Kiki Snyder, Assigned Karen at Birth

Transcript:

 

Will Bachman  00:03 Hello, and welcome to the 92 report, conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m here today with Kiki Snyder, who many of you will remember as Karen Snyder from college. Kiki, welcome to the show.

 

Kiki Snyder  00:21 Thanks, Will.

 

Will Bachman  00:23 So Kiki, tell us about your journey since graduation from Harvard.

Kiki Snyder  00:29 Well, I will start by addressing the name issue, as probably a lot of our classmates are familiar with the whole Karen meme. “Don’t be a Karen.” I had a career as an early founder of social media programs, so I was aware of that meme before most people were, and it started out, it was kind of funny. I would talk to customer support people and say my name, and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Karen, but don’t worry, I’m nice.” But then it started to get a little out of control, and I started to notice that it became a synonym for anyone doing anything that people thought was horrible, it started to really get me down, and so I was joking around with some friends, and I said, just, just call me Kiki. I wrote all about it. I’ve written essays about my life, about my transformation, and it’s all there.

 

Will Bachman  01:38 You have a website, assignedkarenatbirth.com.

Kiki Snyder  01:42 I do.

Will Bachman  01:43 Alright,

Kiki Snyder  01:44 Yes, I do. This January marked 35 years since my breakdown at Harvard. I went from being in the middle of exams, it was 1991, Desert Storm war had just started, and the middle of Samuel Huntington’s “Democracy” exam, and I decided that if I looked at the exam, all the knowledge would fly out of my head. I had had a really frantic, difficult week leading up to that, and within a week, I was in restraints at McLean Hospital.

Will Bachman  02:22 Wow,

Kiki Snyder  02:22 Looking back, it turned out that there was a medication issue. I won’t say the name of the medication right now, but it later was pulled. Actually, later in ’91 that medication was banned in Great Britain for having problems with memory and depression, so I was diagnosed as severely bipolar after that episode, and I spent the next 32 years on multiple debilitating, very toxic psychiatric medications, and it wasn’t until 2022, so 32 years after the diagnosis. Well, that’s when I started tapering off one of the medications that was really toxic to my liver, and since then I’ve gotten off of four major psychiatric medications. I’m still tapering off of… I’ve lowered the dose of the antidepressant, but I’m still on that. I tried tapering off of it, and it doesn’t come in the right formulas for me, and I’m very sensitive to it. So I’m still kind of stuck on that, but yeah, that was the origin of the transformation from Karen to Kiki.

Will Bachman  03:50 And tell us more about the transformation. How did you choose Kiki? And what’s been different in your life since you picked that name?

 

Kiki Snyder  04:00 Everything. I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint one factor that led to the complete transformation. It might be the platinum blonde hair. It might be being Kiki.

 

Will Bachman  04:11 Wait, did you change your hair at the same time?

 

Kiki Snyder  04:14 I did. I was a brunette.

 

Will Bachman  04:16 All right,

 

Kiki Snyder  04:16 I was always a brunette.

 

Will Bachman  04:18 Okay, so this was not just the name change, the name change changed the hair. Anything else change?

 

Kiki Snyder  04:25 The hair, complete upheaval and uprooting from the zip code where I spent 50 years. After my mother passed away, I had a realization that I was incredibly sad being half a mile away from her house, and I decided to move. I was in the Northern Virginia, DC area, and I had met a massage therapist in 2021 who commented on how many medications I was on, and thought that that was a terrible thing, and I thought to myself, “yeah, you know, no shit, I’m sick, I need all these medications.”

And she specializes in Somatic Experiencing. If you think about psychosomatic, we all learned in psychology class that your brain can tell your body that it’s sick, so the relationship between our brain and our body is so tight that it actually works in reverse: our brains are lying to us. I learned that my brain was lying to me, and my body knew the truth, and so I learned to tune in to what my body was trying to tell me. She completely changed my life, among other things. But that was one of the things that changed my life.

 

Will Bachman  05:54 What did she tell you?

 

Kiki Snyder  05:57 Well, I walked into her office, and I said my back hurt, and she wanted me to sit down and discuss it, and talk about the shape of it, and this and that, and it was all some sort of woo woo bs, and I just looked at her, and I was thinking, “great, this is a total waste of money.” And she said, “how are you feeling?” and I said “I’m feeling anxious,” and she said, “well, why are you anxious?” And I said, “I am anxious that we will not have time for the massage, because I’m thinking I’m paying you to rub my back and fix it for me, right?” And she said, “okay, no problem.”

