Raha Naddaf: On respecting your own process, hanging baby photos in the office, and being the role model

Advice from a top magazine editor

Meet our next creator, Raha Naddaf:

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Raha Naddaf
Age: 39*
Kids: Neli, 4; Maya, 8 months
Location: San Leandro, California 
Vocation: Magazine Story Editor at The New York Times Magazine
*Ages at time of interview

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In previous posts, I’ve described myself as a reluctant mother. But that’s not all. I was a reluctant babysitter (I was trusted with a baby and a toddler at age 11!) and I was a longtime reluctant child-adjacent person. I was the asshole on an airplane who died on the inside if a kid sat anywhere near me. I was confused if I had to sit next to a family in a restaurant. I floated through an existence where young (and old) people didn’t really exist. (If Dante had been a woman, there would be a circle of hell for people like me. The punishment would be to have a baby strapped to your chest who is not hungry or tired or sick or gassy or in need of a diaper change—but who won’t stop crying. For eternity.)

I think this child-ignorant experience is pretty normal for a lot of young urban people. We flee our small, suffocating towns for exciting, opportunity-filled cities where we spend our 20s in a bubble of our peers. The result, though, is that the communities we form lack the knowledge and wisdom of elders and the chaos and cohesion of children. So when we finally do have children, we’re often lost and lonely. And it’s certainly not uncommon to slink back to those abandoned hometowns for help. (Last week, Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch, touched on the challenges of a lack of community outside established institutions.) 

This isolation also contributes to the dynamic in a lot of workspaces, especially male-dominated ones, and the magazine industry has certainly been one of those, where the hours can be grueling and many women opt out when it’s time to start a family. The women who do hang on often feel like they have to live parallel lives in order to succeed: During the day they are an employee who exists in a vacuum and at night they are a mother, and never the twain shall meet. Obviously the pandemic, and Zooming with messy homes and children in the background, took a sledge hammer to those walls between work and private lives, and it seemed that everyone was relieved to be seen as more human.

But before the pandemic, there were women chipping away at that wall with a chisel, showing by example that a person can not only have a personal life and a career, but that personal-life experience can actually make them a more-valuable contributor. Because how stimulating could the ideas from a person in a vacuum be?

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Raha is one of those amazing women. Raha started her career at GQ, then moved on to New York magazine and then the Marshall Project. She was the executive editor of The California Sunday Magazine (where we worked together) and is now a story editor for the New York Times Magazine. From that impressive résumé, Raha brings some beautiful insight into the arc of a career, from a young woman carving out a position of equality to a seasoned pro who hangs up baby pictures.

And now, Raha, in her own words…

On maternity leave ending:

Now that I’m back at work, Neli goes to daycare. And I’m grateful for that daycare. I’m very lucky that Tom, my husband, is a full partner in all of this. He took a 3 1/2 month leave from work to take care of Maya. I’m working and he’s taking care of her all day long, so I can actually have a full day of work right now. When his leave is up, she’ll go to daycare too, and then all of our money will go away. 

This time around, going back to work from leave means walking a few steps into another room and closing a door, which feels like a victory—to close a door and not feel like I’m doing something wrong. I don’t need to pay attention to what’s happening in the rest of the house, which for months and months and months was not the case. I was completely responsible for every sound and cry. To be able to shut the door was a big change.

On starting a new job and impostor syndrome:

I started a new job directly after my leave. And all the baggage and anxiety and fear and just, like, new-kid stuff that comes with starting a new job is happening at the same time as my post-maternity-leave, return-to-working transition. But it’s also happening in my house where I’m not wearing real clothing and I’m not brushing my hair. All the formality that comes with a new job, like dressing up and sitting straight and making polite conversation in the hallway, none of that exists. I’m still a schlub but in a new place.

Starting a new job is really hard. I’m wrestling with all the things that I think women unnecessarily wrestle with more than men. Do they regret hiring me? Do I actually know what I’m doing? All those ingrained thoughts bubble to the surface again. Every Zoom call, the stakes are way too high. Everything is off-kilter. 

