I Can't Do This Anymore
There's a scene in season three of Insecure where protagonist Issa Dee is making donor follow-up calls for her white savior nonprofit when she says, "I can't do this anymore." Since graduating college, she's field organized for an education program for kids of color where she's the only Black employee and now she's been relegated to desk duty after her white boss questions her judgement. Issa quits her job on the spot with no plan but a deep knowledge she's stuck and can't figure out what she really needs in life if she stays. It's one of the first moments on the show when she deliberately makes a change instead of self-sabotaging into one. I was rewatching the series in preparation for the final season this October when I saw this scene and thought, "Oh shit."
"I can't do this anymore" has rung through my head in this latter half of 2021. It's something I've said to myself about my job, my apartment, and my anxiety. Dropping out of grad school this summer was one of the few times I've quit a major endeavor just because I didn't like it. That opened up the floodgates for me to reevaluate anything that wasn't working. And it turned out a lot wasn't working.
First there was my job. I had been at my higher education general communications job for four years. I'd learned everything I could and effectively graduated from the role, but I was still there like a fifth-year student hanging on. In truth I'd only gone to grad school because I was too afraid to job hunt during a pandemic and thought doing a comped master's would be the forward momentum I desperately needed instead of the backwards step it actually was. Dropping out of school gave me the space to realize I needed to move on. Then return to campus made all the issues I'd been pushing down like a kickboard smack in my face. "I can't do this anymore," I told myself as I rewrote my LinkedIn profile.
This same season also had one major apartment repair a month. First it was a leaking sink when I was about to leave town that took two months to fix with a new faucet. Then a fridge that wouldn't keep cold. When the maintenance man came to replace the seal, he realized it was the wrong size and then decided he didn't want to do it anyway and had the landlord order me a new fridge entirely. You could just do that? You could decide something wasn't working and get a new one? "I'm bringing this energy into the rest of the year," I joked to friends. But I wasn't kidding. When a neighbor pointed out a sewage leak running down our driveway the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I saw a literal turd on the asphalt and thought to myself, "I can't do this anymore."
Throughout all of these stressors, I've also felt awful. I've had insomnia more nights at 4 a.m. than full nights of decent sleep. I've popped chewable Tums like Starbursts to deal with the acid reflux I get after bouts of anxiety. While I was feeling physically rundown, my mind was in overdrive. Whether it was a new variant, job rejection, or last-minute social request, I treated everything with the same level of threat. "I can't do this anymore," I told my therapist.
Realizing I was unhappy and irritable all the time and that it didn't have to be that was helpful, but I still needed to figure out what I could change. As Issa later says in season four when she's quit her job to start an arts organization that actually boosts the Black community, "I think I've been waiting around expecting other shit to make me happy, and I think that shit's a choice." I was choosing to stay at a job because it was comfortable in the same way an old shoe that has lost its arch support is. I was choosing to stay at an apartment whose quirks you put up with when you're 26 because I hated moving. I was choosing to let my anxiety rule my life because I couldn't imagine any other way. I was choosing a lot out of fear. That fear had taken up so much space that I wasn't even sure what I actually wanted. If Insecure could alert me to my career ennui, could it lead me to what would get me out of it?
Choosing happiness is not easy, though. "Insecure has captured the terrifying sense of possibility that characterizes life in your mid-20s to early-30s and the anchor that friends can provide amid the turmoil," Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic. If season four of Insecure is all about Issa choosing happiness, season five is all about Issa choosing herself. In the best episode of the final season, Issa imagines two scenarios if her organization partners with a hip water company or a local fashion designer. These aren't fantasy scenarios—for the most part, though Mayor Tyra Banks gives her a key to Inglewood in one—but actual choices Issa has and neither one is actually wrong. Issa is stuck in indecision. As someone who sometimes can't decide what book to read from the library and often returns them all without opening one, I could relate. "What if there's no wrong answer?" Issa's best friend, Molly, asks. "Things are never all or nothing. Either way you go, you end up great or not, or somewhere in the middle. I know it's never easy to make these kinds of choices, but you'll be so glad once you do. You just gotta go with your gut. Every decision you make, just own it. And if you're being honest with yourself, you kinda already know what you wanna do. So just do that shit!"
These past few weeks I texted friends to debate which company Issa would choose to work with or which man she'd end up with. It was fun to discuss, but also I was waiting for the show to give me some blueprint for how to live my life—never mind Issa is a straight Black woman organizer in LA and I'm a queer white woman writer in Atlanta. We aren't alike, except the pressure to pick perfectly is universal when you're 31. But like Molly said, I knew what choices were right for me all along: I needed a new job, apartment, and to get real about my anxiety. Some of these decisions were easier to execute than others. After four months of job hunting, I finally accepted a new role as a research writer/editor at Georgia Tech. I may not be leaving higher education—or even my office parking deck—but I'm on to something new and different. I plan to apartment hunt for when my lease is up in June. Reining in my anxiety is a work in progress but seems less impossible. And contrary to what I expected finally making a decision to make a change has made me feel more in control of my life than just waiting for the world to do it for me.
