She arrived at the hypnotherapist’s door sweating and the woman who answered gasped.
Christina’s rashy shingles had traveled up her body to wrap around the crown of her head and gleamed in the fall sun. “Omigod,” the practitioner said. “We’re going to need way more time than just an hour.”
“Well, but … I have my dog in my car …” Christina equivocated as she entered. She stayed for two and a half hours of breathing exercises and finally slipped into a trance.
She revisited the last time she could remember truly being happy. It was a sunny day on a dock on a lake in Wisconsin with popcorn, magazines, and friends. It was, sadly, the day Jerry Garcia died. But everything else was right. Nothing mattered. Her life was all ahead of her.
Christina cried on the drive home. She stopped at Whole Foods to buy flowers. “I saw these beautiful Gerber daisies, orange with the greenest stems,” she says. At home, she cut the bouquet and set it next to her work laptop, a sort of spiritual amulet against what lay in wait. She logged into the conference call. There was her boss and someone from human resources.
Christina would later call me from Warsaw, Poland, and reflect on her time in San Francisco. Decades prior, she had arrived fresh-eyed from Chicago, enamored with the promises of what tech would do for the world—and for her. The lunches in the Salesforce tower. Working alongside the Valley’s elite. Her descent into crisis, and now the redemption she’s found in helping coordinate sister murals in two locations: downtown San Francisco, technocapital envy of the world, and the oldest prison in the state, visible just across the bay.
This is Christina’s story. But it is also the story of tens of thousands of transplants like her, to whom the tech industry promised and reaped in unequal measure. People who gave everything and then learned they were disposable. Cast off by capital-rich startups claiming to cure the world’s ills, but who all too often, leave their people with hospitalizable diseases. This is a story about that uniquely Californian type of prison.
Burning out, fast then slow
Wind back the clock, and Christina’s most recent job seemed certain to deliver her from the agonies of the prior one. She works in public relations, and her resume is dotted with companies you know. This newest role had her working at a “hyperscaler” cybersecurity startup with a founder who she maintains is the most humble billionaire she has ever met. He flies Southwest economy. He prefers walking to taxis. He’d change his clothes in the hallway of a WeWork before appearing on CNBC’s Mad Money.
“He was funny, but also a little out of it. He would call me because he thought I was Ukrainian and would ask what he could do,” says Christina. “My family is Polish. I told my dad. He said, ‘You should have asked for money!’”
Christina put in five years at this company, by which time she could do the job in her sleep. After several decades in PR, writing was her forté. She spent that winter holiday in Poland with family. Being out of Silicon Valley, she found she breathed easier. It was refreshing that nobody asked for insider news. People envied her. And she? She envied them. It was here she realized she actually hated a lot of her work, and in particular the stories she had to tell. The ones she couldn’t believe in, where they knew they were trying to bend the public narrative or stoke panic. Yet work had consumed her life. Work was life. She wondered whether she should quit, but deferred. The money was so good.
Back home, she was greeted by an email from her boss that read:
“Somebody told me that six months ago, you were short with them on a call. Let’s discuss.”
He copied someone from human resources.
Christina had worked with her boss for five years, and he was, in many ways, her confidant. Behind the company politics, they were always texting. Suddenly he’d grown cold and withdrawn all trust and respect.
“I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ But he’d put up a wall,” Christina recalls. “When you are suddenly bombarded with notions of your defectiveness, let me tell you, it really screws you up. All of a sudden I was like, ‘Can I not write? Am I greedy? Am I taking advantage of the system? Am I just dialing it in?’”
When you are suddenly bombarded with notions of your defectiveness, let me tell you, it really screws you up. All of a sudden I was like, ‘Can I not write?
For five years, her boss had happily approved her press releases. Now, he questioned nearly every line: “This is all wrong, Christina. All wrong.” She started asking coworkers to review her work ahead of time, and they’d give it a thumbs-up. Then he’d tear it apart. She began running everything through ChatGPT and felt a dawning sense of desperation. Work wouldn’t let up. The eccentric billionaire founder would still call her on Sundays to review press releases, but now her manager also joined. She filed a formal complaint with HR, and her boss backed off briefly, then resumed. She welled with hurt and indignation.
Christina had been working for two long decades now, including weekends, and had nothing left in reserve. She was a wire drawn taut. But before she broke, she sang out and tried to give the company even more, to prove her devotion.
She began commuting into the office every day, sometimes two hours each way. She’d overcommunicate in Slack to show she was working. She knew it was crazy, but the situation was crazy. To her dog’s despair, she stopped leaving her apartment as frequently so she’d never miss a message. “I couldn't even take the time to go for a biopsy because I was so scared of losing my footing. Like, it was already shaky. I would set my alarm for two o'clock in the morning just to show people that I was working. I was that stupid person you read about,” she says. “Nobody cared that I was working at two o'clock in the morning!”
That’s when the outside illness moved inside. Anxiety devoured any hope of sleep. She started to have lung issues and apologized profusely for the hour and a half she was offline to get X-rays. She visited the emergency room twice. And her boss only tightened the screws. He began to ask her what she was even doing with her time. She had to begin documenting her work.