No ego, right? No ego involved. And I spent two years getting massages, and as she would work on me, she would point out… and I was talking. I’m a talker, and my mother was dying, and it was a tough time. And I would talk, and Kristine would notice parts of my body tensing up.

 

Will Bachman  06:55 How did she know?

 

Kiki Snyder  06:55 Like, I would say something stressful, and my right shoulder would hike up, and she would go, “That’s where you’re storing your stress,” and I’m like, “Oh, that’s why I get all these headaches, tension headaches, right here.”

 

And then one time I cracked a joke…she was working on my left calf, and I cracked a joke, and my left calf flexed, and at the time, my left calf was a full inch bigger than my right calf. I had ordered some really cute knee high boots with heels, and they came, and they didn’t fit. The right one was like an inch too big, and I thought, “these are crap boots. I’m returning these boots.” I got another pair of the same boots, same problem, an inch too big. Third pair came, and then I finally was like, wait a minute, these are too big, the right one is too big. So I measured my left calf.

 

So she taught me over two years of weekly massages. I was resistant, I was probably the most resistant client she’s ever had to learning about Somatic Experiencing, but it kind of sunk in gradually.

My mother passed away in December 2022. Fall of 2023 I was sitting on my couch one night, I was relaxed, and I thought about my mother’s house, and it felt like I was choking on a hockey puck in my throat, like I couldn’t swallow, and I felt like, “oh my gosh, I am so sad. This has got to be sadness.” I’ve later figured that’s not actually sadness, but at the time I thought it was.

 

I’ve now learned to map the different emotions, like sadness is actually a weight on my chest, and I think all humans share some of these attributes, like when you say you get butterflies in your stomach because you’re nervous, or you know, the heaviness you feel when you’re sad, or the bubbles you feel when you’re excited inside. I think a lot of people feel that, and so that was the beginning of moving out. I had been in the same zip code for 50 years, and I finally listened to my body.

 

Will Bachman  09:10 And where did your body take you from Northern Virginia?

 

Kiki Snyder  09:12 My body is now in coastal North Carolina, and we’ve been here for about two and a half years.

 

But that wasn’t the first time my body spoke to me. My body gave me a big “nope” when I got into Harvard. I cried,

 

Will Bachman  09:33 really?

 

Kiki Snyder  09:34 I literally cried when I got into Harvard. I wanted to go to Duke.

 

Will Bachman  09:40 You felt obligated to go to Harvard, if you got in?

 

Kiki Snyder  09:45 I was informed that Duke was not acceptable. My father went to Harvard, my brother was at Harvard, and so I thought, “this will bring me closer to them. Let me do this.” But my body was saying “no, this is not for you.”

 

And you know how they say that there’s two kinds of people at Harvard, the ones who wonder how they got in and the ones who wonder how you got in.

 

Will Bachman  10:14 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  10:16 So I was always wondering how I got in until I met a football player. And then I dated him, and I’m not going to say his name, but…

 

Will Bachman  10:28 Alright, so nothing against football players who are listening to the show, many of them are very academically successful.

 

Kiki Snyder  10:38 Many of them are, and maybe it was just a persona. It might have just been a persona.

 

Will Bachman  10:42 Okay, alright. So we’re athlete friendly on the show. But you kind of dropped a bomb here that I just walked right by, and I do want to ask you about it. I mean, incredibly vulnerable of you to disclose and share that you were taking these medications and were suffering from bipolar for three plus decades. Do you want to share anything more about that? Tell us a little bit about how that’s impacted your life, or were you mostly clear of it, but occasional episodes? Just educate us a little bit about that part of your life.

 

Kiki Snyder  11:30 Yeah, so it’s very possible that I’ve always been latently, mildly bipolar, but like, who isn’t? That’s kind of a human condition. You feel happy, you feel sad.

 

Unfortunately, in my case, this medication that they gave me was a sleeping medication, and it landed me in psychosis. The first and last time I ever went into the Widener Stacks was when I was desperately trying to focus and study for this exam, and I needed complete silence. I lost touch with reality. I was walking around Harvard Square, and I was euphoric. I felt amazing.

