I resigned in May 2017.Excel’s pivot tables are a powerful tool for analyzing data. I felt like I’d personally failed as a leader, but I wasn’t healthy enough to continue. The challenges facing the organization were bigger than financial. Ultimately, I realized no one would want my job. Then I had a brilliant idea: I could fundraise so that someone could take my place as executive director. I created a fundraising strategy doc for 2017, to raise enough money that I could earn a $40,000 salary. I didn’t realize I was suffering from burnout. I read self-help books on productivity and leadership, trying to optimize myself back to being a Highly Effective Person. I only felt awake when I was running on adrenaline from the latest conflict in the Facebook group (imagine the high drama of “Bad Art Friend” unfolding on a weekly basis in an online community that you’re in charge of moderating). I was easily irritated a single email could ruin my day. At the same time, I found myself fixating on the mistakes, incompetence, and ignorance of other people, to shield myself from my own feelings of worthlessness. I became cynical about online feminist activism: how easy it was to publicly shame or socially exclude someone for disagreeing with you or your clique. I gained fifteen pounds.Īll the idealism I’d had when I started the conference was gone. Wine at night became nonnegotiable drinking was how I numbed out while scrolling toxic conflict threads. Moderating our private Facebook community of 40,000 writers was taking a toll on my mental health and I went back on anti-depressants for the first time in years. I wore wrist braces to BinderCon LA and took them off when I got my picture taken with Lisa Kudrow. But I think a lot of working writers can relate to the juggling act of labor: what work do I have to do in order to get paid, so that I can do the work that pays nothing?īy the spring of 2016, I had developed repetitive stress injuries in both wrists from overwork. My situation with BinderCon is unusual: most writers don’t start an $80,000 conference as a side project. (I wasn’t paid for this speaking opportunity, but I did receive a VIP gift bag with a bottle of prosecco.) They offered it every year with the same title. I did do a little of this-I moderated a panel on women screenwriters called “Chicks and Bics.” When I asked about the title, I was told that was the one panel at the screenwriting conference about women writers. If I leveraged my personal brand as a female founder in her early thirties, I could go around the country talking about gender and racial inequities in the writing industries, using data collected by organizations like VIDA and the Writers Guild, and get paid to be a feminist thought leader. Friends who knew how broke I was advised me to hit the women’s empowerment conference circuit (e.g., Create & Cultivate, where “the next generation of curious creatives…enlighten, entertain and inspire” or BullCon, “where there is no reason you can’t have a roundtable on sexism in the workplace followed by champagne”) and use the fact that the Washington Post had named me a “ leading feminist” to my advantage. If I’d written a personal essay about my financial situation, I could have qualified for a scholarship to my own conference.īinderCon LA 2016 with Lisa Kudrow. I managed a bicoastal, largely volunteer staff of 24 people. Our generous scholarship program included travel and childcare stipends. To make our conferences more accessible, I helped to organize viewing parties of our livestream all over the country. My co-founder and I raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate sponsorships and foundation grants (each two-day conference cost about $80,000 to put on). I organized a conference called BinderCon, which happened in New York every fall and Los Angeles every spring, drawing about 1,000 writers a year. I clocked 859 hours for the nonprofit in 2016. I was able to get on my partner’s health insurance plan (the year before, I’d been on Medicaid). For my role as executive director, I was paid a stipend of $12,000. I taught writing workshops in New York City ($7,988), did freelance proofreading and copyediting for a startup ($8,348), wrote freelance articles ($4,772), and received part of a book advance ($5,814). That number is not my salary-it’s the sum of multiple income streams, as I hustled to support my passion project. In 2016, I was executive director of a nonprofit writing organization and I earned $38,922 before taxes.
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