After losing my job at a federal agency in a recent wave of terminations, I went out for drinks with my friend Deb, who still had her job (at least for the time being) at a different agency. Exhausted, miserable and a half-glass of wine deep in the company of another federal worker, I indulged myself in a little public cry.
Deb understood. “Are you sleeping and eating?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said, wiping away tears. “But I’m definitely not drinking water.” (My friend Paige, knowing I had become an over-caffeinated, dehydrated, cover-letter-writing husk, had been sending me daily text reminders to “Drink water!”)
“You should get on Finch,” Deb said, pulling out her phone to show me.
Finch is a so-called self-care app that claims you “take care of your pet,” a virtual bird, “by taking care of yourself.” Deb’s bird on the app, Chickadee, wore purple aviator glasses and a chic chore coat and had a turtle “micropet.”
Chickadee got rainbow coins whenever Deb completed self-care goals such as “get out of bed,” “brush teeth” and “drink water.” And Chickadee could send Chickadee’s friends (i.e. Deb’s friends’ birds) virtual well-wishes. These included hugs (accompanied by a heart emoji), reminders to drink water (water glass emoji), gratitude (heart face) and more.
At first, it didn’t appeal. I’ve been in therapy and don’t generally need to celebrate remembering to brush my teeth. But when Deb texted me her promo link, which included an adorable llama micropet named “Oatmeal,” I couldn’t help but click. After downloading it, I found myself in possession of a baby bird. I named her Buddy, and I started Finching.
What does “Finching” entail? As I completed self-care tasks, “rainbow stones” of varying denominations flew into my treasure chest, allowing me to shop for outfits for Buddy, home décor for her birdhouse and “body dye” to change her feather color, the last of which I found myself disapproving like a protective parent. (Certainly not until she’s a teenager?) Premium options were available only to the paid tier of Finch patrons, a mysterious upper echelon who I assumed were stably employed in the private sector.
On Finch, as your bird has adventures, she unlocks new capabilities that may or may not be age appropriate. Once she evolves from baby bird to toddler, she can travel. Buddy went straight to Bergen, Norway, then got trapped there for two weeks because I couldn’t remember how I did it or how to get her home.
Your bird also hatches weekly micropets, some of which are cute in a normal way, like Bongo the baby gorilla; some of which are cute in a surprising way, like Kimmi the “water droplet”; and some of which are genuinely upsetting, like Beary, a bouncing bear head with no mouth.
Jobless, and facing the dispiriting prospect of applying in an oversaturated market, I gradually made Finch my entire personality. At a gathering of colleagues to mourn the demise of our agency, people asked how I was. Instead of describing my exhausting job search, I told them about what I had started calling my “Bird App for Depressed People,” or “Depression Bird App” for short.
The reaction (confused, concerned) was less important to me than the effect (we were no longer talking about my job search). This was so successful that I started using it as an all-purpose talking point. If a recipient of my spiel nodded too sympathetically, I texted them a friend code and complimentary llama. “Look within yourself,” I would say. “Find that you want Oatmeal the micropet.”
In a sign of the times, a lot of them did. My Finch friends had been terminated from and then reinstated to the U.S. Forest Service (Julia), put on administrative leave at my agency (Joe), fled the Justice Department (Brian) and continued to anxiously fly under the radar at an agency that will remain unnamed (Deb).
Also on the app were friends who were dealing with the kind of normal stressors I forgot people have, like moving and starting graduate school, and my friends who were fine but missed hanging with the version of me that used to have a good time. I may have been leaking tears at the movies, but Buddy was waving, smiling and sending prayer hands.
Despite my app-inspired self-care routine, my emotional state remained fragile. The job loss had been tough to process: I had finally found a job I loved, doing work I believed in, and I’d built a real community in Washington after years of moving around. And then, at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday in February, I had been unceremoniously locked out of the system.
I had received a form termination letter by email that didn’t even fill in the “employee name” blank, followed by a distressed call from my manager, who had obviously not been consulted and apologized to me “on behalf of the government.” After union negotiations, I had been given the chance to pick up a box of my office items in the lobby.
This is all to say that even with Buddy’s help, I was having a hard time holding it together.
My therapist and I established that it’s painful to lose your job and worse to have it happen in an intentionally traumatic way, and she reminded me, “This isn’t forever.” In the meantime, though, I had Finch. I tried to show my therapist the app by holding it up to the Zoom camera. She smiled gently and moved on.
Out for drinks one evening with my still-employed friend Joe and a mutually terminated former co-worker, I asked the latter for his number and, sensing weakness, forced my Finch friend code upon him.
“If you join,” I said, sounding insane, “I get a new micropet.”
I expected him to ignore me. Instead, he signed up later that night and we started exchanging innocuous Finch greetings.
Later that week, Joe said something about my former co-worker being a terrible texter, and I smugly noted that he was sending me emojis daily.
“I’m sure he is,” Joe said a little acerbically. And suddenly, picturing the former co-worker, I realized he was hot. As a rule, I never think of colleagues as romantic prospects — too risky. But now that we had both been terminated, it occurred to me there was no reason that he couldn’t be my Finch crush.
I sent his bird a “sweet dreams” emoji that night to see how it felt, and he sent me one back. The fact that I was also exchanging nightly “sweet dreams” with Finch friends Daisy, Birdywirdy and Cleo didn’t stop me from asking myself: Wait, are he and I together? He was moving across the country for a new job in a month, but so what?
I asked him if he wanted to go to a movie, and he said yes. This meant that I then had to tell my horrified friends that I had essentially asked out a guy through my Depression Bird App, and they had to make a monumental effort to scrounge up positive reactions.
One friend could barely get through her voice memo to me: “I just, wow. I guess I’m happy for you, but oh, wow. I — the depression bird app. I mean — wow.”
The phrase “love in a hopeless place” kept getting tossed around. When the former co-worker wished me a “Good Morning,” I kicked my feet a little.
He and I went to our movie, established that he reciprocated my crush and then proceeded to spend most of the next week together, Finching each other when we had to be apart. Colloquially, I started referring to him as my long-distance boyfriend (I did not tell him this). In my journal, in the middle of a page-long run-on sentence about whether to accept a job offer, I noticed that I had written: “and why does he have to leave?”
Soon spring arrived, the cherry blossoms bloomed and a federal court ordered our reinstatement with back pay. He and I picked up our laptops from headquarters and, in a kind of buoyant, hysterical mood that is hard to explain, checked the relationship policy (it didn’t apply). Obviously, though, this relief wouldn’t last. Our agency continued to exist by the tenuous thread of a separate court case. I kept interviewing for jobs. He gave his notice and packed his bags.
I knew there might be a time in the future when I would look back on this spring and regret inviting him and his Finch into my life, making myself vulnerable to heartache to come. But in that moment, it was worth it.
Not long before he left, he got me a glass of water from his kitchen and said, “It’s just like in Finch!”
We groaned, laughed. I said thank you. And later, when he hit the road, I Finched him gratitude.
Nina Cahill is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.
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