A Drunk Horse Gave Me the Best Professional Advice I Ever Received

This Is Fine. is Broadly's weekly newsletter about the previously private and highly personal tactics people use to make the world less harrowing. In yesterday's newsletter, mental health advocate and founder of Sad Girls Club Elyse Fox wrote about how BoJack Horseman helped her deal with corporate stress. Sign up here to receive a newsletter with a new strategy each Sunday evening.

I trekked out the door in a fancy, yet casual dress and my laptop, having checked Google Maps to ensure I gave myself enough time to arrive 15 minutes early (but, foolishly, not enough to eat breakfast). As the 6 train heaved into my stop, my emotions cycled between excitement and holy shit as I realized that I had to perform—and perform well. My anxiety flares up in group settings—I strive to please everybody at once.

I’d already met every staff member (I worked in a part-time role when the company first launched), but now I was the new girl in the big office, and I was perplexed as to what that was supposed to mean about me. During onboarding, every question that popped into my head seemed really dumb and minuscule: Do I need permission to get lunch? What should my email signature be? Most pressing: Can my team sense my anxiety?! I rehearsed every sentence in my head before saying it out loud to my superiors—looking back, I’m sure I sounded like Sophia the robot.

None of this was close to how I acted outside of work, but I didn't want to unveil my full-on Brooklyn sarcastic-ass personality: As one of three women of color in the office, I feared I would come off as being “too Black,” and I was definitely the runt of the litter as far as academic accomplishments in comparison to my colleagues went, so I kept my opinions to myself and my eyes glued to my laptop during group conversations.

My first week flew by. I managed to complete my tasks—and, eventually, figure out the lunch break schedule—but I felt as uneasy the following Monday as I did my first day. By the end of my second week, though, I’d found solace in the form of a depressed, alcoholic cartoon horse. My seat was assigned in the perfect section of the open floor plan to watch a minimized window of BoJack Horseman, an animated series about a humanoid horse navigating society as a former celebrity, at my desk.

BoJack struggles with adapting to his new life, maintaining relationships, and honestly expressing his emotions while simultaneously seeking praise. I recognized small moments in BoJack in my anxiety-filled workplace encounters (while also questioning why I had so much in common with a narcissistic, pill-poppin’ horse…but that’s a conversation for another day).

I related especially to Diane Nguyen, a spotlight-loathing transplant from Boston who moved to “Hollywoo,” the show’s setting, with hopes of becoming a world-changing writer. Instead, she becomes BoJack Horseman’s social media coordinator, even though she has no idea how meaningful “impressions” or retweets are and pocket-tweets from BoJack’s account regularly. I admired that she owned her personality anyway—and that she never let her anxiety (or lack of aptitude) get the best of her.

Bit by bit, I watched an episode or two throughout my first couple weeks, and found myself a bit calmer knowing that I had conjured a productive balance of BoJack and work throughout my day. As I worked and watched, I was introduced to a character who resonated even more than Diane: Vincent Adultman, a charismatic alleged businessman who is actually three children stacked on top of one another in a trench coat, imitating an adult. He’s vague about his job: When asked about work, he replies, “I went to the stock market today; I did a business.” He seemed to perfectly understand what it means to be an adult: We’re all just pretending—some people’s acts are just more refined than others’.

I channeled Vincent as I created programming for Insta Stories and led meetings with the exec team. It was all new to me, so I took notes from his confidence even through uncertainty. In one instance, I volunteered to strike a media deal with YouTube—I had no idea how to get it done, but, through great faith and cold emailing, I did it.

Thankfully, BoJack’s crew weren’t to be my only friends at work. Soon after I started, my work wife joined our tiny team. She was funny, clumsy, and loud—she read odious tweets, unprompted, at a volume that rang throughout the open floor plan. When she dropped something or spoke out of turn during meetings, she jokingly asked, “Can you tell that this is my first corporate job?!” I instantly adored her self-assuredness, and having her as my partner in crime made each day thrilling instead of daunting. Together, we tackled the challenges of building corporate decks, budgeting for our department, and not driving our manager up the wall. She made me feel less nervous about being a human with a discernible personality, just like Diane and Vincent had (as cartoon animals, but whatever).

I began to open up. Whenever the mood struck me, I provided my coworkers with my two cents on how much of a “postmodern design hellscape” The Cheesecake Factory is or whatever the hell was going on with Kanye that day. I felt comfortable enough to share my progress with my anxiety as I went along, too. Day by day, my shoulders untightened further. I even brought palo santo for our shared desk to make it feel more like home—kind of like BoJack when he began listening to guided motivational audiobooks and developed a “BNA” (brand-new attitude) on life.

Although BoJack’s positive outlook faded with time, mine was more lasting. As time went on and my workload increased my BoJack Horseman consumption dwindled to a stop—I didn’t need it the same way anymore. An office quickly becomes a mundane hole when you don’t experience the personalities of the people around you—and that included my own. To share a quote from BoJack that helped me get my head together: “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier, but you gotta do it every day—that’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”