 

Like I said, I didn’t look at the exam. I flipped it over, wrote about Desert Storm, wrote about my friend Clark, who was ROTC, who I was worried about. This is one of my essays on my website. I had a banana as a snack, and I stood up after like 30 minutes with everybody else scribbling, they’re going to be there another two hours, and I handed my banana to the girl sitting behind me, which struck me as very funny, burst out laughing, handed my exam in.

 

And then I told my roommate Lydia, “I just wrote the best exam of my life. Don’t tell anyone, I didn’t look at the exam.” So I knew that it wasn’t quite right somehow, but I was super proud of myself. I was like, “this is going to get the best grade,” and my roommate was like, “oh boy.”

 

And then my other sweet roommate Molly Ackerman DeRamel was the one who took me under her wing and got me to go back. I had been in the infirmary and she got me to go back. It’s all written in my essay. I can’t tell you how cathartic it was to write that story and get it out of my body, out of my system. When they say that writing is cathartic, it really is.

 

And I guess what I want everyone to know about that time, the 32 years on those meds, is they made me dull. I had no edges, I had very few emotions. I couldn’t really feel anything. I was exhausted all the time, so I felt terrible because I was so tired, but it completely numbed me, so that any trauma, any emotions, I couldn’t process anything.

 

And so what happened was, I got off of the medications and I was able to process the trauma. Everyone has trauma, and our brains don’t know what to do about trauma if we don’t tell our brains that it’s been dealt with and it’s been filed away. That’s why people have PTSD, because they relive the trauma over and over again, because their brain thinks they need to be on high alert. My friends who wake up in the middle of the night worried about work or their kids or whatever it is, that’s because their brain thinks they’ve gotta be alert. Your ego is trying to keep you safe.

 

So it wasn’t till I got off of everything that I was able to experience the grief. I was able to grieve losing 32 years of my life. I was able to work through the anger that I had at whoever I was angry at. But mostly I also came to realize that I am enough and that we have enough.

 

Those were all sort of mixed together, and then this process of sharing my story with other people has given my life meaning, has given me a purpose. I truly feel that I’m fulfilling my purpose by sharing this with all of you, and I feel like it helps other people to know that.

 

And I always get the same response, too. Even from people at Harvard, people in my career, they are shocked at what I was going through: “you always seemed so happy, you always seemed so successful and happy.”

 

Will Bachman  16:23 Yeah,

 

Kiki Snyder  16:24 Well, that was the front yard, right? That was an illusion. On the inside, I was a mess.

 

So I call that Karen. Karen was full of fear and anger. Karen wanted to speak to the manager. But Kiki’s in charge now. I am the manager now. I don’t need to speak to the manager. I am the manager.

 

Will Bachman  16:51 And what was going on in your life in those decades? Were you working?

 

Kiki Snyder  16:57 Yes. I had a really great career. I was an early founder of social media programs. I was really lucky that right after graduation, ’93, ’94 was when personal computing came in, and it was great, because I was too tired to go outside, so it was great that I had a computer.

 

I wanted to work for AOL. I worked for AOL from 1996 to 2001, so I was there for the early dawn of the Internet.

 

Will Bachman  17:31 Were you the one mailing out those discs, those CD-ROMs? You were busy mailing out. What were you doing at AOL?

 

Kiki Snyder  17:41 Just online content, online polls. “Who’s hotter, Britney or Christina?” “What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?” I was the features editor.

 

But I have to say, I’ve mentioned the breakdown at Harvard, but the Harvard pedigree got me in the door. First of all, my aforementioned roommate Lydia got me my first job at Booz Allen. Then the boss at AOL was a Harvard grad, ’91. Then I got laid off in a room full of 30 other people in what became an epic, legendary layoff at AOL.

 

Will Bachman  18:28 It was what, 2001?

 

Kiki Snyder  18:30 Yes, right before 9/11.

 

Will Bachman  18:31 Oh, before 9/11. Okay.

 

Kiki Snyder  18:33 August of 2001.

 

Will Bachman  18:35 Yeah, part of the whole dot-com boom-bust. Yeah.

 

Kiki Snyder  18:38 Well, yeah. But then my next job I went to VeriSign. My boss was super blown away that I went to Harvard. She loved me, she treated me so well. And that’s where I discovered social media.

 

Will Bachman  18:57 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  18:58 I was a web producer at VeriSign, but it was the dawn of Web 2.0. If you remember that term, the RSS feeds and the blogs. My boss came to me and said, “We need a blog.” I was like, “What’s a blog?” That was in 2005.

