Meredith Arthur on emotional wellbeing and leveraging the collective hive mind
Creatives in Tech Interview Series, Issue #2
This week, as part of my interview series on creatives working at the intersection of writing and tech, I talk to Meredith Arthur, writer, producer, and author of the recently published Get out of My Head: Inspiration for Overthinkers in an Anxious World. In this series, I talk to fellow writers in tech to learn how they navigate these seemingly disparate career paths and passions, hear about their latest work, and what advice they have for other creatives in the field. Meredith is the perfect person to talk to as we close out 2020 and all the anxiety its brought us: her book makes a great last minute stocking stuffer for the overthinkers in our lives (including ourselves), as we all try to find a little bit of peace and inner calm in our day-to-day. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Wishing you all a restful and restorative break — see you next year.
Meredith Arthur on emotional wellbeing and leveraging the collective hive mind
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
You and I met at Pinterest, where you are a writer-producer for emotional wellbeing products. You are also the founder of Beautiful Voyager, a mental health website and community, an editor for Invisible Illness, the largest mental health publication on Medium, and the author of the recently published Get Out of My Head: Inspiration for Overthinkers in an Anxious World. How did you become interested in mental health, and why turn to writing to explore this space?
I found myself working on emotional wellness after a long journey in many different jobs and startups. I was basically diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder out of the blue—I did not see it coming. It was a shock, but a very welcome shock: I was thrilled when I was told, and it really changed the course of my work and my life. I realized, this is what I'm here to do, is to make sense of this. So I started my own community, Beautiful Voyager, to connect overthinkers and people pleasers, started mental health community groups at Zillow where I worked, and then was lucky enough to land at Pinterest where I get to focus on emotional wellness, which is incredible. I have been lucky enough to be able to fall into what I'm exactly good at, which is emotional wellbeing and making things happen and creating something new.
Tell me more about why you launched Beautiful Voyager.
Dr. Lisa Sanders has a column in the New York Times where she is trying to figure out what people have and diagnose these different, difficult things. She'd write a piece saying, we cannot figure out what is wrong with this person. And people all around the world would write in and it would help. This column became a Netflix TV show, which came out years after I had started this community, Beautiful Voyager. And I found it very cathartic. I felt like it really nailed why I wanted to do this, which is I wasn't finding the information that was answering my questions anywhere. It really was not out there. It's starting to be now—there are some new books and thinking that's coming out. But when I saw this, I thought, this is trying to bring together everyone's hive mind on the topic that I'm interested in. People that are as obsessive about it as I am—those are the people I need to be talking to. Because I knew I wasn't going to find it otherwise. I was a little anti-authoritarian—I think because I had seen five therapists over the course of my life, and they didn’t spot [my anxiety]—like, does the establishment really understand this? I'm not thinking they do. If I thought I was going to find it anywhere, it was going to be from connecting with smart people that would also be reading a ton and thinking about it. I wanted crowdsourced answers.
In your newsletter and website you write openly about your personal experience. What is it like for you to share your experience in that way?
The reason that I took on emotional wellness as my topic, as my brand, is that I didn't want to have to surprise people with it. I didn't want to have to go through constantly teaching people who I am— and it's totally worked. Now people are like, Oh yeah, you're the mental health person. I love it. I find it very relaxing to not have to surprise people.
Now, when you're first starting to write about your own mental health, especially in work-related situations, it is extremely humbling and awkward as hell. I think the only reason I was really able to do it was because my ego had been destroyed by startups. After that one crazy year, 2015, when I was diagnosed, I was at three startups in one year. Each one I thought was my permanent job. And each one either crumbled or I was let go, or it went under. It took a long time, and it might have also been my age, but I came out of it no longer caring anymore what people thought. I had nothing more to prove. I had already failed in a way. It gave me a freedom of not worrying about people's expectations. That had to happen, I think, for me to start writing about mental health.
Practically speaking, how do you manage writing about your lived experience? When something's happening, how much of you is thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to go into the newsletter later’?
I think it's all about the topic hitting a level where I need to figure it out. The last newsletter was about not knowing when to communicate what you think to friends. What if your friend is doing something you disagree with—is it right to bring it up and talk about that? I hold my tongue on a lot of topics, and eventually that festers and can have bad effects. Usually, when it hits that level of bothering me, I think: I should write to figure out what this is, how to articulate it better, and—it comes back to my diagnosis—how to get people writing me back so I can get more information about it. It's one thing to just have your perspective and say it, but then to have your perspective and to hear from people you know and people you don’t know about how they heard it—that's what really helps you articulate something new. I'm very interested in that. It's like if six people touch the elephant, they each touch a different thing. And so how are you supposed to get a sense of the elephant? But that's the only way I can get a sense of the elephant, is all these different perspectives.
Let’s talk about your book, Get Out of My Head: Inspiration for Overthinkers in an Anxious World. For folks who haven't read it, what's the book about, where did the idea come from, and why did you feel it was important to share with readers?
When I first wanted to write the book, it was years earlier and I was very overthinky about it. I actually thought I'd commission a series of researchers around the world to study anxiety in different countries. And it just spun out. Then I set it aside for three years. (I would recommend this—if somebody feels stuck on a creative project, set it aside.) When I came back to it, it was very crystallized. It was amazing. It became very clear to me that I wanted information that would help people understand how to experiment with their own selves, to explore and not feel pressured in any way. And the design and feel of it had to do that as well. The goal of the book was to connect with other overthinkers—I hadn't seen many books that spoke to me that didn't feel stodgy and didn't feel like a lot of work. I didn't want mine to be work. I wanted it to feel like you could just sit down and read a chapter, let go. The little book in the back [of the main book] was supposed to be like medicine, like a little pill that you could take with you and put in your back pocket. A lot of the thinking was around, how do we make it feel? How do we give the information in a concise way? And then how do we make it feel the way we want it to feel?
