 I thank so much for coming to my talk. It's called There Is No Spoon, Understanding Spoon Theory and Preventing Burnout. A couple of things about me. My name is Jameson, but you can call me Jamie. I'm here, as he said, from Buffalo, New York, which is the home of bad sports. I'm really happy to be here in Phoenix for the first time. I work for AgriList. We're based in Brooklyn, New York, and we do farm management and data software for indoor farms and greenhouses, which is really cool. And you can find me on Twitter at Jamie Bash. My slides are pinned there. One other thing I wanted to introduce about myself right at the beginning. This is something I'm gonna go into further in the rest of the talk, but I like to kind of get it out of the way. I am transgender, specifically. I identify as genderqueer or non-binary. Either of those terms is fine. If you don't know what that means, it basically means three things. Number one, I don't identify as either a man or a woman. Number two, I use the neutral pronouns they. And number three, I have really great hair. I like to bring this up at the beginning, even though I'm gonna talk more about it when I go into diversity, because I know people like live tweet and stuff like this, and if you want a live tweet, that's super cool, but just keep in mind my pronouns when you do it. But let's talk about spoon theory. That's what we're here to talk about. So what is spoon theory? It's basically a social metaphor that refers to how much energy we have in a day to do things. And this is both physical and like mental emotional energy. And the spoon itself is the unit of measurement that represents that energy. So what do you notice about these spoons? There's six, and six is kind of an arbitrary number, but the key here is that it's finite. That's how many spoons you have, however many, and that's the limit, that's how many you have. Spoon theory was originally coined in an essay that was published in 2003 by a woman named Christine Mizorandino, who suffers from lupus, and she kind of came up with this metaphor to describe her life as someone with a chronic physical illness. She had a good friend who, you know, she confided in about what she was going through and who accompanied her to doctor's appointments and things like this. And so she kind of thought, oh, well, my friend has an idea of what it's like for me living with this disease, but the problem is, like, if you don't have, if you haven't experienced it for yourself, it's actually really hard to know what it's like. And so this is a quote from her original essay. I wanted something for her to actually hold for me to then take away, since most people who get sick feel a loss of a life they once knew. If I was in control of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it feels like to have someone or something else, in this case lupus being in control. So spoon theory is kind of referring a lot to like invisible illnesses. And one way to think about that is, like, if you have a disability, there might be some things that you just can't do, you know, you just have those limits. Like, for an example, if you were in a wheelchair and you can't really walk at all, you know, you wouldn't be able to take a staircase. Like, you'd need to have accessibility accommodations in order to do that. But, you know, nobody in their right mind would go up to someone in a wheelchair and be like, well, why aren't you just taking the stairs? If someone did that, like, everyone around would be like, wow, what a huge jerk. But, like, that's a really obvious case and it's not always so clear-cut and obvious. Like, what if there was someone who had a prosthetic leg and you'd seen them take the stairs before, but then on another day they couldn't do it? You like, you might not even know that they have a prosthetic leg. And then it's gonna be way more tempting for you to be like, well, you did it before, like, why can't you do it now? Even though you don't actually know how much energy it's taking them, how much pain they might be in, like, how many spoons they have to use to go up the stairs, you can't know how many spoons someone else has just by looking at them. And what happens when you run out? I said they were finite and, I mean, the key to that is you have a certain amount and if you spend them, like, you could hit zero. And once they're gone, they're gone. And your spoons cry, like in crying breakfast friends. You can borrow extra spoons from yourself sometimes if you run out, but there are consequences to doing that. I like to use video games to describe this because a lot of us like video games and energy mechanics are pretty common in video games since a very similar metric to spoons. So this is from one of my favorite games, Stardew Valley, which is a farming simulator because all I think about is farming. But as you can see in the bottom corner, you have this energy bar. So when you wake up in the morning, it's green. You have your full energy and you go tend to your crops and then you do other things and it's less since it's in the yellow and the day goes on and it's in the orange. And then maybe at the end of the day, you're going out to have a drink and your energy's really