Mycelial futurism
Weird jobs, optical illusions, and the return of familiar questions
When I got into grad school, I was basically working in a factory: the production facility for a mushroom supplement company owned by a certain mycologist known for his evangelical zeal. He believes that mushrooms and technologies derived from them can help save the world. With the malty smell of production around me and a view of the trees, I took a phone call from the university with good news—admission into the MFA program I had my heart set on—and absolutely felt I like was being rescued. No more Crocs squeaking on the shiny lab floor and too-early mornings riding wheeled shelves heavy with inoculated mushroom kits down sketchy slippery ramps. I could quit the forty-hour weeks at what often felt like an awful summer camp—grueling tasks among friends, surrounded by trees and cheerful hippies whose conviction and belief in their work baffled me. Instead, I would move to California and have a salary as a teaching assistant making more money than I ever had (almost $24K a year). It was glorious and surreal.
This is so often how it’s been—one situation replaces another, offers an escape hatch. I’m talking mostly about jobs and other opportunities that justify doing something potentially reckless—quitting a job—in order to pursue a trajectory of becoming a “real writer.” Going to grad school was the first time making a leap also felt financially responsible. Before then, that path sometimes faded into a fault line barely legible beneath the fog of my own doubt. The majority of the jobs I’ve worked have had little to do with writing or being a writer. I’ve crafted storylines, sentences, and paragraphs in the privacy of my head while I’ve whirled around a busy Farmers Market fruit stand, a student-run cafe, a bougie specialty coffeeshop, an artisanal sauerkraut company, and that mushroom supplement facility (just to name a few semi-recent jobs). Their zany workplace dramas and the worlds I’ve seen from their perch have fed my creativity, but there’s often a backdrop of panic to the experience; I’ve often been terrified that they will swallow me up—that the whole precarious arrangement will wear me down faster than I can bring my ideas to life or show what I know is inside of me. It is fear of being obliterated, of being primarily hypothetical and rarely actual. The fear of a future where those creative dreams have still not materialized into solid form.
Those few phone calls I’ve gotten with good news—an offer of admission into an artist residency or grad program—have given me evidence I’ve clung onto in my darker moments. It’s easy for me to criticize the exclusivity of literary and academic institutions, but/and moments when I’ve been let inside have been helped solidify my own sense of belonging within my ambitions. This is especially true of grad school, where I was seen as a writer in both my capacities as student and as a teacher. That identity was overt, in the room. I didn’t feel so stuffed inside of myself.
And yet, life does sometimes loop back on itself, serving up familiar questions in new forms and disrupting any sense of linear progress. Almost two years ago, I got another job at the same mushroom supplement company where I worked before grad school—this time an office-type job as a copywriter, where I used the skills I honed during grad school to write and edit innocuous (if not also hyperbolic and dare I say evangelical) email newsletters and other marketing “content.” Writing for money in the often chaotic atmosphere was disembodied hell—worse for me than I realized. When I worked in the factory some years ago, I got to inhabit my thoughts as I went through the physical motions the job required. This time around, my body was mostly motionless while whirring with private reactions and a widening gulch of alienation as I squeezed attention from myself—did “knowledge work”—for forty hours a week. Inhabiting this private work-from-home bubble—stuffing myself back inside—was what that job required.
Working that job also meant wringing out more from myself than I had to give, and which I felt I had to keep doing even though I could not. I’ve written a bit this spring about the fallout from this—being on medical leave after hitting the wall; my decision to quit the job (which was preceded by a long stretch of indecision, a zig-zagging process of making forbidden choices and then turning back on them). The pseudo-security the underpaid job offered me was a fiction in the face of the actual damage I experienced; my decision to quit was preceded by finally seeing staying as more risky than breaking things off.
Just before my very last day there, I experienced another kind of wringing out, a purge—not stripping energy from myself to keep working the job, but food poisoning…from a mushroom. Morels have been growing in our backyard—just volunteering themselves—and I blame them. (It’s a better story than blaming contaminated produce—another gift/curse of the mushrooms.) I was so violently sick that I burst a capillary in my eyeball. For days I’ve walked through the world displaying that dish of blood or hiding it behind sunglasses, self-conscious of the grotesque residue.
Being poisoned was miserable but it was cathartic—euphoric, really—to get to the other side of it, and even relieving to be left with the tangible party-favor. For the kind of injury that heals in a matter of weeks to come up to the surface, something you can’t miss if you look into my eyes. The other symptoms invoked by (or coinciding with) this job have been more subtle and private: hot, swollen fingers and painful joints (autoimmune arthritis); wicked insomnia; headaches; cognitive strain that got so bad I actually couldn’t do my job—could no longer force my brain/body to glue up the loose ends that was the entire galaxy of that job, the outer space through which I orbited or peered into on a computer in a desk in a room in my house. This galaxy was filled with hyperbolic metaphors about mushroom mycelium and the future, and its storms wore me down in the privacy of my own home whether or not I was clocked in. Little bitter conversations with myself pounced around as I washed dishes or took a shower.