Yet what the final episode of the series showed wasn't Issa making just one choice but dozens. Who and what Issa picked wasn't even the focus of her life. Showing up for her friends and self were the most important things. As the actual Issa Rae said in a great interview with Vulture's E. Alex Jung: "I’m very in tune with what makes me happy. If I’m not happy, if I’m miserable, or even if I’m feeling doubtful, then it will cause me to take a step back and figure out what it is that I really want. So I am rarely unhappy. I don’t know that I have been unhappy in a very long time even when things aren’t going according to plan. And that’s kind of my barometer."
When I read this quote, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. I would never describe myself as a happy person, especially not lately. I was envious of Issa for how easily this comes to her, but really she's just in touch with her intuition, and if I have one main resolution for 2022, it's to trust myself more. It may have taken a TV show and its brilliant creator to teach me that ironically, but it's a process. Or as Issa Rae says: "I have had to be confident that things are gonna work out and confident about what I don’t know, who I’m not, and where I’ll never be, but optimistic that things will work out the way they’re supposed to and secure in the fact that I have these insecurities and these flaws, and I have so much more learning to do. I have nothing figured out yet, but I have just enough to be confident where I’m going. We put so much weight on these decisions of love interests. That was part of her journey, but it wasn’t her entire journey."
Crispy Cheese Pan Pizza
![pizza pizza](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e0f2151-32aa-443a-89d5-055ed58718d8_640x690.jpeg)
This King Arthur skillet pizza is a great recipe to make when you're sitting at home on this weird week between holidays because it takes more time than effort. The directions are a bit verbose but don't let that intimidate you.
Ingredients
Crust
2 cups (240g) Flour
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. instant yeast or active dry yeast
3/4 cup (170g) water, lukewarm
1Tbs. (13g) olive oil, + 1 1/2 Tbs. (18g) olive oil for the pan
Topping
6 ounces (170g) mozzarella cheese, grated (about 1 1/4 cups, loosely packed)
1/3 to 1/2 cup (74g to 113g) tomato sauce or pizza sauce, homemade or store-bought (I've become a fan of Rao's lately to save time and it's honestly better than 90% of the tomato sauce I've made from scratch)
Freshly grated hard cheese (e.g. Parmesan, Asiago, Romano) and fresh herbs (oregano, basil, thyme) for sprinkling on top after baking, optional
Mushrooms, olives, pepperoni, or any other preferring toppings
Directions
1. Place the flour, salt, yeast, water, and 1 tablespoon (13g) of the olive oil in the bowl of a stand mixer or other medium-large mixing bowl. Stir everything together to make a shaggy, sticky mass of dough with no dry patches of flour. This should take 30 to 45 seconds in a mixer using the beater paddle; or about 1 minute by hand, using a spoon or spatula.
2. Scrape down the sides of the bowl to gather the dough into a rough ball; cover the bowl. After 5 minutes, uncover the bowl and reach a bowl scraper or your wet hand down between the side of the bowl and the dough, as though you were going to lift the dough out. Instead of lifting, stretch the bottom of the dough up and over its top. Repeat three more times, turning the bowl 90° each time. This process of four stretches, which takes the place of kneading, is called a fold.
4. Re-cover the bowl, and after 5 minutes do another fold. Wait 5 minutes and repeat; then another 5 minutes, and do a fourth and final fold. Cover the bowl and let the dough rest, undisturbed, for 40 minutes. Then refrigerate it for a minimum of 12 hours, or up to 72 hours.
5. About 3 hours before you want to serve your pizza, prepare your pan. Pour 1 1/2 tablespoons (18g) olive oil into a well-seasoned cast iron skillet that’s 10” to 11” diameter across the top, and about 9” across the bottom. Heavy, dark cast iron will give you a superb crust; but if you don’t have it, use another oven-safe heavy-bottomed skillet of similar size, or a 10” round cake pan or 9” square pan. Tilt the pan to spread the oil across the bottom, and use your fingers or a paper towel to spread some oil up the edges, as well.
6. Transfer the dough to the pan and turn it once to coat both sides with the oil. After coating the dough in oil, press the dough to the edges of the pan, dimpling it using the tips of your fingers in the process. The dough may start to resist and shrink back; that’s OK, just cover it and let it rest for about 15 minutes, then repeat the dimpling/pressing. At this point the dough should reach the edges of the pan; if it doesn’t, give it one more 15-minute rest before dimpling/pressing a third and final time.
7. Cover the crust and let it rise for 2 hours at room temperature. The fully risen dough will look soft and pillowy and will jiggle when you gently shake the pan.
8. About 30 minutes before baking, place one rack at the bottom of the oven and one toward the top (about 4" to 5" from the top heating element). Preheat the oven to 450°F.
9. When you’re ready to bake the pizza, sprinkle about three-quarters of the mozzarella (a scant 1 cup) evenly over the crust. Cover the entire crust, no bare dough showing; this will yield caramelized edges. Dollop small spoonfuls of the sauce over the cheese; laying the cheese down first like this will prevent the sauce from seeping into the crust and making it soggy. Sprinkle on the remaining mozzarella.
10. Bake the pizza on the bottom rack of the oven for 18 to 20 minutes, until the cheese is bubbling and the bottom and edges of the crust are a rich golden brown (use a spatula to check the bottom).
Tess Recommends:
-Insecure has one of the best R&B and hip-hop soundtracks that's introduced me to everyone from Jazmine Sullivan to Sampha.