low. It's in the red. So the way that this would work in Stardew Valley, this mechanic is if you went to bed right now while your energy was at this level red, you would wake up the next day and you'd have the big green bar, like in the first slide. Or if you kept going, it will let you go below the bottom of that energy meter. But if you do that, then when you wake up the next morning, you're not gonna be at full energy. You're gonna already have your bar partially depleted. And you got a lot of do. You got a lot of farming to do. You got work to do. So it's really hard when you're not starting out with your full amount. Who does spoon theory affect? I think everyone can benefit from an understanding of spoon theory. Christine Miser and Dino talks about the idea that like healthy people have unlimited number of spoons. And I don't think that's true because spoons are energy and nobody has an unlimited amount of energy. But the key here is that like an average, healthy person probably has enough that they can get to the average day without having to ration it or really think about it. But I also don't think it's just the chronically ill and like physically disabled communities that can benefit from this metaphor. The mental illness community has already started to use this as like a communication technique. And I also think that there are like marginalized groups of people that it's a good way to express the discrimination that comes along with being part of those communities too. It gives us a shared language. This is my favorite thing about spoon theory. You know, we're gonna talk about some pretty heavy stuff. And sometimes that's stuff that's like hard to talk about. Like it's hard to go up to someone you don't know that well or a boss and say like I'm having trouble with my health. But if everyone knows spoon theory and is familiar with that language, it's much easier to say, oh, I can't really do that. I don't have enough spoons today. And it makes hard conversations easier. It gives us a greater empathy for others. Even if you're not struggling with this, maybe you can have a better understanding of how other people might be struggling. And it gives us a better understanding of our own limits which is really important too. I wanna talk about like the three communities that I mentioned and some of the ways that spoons are expended just as a caveat. It's really different for everybody. There's lots of different disabilities, diseases that people have, lots of different marginalized communities that have different problems. So this is kind of generic. For people with physical illnesses and disabilities, constant pain is really exhausting. I feel like this is an obvious one but it's really important to say. Being in pain makes literally everything you do harder. Like there's so many things we do every day that are part of our routine. We don't even think about them. But if you have a condition that gives you chronic pain, like you can't not think about those things. Everything is harder. Personally, I've struggled with intermittent chronic back pain and like the fact that sometimes I have it and sometimes I doesn't really highlights this idea that like I'm taking for granted the fact that when I'm not having pain, I can tie my shoes and it's no big deal. But then it can feel insurmountable at another time. The emotional drain of worry. I mean, when you're sick, that's like a really heavy burden on your shoulders to think about. Reduce mobility. Decrease accessibility to places. This is another thing that just makes it hard to do daily activities, like go places. And if you need special treatment, special accommodations, you know, that can garner unwanted attention, which is also really stressful. And frequent healthcare. I mean, healthcare is great because it helps us manage things we've got going on in our lives with our health but it can also make you weak. Like think about someone who's going through chemo. They need that to manage their illness but it's taking up a lot of their spoons right there. Mental illnesses are similar in many ways to the last slide because like mentally ill people are also chronically ill but society treats it a lot different. So I think there's different things to talk about. Constant emotional distress is also exhausting. I feel like this should be obvious because everyone's had some emotional distress and it's very awful. And being told to get over it is kind of what I was getting at when I say it's not treated the same. There's kind of this weird perception that people with mental illnesses should pull themselves out of it and get over it and it's not treated as a disease in the same way. Being told to get over it is a huge burden because people are taking the burden and putting it back on you expecting you to minimize your own struggling. And it also can cause people to second guess their right to even be sick. Like if people tell you you're faking for long enough, you might start to feel like you are faking or like it's some sort of failure on your part rather than you have a disease. And it can be socially ostracizing, partially for those reasons, partially because some of the symptoms can cut you off from your support