And still she persisted. She began to try every treatment method possible and sought advice from a friend who’d been hit by a car while working at Google and had gone on medical leave. The friend recommended the hypnotherapist, whose work unfortunately did not save Christina from being paralyzed with fear on the disciplinary call where her boss laid into her about her poor work quality for an hour—as she stared to the side at her Gerber daisies with the greenest of stems.
Finally, exhausted beyond measure, Christina asked if she might go on medical leave. And now her boss grew vindictive.
On leave, her boss would repeatedly email asking her to share files. He also started to write her text messages, then delete them. The company hired a service called Tilt that stands between employees on medical leave and the employer. But the Tilt social worker’s purpose is to essentially spy. Overwhelmed by shingles, anxiety, sleeplessness, and mood swings, all exacerbated by having to beg Tilt and her insurance to please all talk to each other, Christina didn’t know what to do. So she flew home to her parents’ house in Poland—they had since moved back—and she collapsed into crying fits.
Her social worker learned of the trip and reported back to the insurance company that she was on a European vacation.
This is how the company’s lawyers were able to finally justify firing Christina in a move that’d give Joseph Heller chills: They retroactively denied her medical leave, then fired her for not showing up to work during the time she believed she had been on leave. The insurance company then retroactively revoked her coverage.
Her boss pushed all the paperwork through just in time—they fired Christina five days before her five-year stock vested. The billionaire founder signed off.
Moving to San Francisco full of hope
“My family left communist Poland because it got so bad, you couldn’t trust anybody there. Sort of ironic,” says Christina, over our video call. “I'm returning because I am so distrustful of all of the negativity and fear mongering and all of the lies that are being told in the States, which I called home for 25 years. I feel so much safer here now.”
Back in 1994, her parents had seen a Soviet doctor who told them Christina would never walk on account of her scoliosis. The doctor wanted a bribe. It was one too many deceptions, and they chose to move to Chicago and start entirely over in a place where their daughter would have sound medical help and true opportunity.
From Chicago, Christina looked on California as the land of sunshine and promise. When a friend suggested they fly out for a weekend, she leapt at it. The friend then encouraged her to look for jobs: “You want to move out here, right?” They set her up with an interview at a tech company and, at that lunch table, someone was complaining that they suddenly needed a roommate. She slid up to them. Another person at that group was selling their bike. She cut a check on the spot. Afterwards, she called her mom.
“I didn’t know what I was doing but it was like all the doors were opening. I came to San Francisco and met some really funny people and stayed. I was so different, but I got to reinvent myself,” she says. “And then the money got good and I stayed even longer.”
The names and impact were extraordinary, she felt. She was calling big-name reporters. Dealing in big numbers. Big investments. It was easy to pull an all-nighter or work a weekend—the startup needed it. What was a crisis call or late night every now and then? They were making the world more efficient! Connecting people! Several decades passed that way, work incrementally eating into fun, night by night, canceled plan after canceled plan, until the pleasure was gone and all that was left was work.
In the few moments she had to reflect, Christina also felt increasingly ashamed of the messages her team had to sometimes push. Salesforce had her promoting “The Ohana,” a native Hawaiian word for “family” that they’d co-opted, about how the company took care of its people. This proved an empty claim years later when the company initiated multiple rounds of careless and indiscriminate layoffs. They axed some of their best performers and some of their worst. Nobody could feel safe after that. Those remaining assumed the departed’s responsibilities.
Christina found a new work family at each company. But they were bound by the grim solidarity of people devoted to a job that could never love them back, from which they never really had a day off. Their existence had become continuous with their work, and whose finances and health increasingly prevented them from leaving.
At the “hyperscaler” security company, Christina’s team was supposed to promote the phrase “zero trust,” which means what it sounds like: That cybersecurity professionals should treat every employee as a suspect. “What a horrible world we live in, that we’re making money off of,” says Christina. “Trust nobody? We’re doomed as a society if we can’t. My god. Shame on me for shilling that for so long. But when you’re inside the tech machine, you start to believe the story, right?”
Visitors to San Francisco tend to gawk at the homeless hordes, but this too really started to bother her. If this industry really were living up to all its promises to connect and enrich the world, to offer individuals freedom, what was happening here on its doorstep? Further, all the glass skyscrapers and isolation were starting to encroach on her sense of autonomy. High atop the tower in San Francisco, she could see mountains on three sides and sea on the fourth, but rarely ever went there. In a sad twist, Salesforce adopted the aesthetic of national parks for its lobbies, filling them with faux national park signage and redwood trees of the variety most employees would rarely ever see.
Long after leaving Salesforce, Christina went on a date with a man who worked at the company, and she couldn’t focus on his stories. All he could talk about was software. And as he talked, all she saw, looking down on the street, were ants. Just a downtown of giant ant farms, up and down, full of busy people frittering away their existence in a digital mine. This was, she concluded, no way to live.
