.
I lived in a nice home in Los Angeles. I've
really looked to the outside world like I had everything,
but I was already at the top of that going wait,
(19:56):
is this it? My life did not feel like my own,
and the worst part of it was I had zero
connection to myself because I had not been b my
personal and life resume at the same pace that I
had been building my professional resume. So my life was
(20:19):
completely unbalanced and it was very scary.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. After years of climbing the corporate ladder, Jennifer
Romalini had finally made it to the c suite. She
(20:48):
was an executive at a celebrity owned website for women.
But less than a year into the new job, she
developed an issue with her vocal cords. A doctor told
her she needed surgery and a two week vocal rest,
and it was during this period that Jennifer began to
see her workplace as quote a great dance of winner
take all dysfunction.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And so following that surgery, I did the job. I
showed up to everything. I put in good work, but
I stopped going above and beyond. I stopped meeting unrealistic demands.
If I got an all caps slack tirade at four
in the morning, I didn't answer it. As soon as
I woke up, I let go of work a little bit.
(21:35):
I took like my white knuckles off the steering wheel.
I still was working and I had not let any
balls drop, but I wasn't available for anybody's whim at
any time. So about six months after this, after not
(21:55):
answering every just ridiculous call, after six months of not
treating everything with like a level of like life and
death urgency, it turned out that the person they had hired,
who had done all of that versus the person I
(22:16):
was now I was no longer a good fit.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
You got a knock on your office door, tell me
about that that day.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
So it's Monday afternoon. It's about four o'clock. So I
have two people come into my office and they tell
me that they're going in another direction. They don't say fired,
and I say, so, you're firing me because I want
to disrupt the script, like I was such an asshole
brought this whole process. But I was in shock.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I couldn't fathom that I would be fired after how
hard I'd worked. Yeah, and I felt so ashamed that
I had not held it together. I felt like I
had really let my family down. There was so much
to process after getting fired. It was a real sense
(23:09):
of grief, and I know people go through grief much
heavier than this. But I really grieved so much after
getting fired. I grieved the life that I had given
away to various toxic jobs. I grieved the time I
would never get back. I grieved the person that I
(23:33):
wished I had been in different situations, the concessions I
had made, and I found after I got fired. I
had always been able to like talk myself up, you know,
just get over it, pull this shit together. But I
was just fried, Like I no longer had like the
password to my brain. I was just kind of broken
(23:57):
by this experience, and I needed to process it. I
was in absolutely no shape to go back to work.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
In the aftermath of your being fired. How did you
put the piece is back together?
Speaker 2 (24:11):
I didn't take any jobs that we're going to have
any kind of high profile, and I was offered a
lot they start They just kept coming, and I had
to reject them, and I had to say, we're going
to make a lot less money in this house. And
I reconnected with my life. I started taking like I
took a woodworking class, Like I just started doing things
(24:34):
out of curiosity. I flexed like creative muscles that I
forgot that I had, and then eventually I said, okay,
I think it's time to get a job that has
health insurance. I think we need some more stability here.
This is not feeling sustainable and stable. And I made
(24:56):
a very intentional choice about the kind of job I
would go back to. I was so thoughtful about the
peace that I had gained and protecting it. So I
started thinking about what I like about work, because I
love work like I love it. It brings me so
much pleasure. I love mastery. I love learning new things.
(25:19):
So I started to think, well, what did I love
and work? How do I work so it serves me
not some external idea of me.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
But how do you actually practice that. It's not like
there's a switch in your brain you can just flip.
That's like, I don't care anymore about how I'm perceived
externally or where I am on the ladder. So what
advice would you give to people who want to train
their brains to get to the place that you're at?
What does that look like?
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I'll tell you exactly how this all changed for me.
I sort of pursued this what I thought was going
to be a freelance job, and it was a cannabis website,
a website that was about weed it was run by
these like twenty five year old Irish kids. This job
was the dumbest job I've ever had. Okay, it didn't
(26:12):
even pay that well, but it paid enough to pay
my half of the monthly bills. Everybody in my life said,
this is a joke job. You're going to go be
the editor of a weed site?
Speaker 1 (26:22):
What are you?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Twenty three? This is the death of your career. Like
people I trust and advise, they're like, what are you doing?
How are you going to explain this? And I was like,
I don't know, it seems like fun. So I took
this stupid weed job and I worked it for a
year and it was the best thing I ever did.