network or make you be perceived as selfish or flaky. And also because some things are socially taboo in and of themselves, like eating disorders. And there can be a physical aspect too. Panic attacks are really hard to describe but I'll kind of try. They're one of the most physical things that has ever happened to me. I feel flushed, feverish, heavy breathing, high heart rate, sometimes I'll hyperventilate, I'll thoroughly nauseous, sometimes I'll throw up. It's very, very physical and it looks scary from the outside. Like it looks enough like I'm having a stroke or a seizure that I have to warn people in my life. It's like, no, it's okay. You don't have to call an ambulance. But the point is it's really serious and it can be really scary. And the last thing, marginalized groups. Again, less common to apply spoon theory too. But I think it really works in this relevant. It turns out being discriminated against sucks. And if you're experiencing that every day, racism, homophobia, transphobia or whatever, you're starting your day from a place of fatigue. I think emotionally dealing with the political climate has been hard for a lot of people lately but for marginalized people it's even worse. It's really exhausting to watch the news every day and see bad news about your rights and people you know getting murdered, committing suicide. It's so tiring and such a burden. And then people expect you to talk about it because it's like you're a minority and you should talk about minority issues even if it's like not something you wanna talk about or even think about. As a non-binary person, I have to justify my own existence a lot. I have to explain to people what non-binary means all the time. And I don't mind doing it in theory. Like I, not everyone knows and I think everyone should know and the easiest way is for me to tell them. But sometimes there's like a subtext where if I don't do a good enough job explaining it then they're not gonna accept the explanation and then they're like not gonna accept me. So it ends up feeling like I'm begging for people's approval by educating them. And microaggressions are a thing that I've literally done an entire talk about so I'll try not to be too long-winded. But basically microaggression is a scary word but it's kind of less blatant examples of discrimination that are often coming from well-meaning people that don't wanna be jerks or don't realize it. Something that if it happened to you once it would be annoying and you would get over it but since it happens so many times it becomes like more and more hurtful like a mosquito bite. A few examples of microaggressions. Every marginalized group of people deals with different ones. You don't sound black. I think we all know why that's like not a cool thing to say to anybody, hopefully. You don't look transgender. Okay. How did you expect me to look? For people with different ethnic backgrounds. Oh well where are you from anyway? Chicago. Where are you really from? Chicago. This one is for like lesbian couples who's the guy in your relationship? Nobody. We're lesbians. That's kind of what that means. And for women in tech and attending tech events. Oh are you the secretary? No, why would you assume I was non-technical? I wonder why. So when I said it was like a mosquito bite like if someone had one mosquito bite and they complained about it you might be like well come on it's just one mosquito bite. But not everyone gets bit by mosquitoes at the same rate. And if you're covered in those bites from head to toe all the time like yeah you're in your right to complain about that because that sounds awful. I wanna do a short exercise about like going through an average morning from the perspective of a few different people and see where spoons might get spent. Again just an example but I think there's something to be said for it. So here's our control group morning. The average morning for like a healthy, advanced person, getting up, getting ready, commuting to work, getting to work. Nothing special, nothing crazy or overly difficult. You might lose a spoon or two on this ordeal potentially like maybe it's really crowded on the train or you get to work and the elevator's broken and you have to take the stairs, you're kind of out of shape so it's a huge pain. Like overall you've pretty much got under control. Now let's imagine that you have an illness that gives you chronic pain. First of all you're gonna start off with less spoons in the beginning because you didn't sleep well, you know you were in pain overnight again. So you get out of bed and you get ready. It hurts a lot to sit up, you're getting dressed, it's taking a lot longer because you're in pain. Maybe you take a bunch of medications, potentially some of them have side effects that even though you're used to them it still sucks that you're nauseous in the morning. You're spending a spoon on that for sure at least. Maybe you're commuting to work on that crowded subway from the previous example but you're getting jostled and it's really painful every time but nobody thinks to give up a seat for you because you're not obviously disabled. You're carrying your bag and your back hurts and it's really rough. And now you get to work