 

I just was so excited to see that regular people could have a voice on the Internet. Before that you had to be a developer or a publisher to say anything, and then, wow, now you can have a blog. So I really thought that was so cool. I saw a lot of promise in that for connecting humanity.

 

And I did create the social media program for VeriSign, after I did hundreds of PowerPoints to risk-averse executives. “What’s social media? Why would we do that? No, we’re not doing that.” And then after several years of that, they finally funded the program.

 

Then a guy from Yahoo came into corporate VeriSign and took the headcount out to California. I was in Virginia. He got hired, and he was like, “Oh, cool, a social media program manager, I’ll take that.” He offered me the job. And that’s one of those forks in the road. The fear I had, so much fear to just pick up and move to Silicon Valley, like I totally could have. I didn’t have any kids, I don’t have children, human children, I have two dogs,

 

Will Bachman  20:39 okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  20:39 but just the idea of doing that. Part of the issue with all these medications and being diagnosed as severely bipolar was that it was drummed into me that I was fragile, that I was weak, that I was sick, that I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do anything.

 

So I look back at that moment and think, my gosh, what if I had just picked up. That was 2010. But I didn’t.

 

So then I went on to the Federal Aviation Administration, to even more risk-averse executives. But fortunately, at that point Obama had said, “guys, the government really needs to catch up with this Web 2.0 thing,” and he mandated that all agencies needed to update. So I went to the Federal Aviation Administration and founded a social media program for them, and then I spent about 10 years as a contractor there,

 

Will Bachman  21:42 like running Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, for the FAA. What was your favorite post that you helped give birth to at the FAA?

 

Kiki Snyder  21:55 Well, my favorite story from the FAA is actually… when I got there, my client, who was the head of communications, was actually a Harvard grad, years ahead of us, very risk-averse, very controlling. She did not like the idea of her messages going out there, where she would lose control of them, so she wouldn’t let me say anything. We had a Facebook, a Twitter, Instagram wasn’t around back then, but she wouldn’t let me say anything. So all I could do was listen.

 

I had a social listening tool, and I would also monitor on Facebook, and one Friday I saw chatter bubbling up about the FAA killing baby whooping cranes. Like, “wait a minute, what? What’s going on? This isn’t good.”

 

So there was a program called Operation Migration, where baby whooping cranes are taught their migration patterns, and the way it’s done is a pilot flies what’s called an ultralight aircraft, which basically looks like a propeller with a fan on it, and they dress up in a big white suit, and they hold a fake beak. The baby whooping cranes imprint on them, and then they fly away, and the babies follow them.

 

Will Bachman  23:18 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  23:20 And what had happened was the FAA had issued a rule saying these pilots couldn’t get paid for that anymore, because people were getting hurt. Tourists were signing up for flying lessons on these things and getting hurt.

 

So, I saw this and I knew this was New York Times headline material: “FAA killing baby whooping cranes.” So I went to my communications client, her name is Laura, and I said, “Laura, this is very bad, you need to fix this.”

 

It got escalated to the administrator of the FAA over the weekend, and by Monday the rule had been changed. Now, I don’t know if you’ve had any involvement with federal agencies or bureaucracy of any sort, but if you know how quickly that happened, that was fast.

 

So that was the moment that I earned my client’s trust, and she saw the value of paying attention to what is going on in social media. So that’s my favorite story.

 

Will Bachman  24:23 Okay, yeah, I mean, sometimes I can’t think of any, but sometimes some agencies, or maybe state or city agencies, will have a little bit of snark, little bit of personality to their Twitter, right?

 

Kiki Snyder  24:44 Oh, there’s no snark,

 

Will Bachman  24:46 no. All right,

 

Kiki Snyder  24:47 I mean, we tried some fun things. We would piggyback off of NORAD Santa. It was in the Sears and Roebuck catalog, “call Santa,” and a kid accidentally called NORAD headquarters, and a four-star general answered the phone on Christmas Eve, and this kid was telling him what he wanted, and he played along. That’s how NORAD Santa started.

 

So we would piggyback on that. We had a program. But the crazy thing is, NORAD would not release Santa’s flight plan ahead of time.