Christina began to wrestle back time from her swollen schedule to visit the theater. To start therapy. To take an improv class. Work wanted more of her, but she tried to not give in. Improv was from 7-10 pm one night per week, and she’d work on her laptop in the car until it started, rush in, then log right back in after. Improv lit her up—it being the practice of shedding all artifice, shouting unselfconsciously and acting out animal spirits. She’d enter exhausted and leave sweating and energized and quickly call friends to recount the skits. But work took that from her. “I grew too sick and scared to keep up with any of that.”
The CEO inside
After her firing, Christina’s night sweats became terrors. In her dreams, she’d show up at work to leers and jeers. She’d wake with a start and not be able to return to sleep.
But having honed the intense overwork skills that she had, sitting idle wasn’t an option. It actually seemed the greater pain. So on a whim, she went on volunteermatch.com and applied to a position as PR director for a mural project at San Quentin, the oldest prison in California on the San Francisco Bay, overlooking the city.
She wanted to volunteer. She also wanted to remeet her childhood love of painting. Her mom was an artist. This felt like a returning. The next day, she was on the phone with a prisoner named Ray, serving two lifetime sentences, who explained he’d organized a program to bring world-renowned artists to make murals inside the prison, and prisoner artists to make murals without.
“He was so eloquent, so excited. In a way, it was like working with a startup founder,” she says. “Except he couldn’t push me around.” The aim of Lock Works—they named the mural project after the secretive arm of Santa Clara-based military industrial giant—was to bring beauty and better conditions into the prison.
“I don’t know how they did it. They don’t have access to the internet, their phone calls are limited to 15 minutes,” she says. Yet Ray had enlisted a South African artist and her son, who would go on to live at Christina’s house over the summer, and had emails out to Banksy, among others.
The prison work was rewarding on an order she hadn’t felt before. It opened her eyes to that other reality that had been staring at her across the bay, high in a concrete castle where tech could not reach. And the prisoners’ difficulties seemed realer and more urgent. One mural unveiling was canceled because of a lockdown—someone at the prison was killed. Their struggles were more of a physical nature. Talking on the phone, Ray once said, “I can’t find anything in my cell,” and Christina blurted, “I KNOW, right? All those little apps and folders …” To which Ray replied, “No no, Christina, my cell. I can’t find anything in my cell.” She felt mortified.
“It really shakes you up to talk to somebody who’ll never see freedom again, and be having a hard day, and they’re the one to tell you to look inside,” she says. “These people are sending me books about philosophy, art, and life.” One day, she was feeling broken up about seeing her prior company post her former job on a careers site. Ray told her to check herself. He called again later that night to check in on her—she knew she was bigger than this, right? That her departure had been a blessing?
“The politics of hunger in these prisons and the conditions they’re living in really are horrific,” says Christina. “And arguably, in what should be the best, most humane metro in the country. But when you work in tech that you get so wrapped up in tech, you don’t even see what surrounds us. We have all this beauty, and also all this horror, but we’re so subservient to these companies, they end up ruling our lives. You’re now expected to kiss the ground at your boss’ feet because they gave you a job. It’s a similar mentality to the one people develop in prison. There, people are kissing the ground around them because they’re not going to get their next meal.”
“I think,” she says, “I want to help the underdogs because I feel like an underdog myself.”
That month, Christina finally learned from a former co-worker the probable cause of her firing. The company had hired a new chief people officer who believed in what’s called the “rank and yank” method, whereby companies rank and force employees to complete for favor, and force bosses always to fire the uncommitted. In this system it doesn’t matter if the entire team is thriving. There must always be sacrifices. Christina was likely the one. And if that was true, there was nothing she could have done to overturn her boss’ aspersions. Though she’ll never know if her boss’ choice was personal or random—or which of those two would have been worse.
Two prisons, in mute solidarity, across a bay
There is something poetic about the mural project, and it’s twinning those two cities on their hills—San Francisco on one side, San Quentin on the other. Making them sister civilizations, united by artists speaking their grief without words, and giving the citizens of both plenty to reflect on.
This month, the San Francisco mural will be unveiled downtown and the governor will be in attendance, on his path to running for president.
“There really is some kind of parallel here,” Christina confided in me. “Though one is obviously way more free. It’s like everyone talks about this unlimited vacation but it’s all handcuffs, and because they call it ‘family’ and leaders are always saying ‘this pain is temporary,” you don’t realize the fear you’re under. I will tell you, going inside the prison, I felt more seen than I had in years. Because there are no phones. People look at you and want to hear from you and honor your presence. You being there is fuel for them. I felt more connected for those four hours with an almost uncomfortable amount of eye contact, but oh, the eyes, and I was just so exhausted but beautifully refilled. As opposed to being part of that PR machine that’s trying to announce a world that like, just isn’t true.”
I will tell you, going inside the prison, I felt more seen than I had in years. Because there are no phones.
Repatriating herself to Poland felt like being pried from a cruel dream where you think waking up means you’ll perish, but beyond, there is only life. “It’s that feeling of waking up after you did something stupid the night before, or you got diagnosed with something really serious, and you’re like, ‘This isn’t real, is it?’ And fuck, it is,” she says. “But now in this dream you—I—can do something about it.”
