🌜 📜 🌊 Scrolls and Streams: Integrating Rest, Opposing Impostor Syndrome and How to be Alone
Also: Everything Everywhere All at Once sweeps the Oscars, navigating depression as a public figure, and how upstanders create a culture of radical respect in the workplace.
This is Five and Nine, a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We are currently in Season 3, which is all about rest. You can catch up on Apple, Spotify, Google and Instagram.
Scrolls and Streams 📜 🌊 is Five and Nine’s monthly selection of insights and commentary that have caught our eyes and ears. All links are shared in the spirit of “this was interesting” and not necessarily “we fully endorse this.”
Published every 🌜 waning gibbous moon, also known as the disseminating moon.
✋ Top Five
How to Be Alone (Tricycle)
My teacher could see through my disguises. He knew the brittle control beneath my breezy ways. One day he gave me a verse to consider, an old saying with many variations: “When you are alone, behave as though you were with the emperor. When you are with the emperor, behave as though you were alone.” I wasn’t sure what this meant; I thought he was telling me to be braver. But I had grown tired of constantly managing how I appeared.
For Upstanders (Kim Scott)
Upstanders are essential to a culture of radical respect. Not only do they help the targets of bias, prejudice and bullying feel less alone and less gaslighted; they also provide clear feedback to the person who caused harm in a way that minimizes defensiveness and maximizes the odds that the offender will make amends. Everyone feels better about the workplace as a result. Upstanders also lead by example, encouraging others to do the same.
But depression, almost by definition, is a backstage emotion: lonely, prickly, uncomely. When you’re in the throes of it—something I know a thing or two about—it positively defies salable shtick. What this means is that every high-functioning depressed person has a self they try very hard to conceal. It is work performing your wellness—for some people, it’s more exhausting than their actual day job.
Why Everyone Feels Like They’re Faking It (New Yorker)
In “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” published in the Harvard Business Review, in February, 2021, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey argue that the label implies that women are suffering from a crisis of self-confidence and fails to recognize the real obstacles facing professional women, especially women of color—essentially, that it reframes systemic inequality as an individual pathology. As they put it, “Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.”
In Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, Dr. Gail Parkerdiscusses “Sojourner’s Syndrome,” a kind of high-effort coping in the face of stress that outwardly seems effortless but hides our internal struggle. She also discusses John Henryism, which is literally working yourself to death. It’s an adaptive behavior we use in an attempt to control our circumstance through superhuman performance.
More
Believe it or not, this one-word tweet took seven rounds of revisions over three months!
This isn’t the ‘end of ambition’ for young Americans. It’s a redefining of it.
How being a solopreneur has forced me to reckon with my limitations
Some employers are snatching back job offers, blaming the economy
Even More
Five and Nine’s Dorothy R. Santos and Xiaowei R. Wang talk about Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once:
🙏 In Memoriam
Five and Nine honors the memory of Rachel Pollack, American science fiction author, comic book writer, and expert on divinatory tarot. Her book, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, is a tarot classic, shaping and guiding our own practice.
🎙️ Listen to the Five and Nine Podcast
Subscribe now to get our podcast. As a podcast newsletter, Five and Nine brings the conversation to text and sound.
Five and Nine is a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We publish “moonthly” — every new moon 🌚 and full moon 🌝 — , and we provide an ongoing critical discussion through readings, reflections and debate.
In this new world, we’re all rethinking the meaning of work and justice in our lives. Our lives and livelihoods are more essential than ever in identifying ways forward for society that can be grounded in care, compassion and sustainability.
Directors of Magic. Dorothy R. Santos and Xiaowei R. Wang
Creative Director. Xiaowei R. Wang
Lead Producer. AX Mina (Ana)