On fighting hive mind:

My boss gave me good advice before I started this job: He advised me to hold on to the way I arrive at ideas. There’s something that happens to anyone who starts at a new place—you start to observe the institutional way of approaching the job and try to conform to that. You may start to think that people will like your ideas more if you’re pitching ones that would work well in the room. You start entering that hive mind. And he was encouraging me not to do that. To maintain my way of observing the world outside of their bubble. 

On dealing with rejection:

I can have a very hard time expressing an idea in front of a lot of people. I think it’s a very hard thing to do. To do that naturally and not undermine yourself with a phrase like, “Oh, this is a half-baked idea.” That’s how I started my last story pitch in my last meeting. “This is a quarter-baked idea,” but meanwhile, it was a pitch I had thought about quite a bit and had prepared in my mind and felt passionately about. A part of me is like, Why am I undermining myself in this moment? If they don’t like it, they don’t like it. I shouldn’t disrespect my own process just to feel comfortable pitching a story. But these are things we do. We clear our throats and we have these little rituals just to get us to say the words at all. 

There have been so many times throughout my career where I’ve pitched an idea that went terribly, and afterward I was like, Oh god, I’m such a moron. They saw right through this, or I didn’t prepare enough. And then I’ll see that same idea published elsewhere and done really well. So I realize that I had taken the initial rejection to a place I didn’t need to. I made it personal. I made it about my own intellect and creative abilities. And it’s really just about the room. It’s been a valuable lesson. And I’ve become so much better at simply not caring about whether my ideas go over well or what other editors think of my editing abilities. It’s not personal. I’ve also been in this industry long enough to have faith in the fact that I know what I’m doing. So yes, I have insecurities from time to time, and yes, starting a new job brings them out, but also, you hit a certain age where you can say: I’m a pro. And with that knowledge comes fewer highs and lows. You become steady.   

On refusing to separate work from life:

I was coming up at a very different time in the magazine industry. I was a 25-year-old in a workplace where I was one of the only women on the edit staff. So there were things I had to do to pass and to be acceptable and to be liked, and a lot of those things involved bro-ing myself up a little bit. I made up these silly rules that today I roll my eyes at: Don’t be the one to bring the snacks to the office. Don’t be the person to write the notes in the meetings. Avoid the tasks that have been historically assigned to women so that you don’t fall into the trap of being an “assistant” in everyone’s minds. I don’t know if I agree with those rules at all anymore. But I understand why I felt I needed them then.

Back then, I never would have imagined the day when I would walk into the California Sunday office for the first time and immediately put up baby photos on my wall and talk about my kid a lot and show photos of her to near-strangers. I was a mother and wanted to be a mother and very much missed my kid. And I didn’t want to hide any of that. It didn’t even enter into my brain to try and create the divide: In this office space, I’m a person at work and that’s all I am, and when I go home, I’m going to be a mother. That divide is nonsense.

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In most places I worked at, I didn’t really have that model for me. There weren’t women in high positions with children doing that juggle. I had that at one place with my boss who was a man, who was one of the best people I’ve ever worked for, who left work at 6 o’clock on the dot no matter what was going on to catch the train to get home in time. That was the only time I saw that. Once I had a child, I knew I wanted to be that example. I wanted to be the person who talked about having kids, who went home at a certain time to be with her kid, who made that very much a part of her identity.

One thing that I do think that the pandemic did, oddly, is kind of remove that option for a lot of people, even men. There were kids entering the frame at work. There were kids in the background. Finally, it feels like we can all really acknowledge and embrace and respect each other’s personal lives and acknowledge that it’s hard work to have kids and to be at work. I feel like no one can pretend anymore. 

My favorite end to an interview ever:

I lost my train of thought. This is what happens. With the kids...with the kids...I forget things. Your mind just stops. Done.

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Thank you, Raha, for sharing your story!

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*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.