Tell me about the term “overthinkers” — why use this term and not “anxiety”? Does it mean something different?
I started describing myself as an overthinker years before I was diagnosed with anxiety. I knew something was going on—I didn't understand that it was the overthinking. I had a lot of physical symptoms and there were signs that things weren't good. But I would just describe myself as an overthinker on social media, kind of glibly. When I was diagnosed I realized, Oh, you were pawing at this with the word “overthinker.” You just didn't really know. And why didn't you know? It was because the word “anxiety” stressed me out. It’s very buried for me. It almost felt like an impacted thorn that had to be pulled out. I didn't know I was even avoiding anxiety.
When I started talking about the book to people, so many of them were like, that's me, I'm an overthinker, but they would not necessarily say they have an anxiety issue. It almost was a secret handshake where people seem to really get it, but they didn't have to go to that next level of pulling out the thorn all the way. I’m very interested in these things that are almost like secret whistles to the person who doesn't even know it. I'm interested in reaching people that are turned off by terms like “mental health” or “anxiety,” because that was me. I wouldn’t have turned [“overthinkers”] down. The me of before would have thought, This [book] is for me.
So much of the book, right down to the terminology, is deeply rooted in your personal experience. Yet you actually don't talk much about your personal experience until the very end, in the epilogue.
That was intentional, too. There was a feeling that people might be turned off by the term generalized anxiety disorder. That this was not a book about generalized anxiety disorder. That even using that term of generalized anxiety disorder, in the wrong place, could undercut what we were trying to do. I do love talking about my specific experience because I think it is illuminating for other people. I've talked to some people that have very similar experiences where they talk to their therapist, their therapist said, no, you don't have anxiety, and they learned that they did because of the physical symptoms. And so I do want that story to get out there. This just wasn't the book for it. This was really the book to say, Hey, overthinkers, here's some ideas, here's some things to try. Here's some inspiration.
Tell me about the writing process for this book.
Writing newsletters helped a lot. One thing I learned from newsletters is that writing things in smaller essays helps you start to get a cadence, with your own set up and conclusion or set up and solution. I learned through doing newsletters what was working—what kinds of metaphors, what were people really understanding? As I was starting to think about the book, I took a bunch of the newsletters themes and tried to start laying them out in progressive order, clumped topics by chapter, and then rewrote everything. So I kind of had all these little seedlings that I just watered as I went, and that systematic approach helped me so much. It started to feel like, “Okay, you just need to plug this hole. You remember this piece from years ago? Let's think about how you're going to refine that and make it coherent with the rest that worked so well.” A lot of it is consistent writing. We all have this romantic idea of writing, like the muse hits you. The muse would hit me in little flare moments, but the actual book writing itself was trying to take the flares and then methodically go through them.
I did feel a lot of times when I was writing it like: panic, let go panic, let go. The panic was of almost an anticipated vulnerability hangover. I’d think, “Oh my God. Who am I to be doing this?” A lot of it comes back to when I first worked in book publishing—I worked with Nobel prize winners. I always thought, “I can't write because I am working with Alice Munro. My daughter is named after her. I can't write.” But the truth is once you start to tap into your own vein of specific, that specific world of you—no one else has worked in tech, not been diagnosed, done all that—that is where you start getting into the place where you can feel like, this is my voice. I'm the only one that can say that.
You brought in an illustrator, Leah Rosenberg, to help fulfill your vision. What was it like to work with a creative partner? How did you know it was the right fit?
Leap of faith, big time. I really had to let go of what my conception of the book was. In fact, I did a bunch of mood boards and Pinterest boards and design thinking with the designer before we locked in the illustrator, and it was very different from what the book became. There were periods of just letting go of original ideas of what it was going to be or feel like, or look like. It came and went. There were panic moments and then you let go. You just hope that you're going to be able to work with it no matter which direction it starts to go, and that you'll be both flexible and structured enough, and have enough boundaries to speak up when it's not feeling right. It's like a marriage, you know? Collaborations are hard. So what do you let go? And what do you push on? I've learned so much about Leah, like how the reason she agreed to the project is, it really meant something to her. We've formed that bond over time. But you can't know that right at the beginning.
A spread from the book, with illustrations by Leah Rosenberg
You’ve made a career from that moment of clarity after your diagnosis and found your niche in emotional wellness, writing, and tech. What advice do you have for other writers in tech trying to make it work?
I talk to a lot of young women in their twenties who are looking for their passion. They want to know, why are they here? What should they contribute? What can they contribute? And it's so hard for me to help them in some ways, because I just lucked upon the thing that I am here to do, and it wasn't until I was 39. If I had pushed really hard for it in my twenties, it doesn't mean I would've gotten it. So I often try to tell people to be patient with themselves, and to practice—to be ready for the moment when the thing they really are meant to do hits them. And practice might mean writing about other topics. It might mean forcing yourself into a habit of morning pages or writing on Medium or writing your own newsletter about the things that interest you. You've got to actually just start showing up and writing. It's a place to start. It's about making sure you have a creative space that fuels you and following that interest, whatever it may be.
What’s next for you?
I'm really excited for some of the apps I'm working on at Pinterest to come into the universe. I am also talking about working on a podcast with someone who I think is really amazing in the space. And just the other day when I was driving, my next book project hit me. We'll see where that goes. I also am working on a children's book idea with Leah Rosenberg. I thought we were going to send out that children's book six months ago and I've still only written a few pages. We had the idea, we had the plan, but it could be another year. So part of it is just hanging out and continuing to deepen those projects until the right moment. I don't know when that's going to be, but there are definitely ideas on the horizon that I'm excited about.
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