I like that my prison is my home (sometimes)
Working from home is very sexy until it’s not very sexy
Wake up at 7 a.m., or 7:15 or 7:30 or 8 a.m., and go walk the dog. Come back home and have a cup of coffee or two, maybe a glass of Diet Coke or one of water; sometimes a cigarette. While I listen to Claude tell me my ideas are wonderful, that my only problem is optimizing and optimizing without executing. Not applying my genius. Then I blow out my muscles with my kettlebell and maybe another cigarette at the end: the best post-workout? I doubt it. I make breakfast for my wife and me. 11 a.m., time to start working.
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In the afternoon: eat and back to my desk. At night: dinner, walk the dog, and back to my desk for a while.
This repeats Monday to Friday. And as I think it over; it’s not so different from what would happen if I went back to working in an office. Routine is something you can’t escape; and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Daily life isn’t supposed to hold an adventure. Life is slow and it happens one day after another.
Now, of course there are differences between working from home and in an office. Leaving the house already means hundreds more possibilities in a day; you might crash your car, pick a fight with some rival, or see a Dr. Simi dancing in the street. The chats I used to have in the break room or while I poured myself a coffee. The meetings. Having a team under me. Being around more people. In the end that’s what it is: more people.
At home it’s just me, my wife, and my daughters, the family dynamic. They tell me about their days, their life out there, and I’m here. I give them advice and claim to know every single thing they’ve been through: because I lived it too, in school. I remember my adventures as a kid and I remember that despite being extremely social, I felt more at peace staying home. Not one day did I choose to go to school: I was forced. That tells me something about myself — that school wasn’t the problem; it’s mandatory structures, the idea of having to do what has to be done, that frustrates me and chokes my freedom. I like to choose. Let me choose what I want to do. That’s why I chose to work from home.
And even though “I think I like this little life” echoes in my head every day; this life charges me a price. I discovered I’m not as likable over WhatsApp, and even less over Google Meet or Zoom. Screens seem to block that charisma I’ve always cashed in on, the one that got me promoted in barely a year and a half at KPMG (yeah, let me brag a little); the one that got me hellos and smiles by the ton in the office hallways.
So my career seems to have slowed down ever since I made the call eight years ago to work from home and on my own. And if you add that my work was mostly ghostwriting, it looks like I’ve simply done nothing. You can’t go through life saying: “See that excellent article by so-and-so? Well, he doesn’t even think that. Maybe he doesn’t even have that knowledge. I’m the genius behind it.”
It’s the fucking screen’s fault, it inhibits me, it hides me. My face distracts me. I see myself: stupid, and handsome, and stupid and handsome, and stupidly handsome. I see myself. That’s the problem: I SEE MYSELF. And like Foster Wallace said: writers are terribly conscious of ourselves, of others, of what they think of us; so on a video call I’m hyper-conscious of myself… because I’m there, and here at the same time. My brain fills with intrusive thoughts. You’re blinking too much. You’re touching your hair too much. They caught you spacing out. So I start acting and my performance gets weird: I sip coffee, I drink water, I flex a little, I smile, I hunt for my best angle (left or right), and I lose myself. Things I’ll maybe never know about myself in an in-person conversation. But on the video call I see myself and see myself. I see myself too much. I think too much. My god.
And over chat? I send you a dancing monkey or a meme with so many layers it makes an onion look like a dumbass. This was always part of who I am. Whoever knows me in person gets that absurd layer of mine. Whoever doesn’t know me in person just gets confused: what the fuck’s wrong with this guy. Just hand over the article.
Sweet solitude
Reading helps me understand myself, to know other human beings. With those universal pains: love, money, freedom, and the system. Loneliness. The essence is almost always the same. It seems we’ve all lived the same thing; we’re a fucking redundant species. Loneliness is the same today as a thousand years ago. We’ve all felt like we don’t belong; that our time isn’t the right one. All this to say I feel lonely from working remote? Looks like it. That’s how my brain works; that uncontrollable little bastard. Alone but happy
Yeah. Sometimes I go for coffee and there’s no one. Nobody to tell me which person slept with which other person, that we won’t hit the budget, or that they’re about to fire somebody. I just stare into the void and listen to the silence. In that coffee room, the one where I’d look out the window and horses ran by (weird, right? This is Mexico) and I ached to be that free. Like BoJack in that episode where he watches the horses run. We just can’t have it all. Grow up, little guy.
I never pictured myself as a writer writing from the tower, no contact with people. It creates a strange distance, because I live in a virtual world and not the other one. And I want to come back… little by little. To get grossed out by humanity again like when I was a kid.
These are my first steps. Written under my name. Putting my thoughts out into the world for people to make their own or throw away. But let them out of my head. Let them explore the world, go corner to corner. Then I’ll come out. I’ll go back to the humans. Because I’m human and feeling like I don’t belong fills me with terror — the terror of turning into an alien.
Or maybe not.
Because I eat breakfast without rushing. Because I walk my dog slowly. Because I eat with my family beside me and not next to that idiot who smelled bad. Because I get to have breakfast with my wife every day. Because I’ll find ways to get my career back. I’m going to tame the screen and my charisma will punch through; I just have to figure out how to be myself on video calls. Seriousness only kills jobs, business, and everything that’s fun.
Will I go back to an office? Never! At least not a traditional one. But preferably none at all. I like that my prison is my home. A prison that makes me feel free.
That’s the glitch.
Translated from the Spanish by the author, with help from Claude.