From 2019 to 2022, I was a Pampered Chef consultant on top of my day job as NewPages Managing Editor. The gig itself was nice on paper: work from home, run your parties on Facebook, no garage full of inventory, no hauling gadgets into someone’s kitchen. Low pressure, low risk, or so it seemed.
Here’s what the recruitment pitch doesn’t tell you: the whole thing runs on connection, and “200+ friends” on Facebook is not the same thing as 200 real, tangible relationships. Some of those names were core friends. A lot of them were distant family, old coworkers, people I’d liked a few photos for over the years but hadn’t actually talked to in forever…if I knew them personally at all. Selling requires reaching past that surface layer into something real enough to ask someone for their time, their money, their living room—and that gap between the friend list and the actual friendship was where most of the exhaustion lived.
Then the pandemic hit, and the math got worse. Asking people to host a virtual party during a year of layoffs and economic free-fall didn’t just feel awkward, it got you shamed for it. Guilted for daring to ask, even gently, even apologetically. I was supposed to keep hitting a quota built on relationships that were mostly performance, during a year when even real relationships were straining under the weight of everything else.
Weekly Creative Prompt
What if feeling something was never entirely yours?
You don’t choose your feelings. Someone hands you the starter kit—and a monthly minimum.
After watching Inside Out, where Joy, Anger, Sadness, and the rest of them clock in to run a kid’s emotional life from a control room, something clicked sideways in my brain: what if an emotion ran the same way a downline does? What if it needed you to reach past your weak ties to recruit more people in, on a schedule, whether or not the moment, or the relationship, could actually bear it?
This Week’s Challenge
Imagine emotions not as something that simply arises in you, but as a product distributed through a multi-level marketing structure. Every feeling comes with a script, a community, and a quota — and the people you’re expected to “recruit” aren’t always people you’re close to. Sometimes they’re 200 names on a list, and only a handful of them are real.
- Who first recruited your narrator into a specific emotion (grief, ambition, devotion, envy)? What was the pitch, and what did it promise?
- How is the feeling kept circulating? What scripts, check-ins, or guilt keep a person re-enrolling each month, even when it’s costing them?
- What happens when your narrator has to “sell” the feeling to people who aren’t actually close to them—when the connection required to pass it on is thinner than the ask demands?
- What happens during a crisis, when asking someone to take on this feeling becomes its own kind of violence and refusing to ask becomes a failure too?
- Who’s upline? Who profits when your narrator stays enrolled? What does it cost to quit? Is there an exit interview? Do they get to keep the starter kit, or does someone come collect it?
Let form do some of the work, if you want it to: an onboarding packet, a testimonial video transcript, a Facebook event invite for a “feelings party,” a training manual, an earnings chart that tracks emotional intensity instead of income, a guilt-laced group chat thread.
Three Ways to Enter
Depending on your chosen genre, you can select one of the options below as your jumping off point.
1. Build the Script (fiction, speculative, hybrid)
MLM language is its own dialect: upbeat, urgent, borrowed empowerment vocabulary dressed up as encouragement (“you’re building something,” “don’t quit before the magic happens”). Write the pitch your character heard when they were first recruited into the emotion. Then write the moment they’re asked to pass it on to someone who barely qualifies as close to them (a half-known cousin, a coworker from three jobs ago) and let the strain of that thin connection show in the dialogue before either character says it outright.
2. Map the Downline (poetry, lyric essay, hybrid)
Every MLM structure depends on inherited lines. You join under someone, and eventually someone joins under you. Apply that to an emotion passed through a family or a friend group. Who recruited your mother into anxiety? Who recruited you? Now add the complication: what happens when the only people left to recruit are weak ties, distant ones, the equivalent of a Facebook friend you haven’t spoken to in eight years? Write the genealogy of a feeling as a downline chart, and notice where it has to stretch past real intimacy to keep growing.
3. Write the Real Thing (personal essay, memoir, nonfiction)
If you’ve sold for an MLM—Pampered Chef, LuLaRoe, doTerra, whatever the product was—you don’t need a metaphor; you lived the mechanism. Write the actual weight of the ask: reaching past your real friends into the long tail of people who barely know you, trying to turn a “like” into a sale. Write what it felt like to keep asking during a crisis, when the ask itself became something people resented you for and what it cost to either keep pushing or finally stop. What did the quota take from you that the welcome packet never mentioned?
Helpful Tip
Still feeling lost? Try on one of these tonal angles to help you push your work further and sharpen where it lands.
Try This:
- Dark/satirical: emotion as predatory economy like weaponized grief or monetized outrage
- Corporate uncanny: HR language applied to inner life like a performance review for sadness or a PIP for joy
- Speculative/legal: a world where opting out of an emotion has economic or legal consequences
- Pandemic-specific: a feeling that requires recruitment precisely when no one has the capacity to take one more thing on
Enjoy prompts like this?
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