and the elevator's out for you too but instead of a mild inconvenience this is a huge problem. Climbing stairs is really hard for you but what else are you gonna do to get to work if there's no accessibility? So you climb the stairs, it takes you 20 minutes, you have to pause for a rest halfway through, you're late for work, you're at your pain threshold and you've spent a couple of spoons on that ordeal. You get in, you're late so you don't have time for coffee and you have extra work piled up partially because of that and partially because you had doctor's appointments that you had to take half days for earlier in the week which you have almost every week. So that's a lot less spoons. We're gonna do it again, it's like Groundhog Day. You just have to keep living out the same day over and over. Now imagine if you had anxiety and panic disorder. This is what I'm talking about because it's kind of what I've experienced and what I know. Oops, you had a panic attack last night and you went way over your capacity and borrowed spoons from yourself so you're also starting with less. When you wake up, you know all these bad feelings from having a panic attack or kind of coming back to you like a bad hangover even though you haven't been drinking. Also keep in mind that clinical depression is linked to like a whole long list of other mental illnesses and disorders so it's really common for people to have to deal with that on top of whatever else specifically plagues them. Getting out of bed and getting ready. When I'm having a bad anxiety day, it can be really hard to get out of bed and it's not just like I don't feel like it. Like I have sometimes really intense inexplicable fears of like leaving my house or even leaving my room but unfortunately that's not really something that you can call off work for so you'll have to push through it in this scenario. I can't drive when my anxiety is bad either so a crowded subway sounds kind of terrifying but it's the lesser of the two evils because I can't crash my car into anybody. So you're on the subway, it's crowded, your heart is racing every time someone bumps into you, you feel like you're starting to panic. On really bad days, you might even feel like a paranoia that people around you are like following or tracking you somehow which is really terrifying even if it's not true. By the time you get to work, you've already worked yourself up into a state and you're feeling kind of nauseous. Anxiety has a compounding effect. Once you're feeling anxious, everything around you is gonna make it worse, even things that normally would be okay. Now you're freaked out, you're overanalyzing the tone of the receptionist, when she says good morning to you, you're overanalyzing wordings and your emails. Having a panic attack yesterday actually makes you more susceptible to having another one today because of this stupid thing called secondary anxiety which I call it stupid because I know it's stupid even when I'm experiencing it that's like, oh, I'm feeling anxious, I hope I don't have a panic attack. Oh my God, what if I have a panic attack? And then I get so nervous about it that I work myself up into it just because I didn't want it to happen. It's something that I know is stupid even in the moment but I just can't make it stop. So you're losing at least a spoon and freaking out about nothing and if you actually work yourself all the way up to a panic attack, it's pretty much game over. I'm not really useful for anything else for the rest of the day. One more time, this is the last Groundhog Day, I promise. Now you're a member of a marginalized group. Again, I'm gonna go with what I know and we're gonna talk about what it might feel like to be transgender. You get up and get ready. Maybe you wake up in a pretty good mood but then when you're brushing your teeth, you know, you look in the mirror and don't super recognize the person that's looking back at you. Gender dysphoria is another thing that's kind of hard to describe. But kind of imagine if like tomorrow morning you woke up in the body of like not the gender that you've associated yourself with your whole life. You know, every time you see your reflection or hear yourself speak, it's gonna feel wrong and it's gonna be impossible not to notice and think about it. Getting dressed can also be a burden. I wear a binder, which is hard to get on and it's uncomfortable to wear during the day. So that's at least the spoon getting ready. You take the subway and you get cat called, somebody calls you a freak and you don't feel good about it. Four or five strangers passively misgender you that they just don't know any better. They're not trying to be jerks but it may have you feeling down. Then you're reading the news. They passed a bill that limits the rights of trans kids in schools and another trans woman of color was murdered in your city over the weekend. So now that cat call that you felt crappy about earlier is making you feel like really legitimately nervous. You get to work, you climb the stairs, the receptionist misgenders you again even though you've told her a million times. So you correct her again and she makes a comment about how being trans is the only thing you ever