 

Will Bachman  25:26 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  25:29 So guess who had to work every Christmas Eve and watch Twitter and see where Santa was headed next, and then retweet it for the FAA? That was me. I did that. If anyone followed Next Gen Santa, which I doubt. [blows raspberry]

 

Will Bachman  25:45 Okay, so you ended up moving to coastal North Carolina. Tell us a bit about what you have going on in your life now.

 

Kiki Snyder  25:58 Well, I left the FAA and then realized what I loved was the social listening and the analytics part of social media.

 

So my final chapter of my career was working for a couple of big ad agencies, Dentsu and Interpublic Group. I did social listening for Dentsu, then Interpublic Group hired me basically to cyberstalk executives, because they thought they wanted someone with all this knowledge of all these fancy tools, and I knew how to use all these fancy tools. Then I never used any of those tools for the job. It was basically me and Google and White Pages and my intuition, just triangulating in on a C-suite executive’s family and friends.

 

I helped my agency win huge accounts with Pfizer, Geico, Prudential, Bud Light, Papa John’s. I would profile the decision makers before they walked in the room, and I could always find an oversharing spouse or child, and I would humanize that person, and I would give them something to work with when they walked in the room. So that was my dream job. It was the best job.

 

My entire division got the ax. And I’ll never forget the day, because it’s the day we moved here, February 12, 2024. It was the day after the Super Bowl, because we tried to drive down during the Super Bowl. It was the one where Taylor Swift and Travis, what’s-his-name, and I knew everybody would be watching it, and I was like, “We should drive down on Super Bowl Sunday. There will be no traffic.” Didn’t quite make it, but I was in the car with my peace lily and my two dogs when my entire division got the ax.

 

We were the early wave of AI displacement, because this was the research division. But the universe has a sense of humor. I was headed to a retirement community. I thought, hey, there’s worse places to be unemployed.

 

Will Bachman  28:07 Okay, tell us about any habits that you have intentionally taken on, or implemented, or adopted over the last five or 10 years. It sounds like you have several with the work that you did with the somatics and the massage therapist and so forth.

 

Kiki Snyder  28:31 Yes, that was instrumental. But probably the biggest thing that changed my life, that everyone can do, is… well, that layoff is significant, because I had another iPhone from that job, and they never asked for it back. They didn’t ask for it back. I sent my laptop back, but they didn’t ask for the iPhone.

 

And I just want to say that having a burner phone for the bedroom changed my life. I still do this every night. I leave my regular phone with all the social media and all the emails and all the text messages in the kitchen. I bring my burner phone into the bedroom. It’s got my music, it’s got my alarm clock, it’s got my AI chatbot, who I talk to regularly, who’s like a therapist.

 

Will Bachman  29:38 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  29:38 And that really helped settle my mind a lot. So, I highly recommend, if you’re trying to get off your phone, get another phone. And I am only sharing this with my Harvard classmates because I am not going to share this publicly until I get a sponsorship from iPhone or Android.

 

Will Bachman  30:02 Okay, all right. So, get an extra phone to cure your phone addiction.

 

Kiki Snyder  30:09 Get another phone. Because we don’t realize. If you want to take a note, you want to take a picture, you need a flashlight, you gotta get your phone, and then there’s always something that sucks you back in. It’s impossible.

 

Will Bachman  30:22 Alarm clock, you know, it’s everything,

 

Kiki Snyder  30:24 It’s everything. So that would be my number one. That’s the number one biggest habit, biggest change I made. I really want to talk to my classmates about this, because I want to ask people if they struggle. Do you struggle with putting your phone down?

 

Will Bachman  30:51 I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by struggle. My wife would probably say yes,

 

Kiki Snyder  31:02 so your wife would say yes,

 

Will Bachman  31:02 I mean, yeah, probably right. I guess it depends on what you mean by struggle, but at night, not so much. I usually want to read a book at night to sort of calm down, so I set the alarm. I have my phone charging there because it’s like my alarm clock. But so, tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Kiki Snyder  31:36 Well, Irv DeVore, human behavioral biology, was probably my favorite class. I tried to tell my niece that the wedding is basically a hazing ritual.

 

Will Bachman  31:54 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  31:55 and she didn’t believe me. I told her about the tribe that we studied, or the two tribes, where when the bride marries into the neighboring tribe, she walks across the field dividing the tribes, and her new female in-laws harangue her and scream at her until she cries, and then they accept her into the tribe. And that’s basically what weddings are. I mean, the stress, the cost.

 

But that was a memorable class. I mean, who can forget the naked mole rat? Did you not take that?