Meanwhile, as I was on medical leave, another plot-line also exploded, bringing injury to the surface: the company’s union-busting efforts. (Learn more about this from LaborLab here.) It’s a big bummer for a lot of reasons; I didn’t quit because of it, but that has helped me see the obvious contrast between what I believe in and what those leading the company believe in. (Last I heard, workers aren’t asking for boycotts, and union organizers are focused on internal education. On that, check out this brief video from actor Anthony Rapp, who played a fictional iteration of a certain famous mycologist on Star Trek, expressing his support for labor organizing efforts.)
This constellation of events feels like one of those moments that’s writing me, a riddle I’m trying to decipher just on the heels of living through it. I’m thinking about the annoying “mushrooms can save the world” rhetoric in the company culture (mycelial futurism) and my day-to-day reality. There’s something I’m trying to figure out how to say about these kinds of pseudo-revolutionary metaphors, my own disembodiment (my own culpability in missing the tangible evidence or struggling to read its literalness), the company’s union-busting efforts that bubbled up in my final days on the job, and also how the ghastly undertaker of the HR director always capitalized Company (“the Company”), denied raises, and made everybody write SMART goals. (SMART goals!) Something I’m figuring out how to say about how pseudo-revolutionary metaphors (or at least rhetoric) about mushrooms and our connectedness are not a substitute for responsibly tending to our actual connections with each other. There’s probably also something here about heroic approaches to health, why biohackers are so impressionable, and my own impressionability. My own capacity to stuff reality underneath what looks like necessity, but may only be an optical illusion. (I haven’t pitched or sent anything for publication in a really long time, but this feels like the weird seed of a weird pitch, maybe?)
It would be dishonest not to acknowledge the fear lurking inside of what I also feel strongly was the right choice (i.e., quitting). There are echoes of other experiences in what I’ll be doing instead. There’s a marbling of time, as I’ll be working (again) part-time as a barista and revamping the small business I threw so much of myself into circa 2021-2022. (Originally its focus was on creative coaching and writing workshops; I’d now like to slightly expand that focus to include more explicitly ADHD-friendly support as well as some marketing/copywriting services—all TBD!) Of course things are different than they were the last time I visited these forms of paid work—things are always different—but there’s a rough edge to their familiarity. There are ways I feel less bold about my business than I did when I first started it. I’ve seen how even when I’m my own boss, I can exhaust myself and pour too much time/energy into things that don’t matter (i.e., researching which stupid scheduling app to use, etc). I’m more acquainted with its disappointments and financial risks. Somehow, alongside the noise of these more obvious concerns, deeper (and more paranoid) questions are much louder, too: Is there a version of this business that’s accessible for a wider range of people, or am I simply doomed to offer a luxury service? Am I participating in a weird internet pyramid scheme shiny with artificial promises (i.e., “coaching”)? If my goal is to help people, should I become a therapist instead? Am I too shy for this business thing? Too disorganized? Too easily overwhelmed and sporadic in regards to checking email and using social media? Do I actually *like* doing *anything* for money?
Getting out of my head and into conversation feels like an important part of figuring these things out (or getting these anxieties out of my way). Toward that end, I’m taking a business class with Enterprise for Equity, an Olympia-based nonprofit. I’m starting to learn some skills I skipped over when first jumping into the things, skills involving spreadsheets and reality checks. One of my homework assignments is to do research around what I plan to offer—to put together an actual survey. (Gulp, gulp, double gulp.) I have a lot of my own soul-searching to do, but there are definitely some things I can’t answer for myself—and which matter a lot to this process of puzzling out the relationship between my ideas and other peoples’ lives.
Here is where I have a small favor to ask of you, dear reader—I need some homework help! I don’t assume that you’re a potential client—I get that there are a lot of other reasons why you’d be reading this—but nonetheless, I’m trying to gather as much information as I can about what kinds of creative/writing support is relevant and accessible for my broader community in format and price. If you have a couple spare minutes, I would love to hear what’s true for you in that respect:
There’s no writing required, just a handful of brief questions with multi-select answers; you can skip any questions that trip you up; it’s anonymous. (But if you want, you can share your email address for a special discount when I do re-launch my business.)
I don’t usually include a “call to action” in these letters and this request is not the main point of this one. (It also makes me nervous—I’m literally blushing as I type this. Also having flashbacks to the ridiculous mess of a customer survey I witnessed whilst working at the mushroom supplement company…) Thank you deeply for anything you share; either way, I’m glad you’re here. I’ll be back next month with more thoughts about navigating the creative process—including the often beguiling task of creating a life (if not also a future) one actually wants to (or even can) inhabit.
Yours,
Siloh
Offerings
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