talk about. But it's really hard not to think about it when it's jarring every time you hear someone make a mistake. Like think about the metaphor from earlier. If you suddenly woke up and everyone was using the opposite pronoun for you, I think you would notice it every time. Now you get to work but you feel like you have to work harder and talk louder in order to get noticed for anything you're doing which means you have to spend more spoons to get the same amount of work done. Incidentally, all women in the tech industry have to deal with this one. As you can see, privilege is a big factor. Nobody has unlimited energy. Nobody is the terminator. There's gonna be times in everyone's lives when there's things going on that you have to spend more spoons on. Maybe your mom is in the hospital and you're taking care of her. It's taking a lot of your energy and you're really worried. Maybe you're in the hospital because you got sick. Maybe you have a newborn and you haven't slept through the night in three or four months. Like these are definitely things that are gonna require you to spend more spoons. But the difference between these kind of things and the kind of things from the previous example are that A, most of these kind of things are temporary. And B, someone in those other three categories is just as likely to have to deal with one of these things on top of all those other things and then it's just compounding. So the lesson here is basically saying just because you have privilege, I'm not saying that your life can't ever be hard. Everybody's lives are hard sometimes. But it's not hard because you have privilege. It's hard even though you have privilege. Well, how does this affect me? I'm not accusing you of being bird's rights activist, although a lot of people are like that. But it depends on who you are. If you're in one of the groups I just described, I'm sure you're already managing your spoons every day, even if you don't think about it like this. But I do think this metaphor is useful to help you think about it. I mean, it's tiring to manage your spoons, but it's also tiring to watch other people not have to manage their spoons and it makes you feel like there's something wrong with you that you have to do it. So thinking consciously about it is a good way to start practicing self-care, which is super important. And actually, it's more than just important. It's necessary to do in our lives. I used to feel like taking care of myself was a really selfish thing to do. I think we're trained to feel like we have to sacrifice our own well-being to please other people. And especially in our industry and especially in the startup culture, I feel like a lot of places have a social status involved with being a martyr. But it turns out we can't give anything in our lives 100% unless we make sure that we're taking care of first. And there are two major things that help me change the way I think about it. I saw a talk about burnout last year by my friend, Mary Thangval, and she talked about this metaphor of putting on your own oxygen mask before you put on others. And it really changed my life to think about it that way. You're not just helping yourself first because you care about yourself more. You're helping yourself first because then you'll be equipped to help other people. And also this quote by Audre Lorde. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It's self-preservation, and that's an act of political warfare. The way I see it as a trans person, like just existing, is kind of an act of political resistance. So it's kind of my responsibility to protect myself so that I can keep standing up for my community. The greater I am and the more I succeed, the more powerful my resistance is because I'm doing it in the face of people who want me to fail. I think a lot of people picture self-care like this, and it can look like this, but on other days it can look like this too. I did an art project recently where I kind of intentionally practiced self-care every day for a month and analyzed how it was making me feel. And the thing that really struck me is how different it can look on different days. Like on days when I can and I have enough spoons, self-care can really mean accountability, holding myself accountable for doing the things I have to do and the relief I feel when I get things done. But on other days, I can't do that. I don't have the spoons. And then self-care can look like giving myself permission to rest and forgiving myself when not everything I want to do list gets done. So the art of self-care is kind of being able to figure out which you need at the moment at any given time and being kind to yourself. Well, maybe if you're not one of the people in the groups I was talking about, but you're an employer or a manager, I will guarantee you that some of the people under you are in those groups. And I hope that the exercise I did going through the morning kind of made it obvious why this is a huge problem. Like, did you see how many spoons some of your employees might have to spend before they even get started working at the beginning of the day when you want them to feel refreshed and ready to do stuff? So it's affecting productivity. Everyone