And so after that ended, I was like, well, what
(26:46):
do I like? What do I want to do?
Speaker 1 (26:49):
What did you want?
Speaker 2 (26:51):
I wanted stable, contained work. And while I had enjoyed
being a manager solving other people's problems, was I felt
like I had done my time for that. So I
very intentionally climbed back down the ladder. I was at
the top. I was in the C suite, and I
started applying for jobs that were mid level jobs with
(27:13):
mid level salaries. But you know, I could handle a
mid level salary I'd handled much less. It took a
lot of convincing because I had to people would I
would be in interviews and interviewers the recruiter would say,
you know, you're overqualified for this, and I'd say, yes,
I know I'm overqualified, but this is the kind of
job I want. It took a very long time. It
took like six months to finally convince somebody that I
(27:36):
just wanted to be in the middle again. But I
have a job now that I I just write about
beauty products all day and I love it, and I'm
excellent at it, and I'm respected, and I have a
lot of autonomy, and I have a lot of free
time after I finish my job to pursue creative projects.
(28:00):
If I choose to spend time with family and friends.
The job does not fill up my whole brain because
it's not I'm not thinking of high level strategy all day.
I don't have executives coming at me from every direction.
The job is very focused, which allows me to do
it very well in the hours I do it each day,
(28:23):
and then to leave it behind. And that was what
I wanted.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
You know, you write about how ambition can be so
toxic that at the same time, you're not repudiating ambition.
You say you love ambition, And so it really just
becomes a question of how we channel our ambition. Yes,
and I'm curious to hear from you how, especially as women,
(28:51):
I don't want us to do away with our ambition
because there's already factors working against that. Right, So, how
do we channel our ambition in ways that are maybe
healthier or make us happier, or are more sustainable.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
You pair ambition with self a way awareness. You stay
aware of what is happening. You don't use work to
stuff things down, to bury your feelings in. You don't
hide in ambition. You use ambition to bring your life
(29:30):
into color, into fullness. Ambition is a force, and you
can harness that force for good, or you can harness
that force in a way that takes you away from
yourself and the things that you actually care about. We
(29:53):
think success has to be big, when it's so often
like the most satisfying success is quiet and small.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
Tell me what small and quiet looks like for you
in your day to day life.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
I've designed my life in such a way that nothing
is neglected. My relationships aren't neglected. I'm not neglected. Work
is not neglected. Everything is in balance. And I'll tell
you my cat died over the weekend, and I had
(30:28):
to make a decision last week. She got very sick
last week. And she was my cat for sixteen and
a half years, and I was very close to this animal.
She was a companion. And because of the way I've
designed my life, I was able to be present and
non stressed to make decisions about the end of this
(30:50):
animal's life, to take a full day to grieve, to
tell my boss I'm I might not be working a
one hundred percent the next couple of days. I'm in
some pain. And because I've done that, I'm going through
(31:14):
the challenges of life. I'm riding them like a wave
much more naturally because I'm not gripping, because nothing requires
that kind of hold on me. And I think that
that was a success because I got to see this
(31:35):
cat off in this very peaceful and quiet way, and
I had the luxury of work not intruding in that space.
And that's what I want for everyone, is to have
a spaciousness. I think that that is success. And when
(31:59):
work is all consuming and doesn't have boundaries and when
you are chasing something inside of work that you're honestly
never going to find, you lose all of this other beauty,
which is what a successful life really is.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Coming up on A
Slight Change of Plans, I speak to David Yaeger, a
professor of psychology and an expert on adolescent development. If
you've ever wondered how to better support the young people
in your life, or if you're a young person wondering
why on earth older people just can't seem to understand you,
this is the episode for you. David bus cultural myths
(33:06):
about the young adult brain and share some amazing science
about what's really going on.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You can think of the adolescent brain as like this
social R and D engine of our culture. Something that
looks like risky and idiotic to us is maybe their
way of creatively trying to solve the problem of having
more of the thing that brings you social success and
fewer of the things that bring you social failure.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
That's of next on A Slight Change of Plans. A
Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced
by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change Family includes our
showrunner Tyler Green, our senior producer Kate Parkinson Morgan, our
(33:54):
producer Brianna Garrett, and our engineer eric I Wwang. Louis
Scara wrote our delightful theme song and Ginger Smith helped
arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a
production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there,
and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
(34:16):
at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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