Snarky Bitch

“I would rather lick a cactus.” 

I actually said that to someone who I hired to be my coach. It was a small-group mentorship program to teach podcasters how to monetize their shows. I had already been feeling a bit of a mismatch in the program, but when I made my cactus pronouncement, I felt a sense of being trapped. From the front of the Zoom room I was being told that hustling was my only option. “Maybe part of my problem is that I also have a full time job,” I suggested aloud. 

“Oh, we have full-time businesses, too,” one coach assured me. 

“Then I genuinely do not know how you do all the things you say you do.” I replied incredulously. 

“Well, we sometimes cry ourselves to sleep,” she said, smiling. 

“Then I need to just give up now and work on finding a well-paying traditional job, because if that is what you are offering, I do not want it.” I was not smiling. 

We were over time for the session. Everyone signed off. I felt like shit. My arm hurt due to the pinched nerve that had yet to be definitively diagnosed. I felt overwhelmed and disheartened. I texted my sister, Emily, who is my co-host on the podcast:

It feels like 1) they don’t actually know what our show is about and keep trying to shoehorn us into something we are not. 2) everything involves hustle and 3) there are so many things they are saying and recommending, how tf am I supposed to know what to do next? I feel like we are barely getting the show out every week.

A few hours later I received an email from the coaches:

Hey Tracie,

We wanted to follow up after our last couple of calls. We took some time to reflect, and we wanted to give you the option of bowing out of the program at this point.

This mentorship works best when it feels like a strong fit and when participants can fully engage and get real value from the experience. If that’s not the case for you right now, we want to be respectful of your time and energy.

You are absolutely welcome to continue with us through June. If you do, we are here and ready to support you and help you get as much as possible out of the program.

At the same time, if it feels like the right move to step away, please feel free to dismiss the April invoice and we will consider your participation complete with nothing further owed.

Either way, we want this to feel like a positive experience for you, and we’re rooting for your continued success.

Warmly,


My first impulse was to explain: my arm hurts; I am tired; it sometimes seems like you have not listened to our show. But no, I didn’t need to over-explain. I didn’t need them to like me. At the same time, maybe there was stuff coming later in the program that I would connect with more than I had the slide-into-Instagram-DMs-to-ask-for-sponsorships lesson. I wrote back:

Thanks for your message. 

Can we schedule a call/zoom rather than doing this over email? 

I was actually kind of proud of myself. I felt … mature.

Less than two hours later – after 9:00 pm – they wrote back. They wanted to keep things over email because, “No additional context or decision is needed beyond [whether or not you walk away now], so we want to keep this straightforward for both of us.”

Oh. They weren’t inviting me to stay or go. I was being fired as a customer. But rather than actually say, “this is clearly not a fit, we think it best if you leave the program.” They dressed it up as my choice – probably so I wouldn’t ask for my deposit back. And then they lied to me: I clearly wasn’t “welcome to stay.” 

And the thing is, it wasn’t a fit. I should have done more vetting. I’m not afraid to work, but I’m allergic to “hustle” and this was a course in how to hustle better. But they should probably not have let me into the program in the first place. My show does not fit the model they are using, and no amount of shoehorning or inapplicable suggestions in slide decks will make it fit. What bothered me the most was that based on the suggestions they were making, it was clear they had never really listened to – nor understood – the show. 

My first instinct was to write back:

Understood. I will disregard the April invoice. Maybe one day you’ll actually listen to my show.

Best of luck,

I decided to sleep on it. And berate myself.

Why am I like this? I texted Emily. If I could just be normal, maybe I could learn from them.

What’s “normal”? came her reply.

I dunno, not snarky bitch? I’m always the snarky bitch. I have no poker face and I can’t just go along to get along. 

In my journal I spent time remembering other times Snarky Tracie had taken the wheel: always in professional settings, nearly always in a training of some kind. 

I texted with Gary, one of my partners. He told me he had never experienced me as snarky. 

I assure you, I AM the snarky bitch. I told him.

He teased: Well of course you are, sweetie. You’re the snarkiest that ever did bitch! 😉

No, I tapped out with both thumbs, it doesn’t feel like a good thing. 

I fell asleep turning it over in my mind: what could I have done differently? Why can’t I just be cool? I knew that Snarky Tracie was a form of dysregulation, and I could not understand why she was so powerful once she took over.

When I woke up, I remembered an old thought experiment: “What if this is a gift? What are you being given?” I wrote in my journal, “Being fired from this program is giving me back time, energy, and money that I can reinvest differently.” 

I wrote back to the ersatz mentors: 

Thank you.

I will disregard the April invoice.

Best of luck,

(Snarky Tracie made them wait until after noon for that reply.) 

And because my self-flagellation involved remembering all of the times in recent memory when Snarky Tracie came out, I finally saw the pattern. Snarky Tracie is protecting me. She gets activated when I feel I cannot walk away for some reason, feel as though I am being set up to fail, and am simultaneously being blamed for that failure. There’s a reason this happens in professional trainings of one kind or another: these are moments in which I feel trapped (I was on the hook to pay quite a chunk of cash for this experience, and needed to try to get my money’s worth) and then start to feel misread (had they even listened to the show?!?), and since they are trainings, there is an implicit or explicit message that it’s my fault I’m not getting different results (my disinterest in a specific less-appealing-than-licking-a-cactus tactic was proof I “don’t want to monetize” my show). 

When she is backed into that corner, feeling misread, Snarky Tracie comes out swinging. She wields the full force of my wit, which is considerable, to counter-attack the person or people (or, in one case, intellectual model) she sees misunderstanding, misdirecting, or misjudging me.

Snarky Tracie isn’t my adversary. Like all the members of the internal committee, her only reason for being is to protect me. I can appreciate that, and even embrace her for her fierce efforts to defend me. But she is not the person I want to be. 

Several days later, on a date with Seth, another partner, I started to tell him about what happened: “I am not sure if you know this about me, but I can be super snarky sometimes.” 

He smiled slyly, cocked his head to one side and said, “Yeah. I can see that.”

My eyes widened at his reply, “Oh! I see how it is.” 

He laughed. “C’mon. I know you. And I like your snark. It’s funny.”

I accepted the assessment for what he named – he knows me – and told him the story.  

I am starting to come to grips with what Seth saw. Regardless of who I want to be, Snarky Tracie is me. I am her. I can’t excise her any more than I could banish the version of me who shows love through caretaking or the one who is compelled to render thoughts through drawing. 

Snarky Tracie — the specific one who comes out when I both feel trapped and misunderstood — looks for the funniest way to be cutting. (“I would rather sell pictures on feet finder dot com than follow that advice. I have very high arches. It could work.”) Once she is behind the wheel, she doesn’t cede control easily. And even if I managed to wrest the wheel from her in a trapped-and-misread moment, she’d make herself known via bitchy eyebrow raises and dissatisfied sighs. 

I’m learning to be OK with that.