needs energy to do their best work, of course. But it's not just work. Whole lives are gonna suffer around that. If we all have stressful jobs, jobs that are stressful at least sometimes, and if you have to use all your energy to stay afloat at a busy job, like what's happening to your work-life balance? Like it's destroyed. So it's about empathy too. Like hopefully you care about your employees and you want them to lead fulfilling lives outside of their jobs. So this is basically just a recipe for burnout. Now let's talk about Agile. This is the chart you need to understand to understand the next section of my talk. Just kidding. You don't need to know about Agile, but a lot of us use at least a little bit of Agile in our days. And I think that spoon theory and Agile methodology are kind of similar and kind of related. I think a lot about velocity at work. That's an intangible unit of measurement. Sound familiar? And if you wanna prioritize your team dynamic, like Agile pushes, you can't be a cohesive team unless everyone understands each other. And that includes knowing each other's limits. How can you predict velocity if you don't have an understanding of what types of things are holding some of your employees back or slowing them down? Obviously if you can remove those kind of barriers, velocity's gonna increase. And Agile methodology says that your employees are your number one resource. I believe that. And if you also believe that, you should be really focused on treating them well and making sure that they're okay. All right, so maybe I've convinced you. You're like, Jamie, I'm in. But how am I supposed to fix it? Like maybe I have employees that have had illnesses their entire lives or like they're experiencing systematic racism in their lives. Like how am I, I can't fix that for them. Obviously nobody expects you to do that. But when you talk about student theory, you're really talking about levels of burden. And there are definitely things you can do as an employer to lessen people's burdens. You have to recognize that their health is more important than their work. This is the martyr thing again. The reason that that's such a pervasive idea is because a lot of companies encourage it. But it's not healthy to expect your employees to think of work as the most important thing in their lives. Provide adequate healthcare for them. Not only is being sick tiring, but it's also really expensive and really stressful. So good healthcare is gonna help people manage their disease, but it's also gonna give them peace of mind, which is gonna help conserve energy also. Treatmental illness is an illness. Here's a pro tip. If you see someone freaking out about something that you think is nothing, they wish that they weren't freaking out more than you wish that they weren't freaking out because it's more of a burden on them than it is on you. And make accessibility a priority. Nobody wants to be an afterthought. Making your employees comfortable is gonna involve considering what needs they might have before they have to come and ask you for special considerations. If you're planning your office, planning events, and thinking about accessibility, it's gonna make everybody more comfortable and it's not gonna make people feel like they were called out because they had to come ask you to change something. Accessibility here is like a huge umbrella that is also a whole nother talk. But some of the things I'm thinking about are access to your building and all its facilities, appropriate bathrooms, that's a big thing in the trans community, but also for people with mobility issues. And huge kudos for Ralph's car for having gender-neutral bathrooms, I almost cried. Transportation considerations and events that your employees can enjoy. Not everyone has fun doing physical activities. Some people have special diets, some people can't drink alcohol, some people have extreme social anxiety and social events that are mandatory are gonna be a real stressor for them. So just think about it. This is basically all about keeping people's needs in mind when you do stuff. You might not wanna give the impression of special treatment for certain employees, but some people just need different considerations to perform at the same level. Fair isn't always equal. I really love this graphic. Like if someone who has a chronic illness is late to work a lot or misses more work than someone else and you're more lenient with them, you're not giving them special treatment. You're giving them a consideration they need to be able to do their job. And you also gotta keep it in mind when you're looking at their work. If someone isn't as productive as someone else, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not as smart or not as hardworking. It could be because they have barriers caused by their situation. There's an example that I wanna use because it's really real and really relevant, but I do wanna preface it a little bit because there's kind of this current trend that I've been seeing on Medium where men will write articles that's like, I pretended to be a woman and now I believe in sexism, but I didn't before. And it's annoying to a lot of people because why can't we listen to people