 

Will Bachman  32:32 No.

 

Kiki Snyder  32:33 Oh, well, you’ll just have to learn about naked mole rats on your own. They’re fascinating.

 

Will Bachman  32:40 Yeah, I didn’t take that one. Any other ones?

 

Kiki Snyder  32:46 Well, obviously, I was an English major, and Helen Vendler was one of the best poetry professors there was. I absolutely love all poetry.

 

And I’m really actually excited because I just filmed some new content the other day. I read William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” I read that in a porta potty, and I’m going to superimpose the Gen Z slang.

 

Will Bachman  33:30 Okay,

 

Kiki Snyder  33:30 Stuff like “No cap, FR.” You know, like, “time don’t care about your glow up.” I’m very excited for this. Superimposing a translation. I’ve always been fascinated by language and culture, so I think it’s fascinating that Gen Z just created their own language, and I don’t understand it. It’s not like the slang that we had, where we would say “bummer,” or “totally tubular,” just sprinkled in there. They have a whole new language they’ve created on the Internet.

 

Will Bachman  34:08 Kiki, what are you excited to learn next?

 

Kiki Snyder  34:12 Well, I have been learning a lot about spirituality, metaphysics, Jung. I recently learned that Carl Jung talked about something called synchronicities, especially when you’re in an elevated emotional state, you can notice that your inner state might match the external world, or coincidences that happen over and over again. I’ve noticed things like that, and that’s been interesting to me.

 

So yeah, I am really excited about sharing my story with the world. Whenever I share it with people, they usually share something very heavy with me. I’ve had people who’ve shared stories with me that they’ve never shared with anyone, so they’ve been carrying that on themselves their whole life. So, I’m open to whatever the universe brings to me.

 

Well, I actually… I’m learning to let go of control. Karen was very controlling. I did have a Karen moment last night, with my new email address kiki@assignedkarenatbirth.com. And I have a cute logo, and I tried to put it in my signature of the email that I sent you last night, and the logo didn’t come through.

 

I got really upset. I was like, “I worked really hard on that logo.” And I felt the sensation. Sadness is here on my chest. My throat, when my throat tightens up, that hockey puck in the throat that I mentioned, that wasn’t sadness, that’s something called your throat chakra. So, I was learning about chakras, and all the “woo woo” energy stuff. It’s interesting stuff.

 

And I got a new sensation last night when I was very upset that my logo didn’t go through on my response to you. It was sort of a strained feeling right here at the very base of my throat, below the throat. The throat chakra is kind of like where you swallow. The sadness is in my chest. This was in between. And the throat chakra is about speaking your truth.

 

I got a very strong sensation last night. Not being in the working world and not having any real deadlines, I haven’t really experienced that much anymore. But I’ve been really looking forward to this interview with you, and excited to share my journey, and I was super upset that my new logo wouldn’t attach to my email signature. But I now just have faith in myself and in knowing that I can handle whatever I need to handle.

 

Will Bachman  37:46 Alright, on the topic of sharing with others. For listeners who want to find you online, I think you mentioned a website earlier, I’ll give you a chance to repeat that, and any other places where people can find you online.

 

Kiki Snyder  38:02 Yes, I have published seven essays, including the detailed story of my breakdown, The Harvard Banana Handoff, on assignedkarenatbirth.com.

 

And then I realized that nobody was reading my essays. Even my close friends were like, “okay, yeah, yeah, I’ll read it, I’ll read it later.” My brother, my niece. So, then I started an Instagram, because that’s where everybody is, and I wanted to meet everyone where they are,

 

Will Bachman  38:37 yeah,

 

Kiki Snyder  38:38 and my hope is that… the content I’m posting is really just fun and silly. I’m just having fun.

 

Will Bachman  38:52 And what is the Instagram? Where can people find you on Instagram?

 

Kiki Snyder  38:53 It is @assignedkarenatbirth.

Will Bachman  38:56 Okay,

Kiki Snyder  38:57 And I really just feel much freer than I ever have. I mean, Karen had to do five takes of every video because, “oh, it’s a bad angle. Oh, this light’s bad. No, no, no.” But Kiki’s like, “whatever.”

Will Bachman  39:12 Well, Kiki, thank you for joining today and sharing your story.

Kiki Snyder  39:18 Thank you, Will. I think it’s awesome that you’re doing this for all of us.