without having to experience everything for ourselves before we believe it? But I'm still gonna use this example because it's really good. We did an experiment. For two weeks, we switched names. I signed all client emails as Nicole and she signed as me. Folks, it fucking sucked. I was in hell. Everything I asked or suggested was questioned. Clients I could do in my sleep were condescending. One of them asked if I was single. Nicole had the most productive week of her career. I realized the reason she took longer is because she had to convince clients to respect her. The point here is that you might not even realize what kind of advantages you have over other people. And that's what empathy is. He learned empathy by doing this experiment, but if we could think more about what other people might be going through, maybe we could learn empathy before we get to this point. Company culture is a phrase that kind of makes me cringe sometimes because it's really often used as an excuse to justify some of the crappy things I've been talking about, like non-tolerance and making people work too hard. But you can promote a company culture that is accepting and is empathetic. So how do you do that? Actions speak louder than words. It's not enough to just say that you want a good culture. You have to actually do stuff to back it up. I want to tell a short story about where I work at AgriList. And on my first day, I was really nervous. I was already out as trans when I joined AgriList. And everyone knew and was very accepting. So I wasn't too worried, but you still get worried. And I was filling out paperwork on my first day. And on our payroll form, there was like a gender question that had two options. And I was like, oh, I don't know what to do. So I emailed my boss, like the CEO of our company on my first day. And I was like, oh my God, this is like suicide. But I was like, I don't know what box to click. What do I do? And she wrote me back. And first she was like, you know, oh, I'm really sorry. I think it's really crappy that they only have two. Like it's 2016, they should have more. And I felt pretty good. I was like, okay, she agrees with me. She knows where I'm coming from. But then she said, in fact, I'm gonna email Trinet right now and tell them that I don't think it's right that they only have two and that they should add more. And I was like, whoa. Like she really wanted to put her money where her mouth is with that. And it made me feel like I was gonna be really safe working for her. Don't demand that minorities do all the diversity work. I think this comes from a, it's not coming from a crappy place. Like I think if you want to do better, it seems like obvious to go ask marginalized people, like hey, can you educate me on this? How can I do better? But the problem is that a lot of people just want to go about their day without doing a bunch more free work when they're already having trouble managing their spoons. So it's not always like a cool thing to do to dump that on them. I'm kind of the exception. I really like, it talks about it. I like to talk about it. I like when people send me questions and I can help them. But I'm kind of an exception and I don't want people to think that because it was okay for me. It's okay to do that to strangers. So I always make this caveat. But do listen to your underrepresented employees and if they tell you stories, you have to believe them. There's a culture of people not wanting to come forward to tell about how they've been harassed or discriminated against because they feel like it's not gonna be taken seriously. The best way to combat that is to just always take everyone seriously. There's kind of a joke in tech that all women in tech know each other and it's a little bit true in the sense that it means that word travel is fast. Like if you're a jerk, people are gonna know. But the converse is also true. If you're really not a jerk, people are also gonna know. And just don't tolerate crappy behavior. This is action speak louder than words again in a different form. If you say you're not gonna tolerate something and then you do, you're just showing that you're untrustworthy, that you care more about appearing to be a good ally than actually being a good ally. Inaction also speaks louder than words. So think about if you're in action is saying what you wanna say. This is one of my favorite quotes. If you're not willing to remove a toxic contributor from your project, you're accepting toxic behavior as a culture and norm. So you have to think about how you wanna act, how you wanna be perceived and how those things link together. I have some recommended reading. This is the original Spoon Theory essay at the top. We have an article about invisible illnesses and article about diversity in tech. The next one is a video of the burnout talk that I mentioned by Mary Thangvong. And the last one's a really great video from the Cerebral Palsy Foundation. It's called The Quest for the Rainbow Bagel and it's about navigating New York City as a physically disabled person. Thank you so much. I hope your spoons aren't crying. Hopefully they're a beautiful flower. You can follow me on Twitter or see my website. Thank you. Thank you.