The Immigrant Experience: A Career Journey Towards Embracing The Stars With Maria Varmazis
Ever dreamed of ditching your computer science career and launching a podcast about space? Buckle up, because that's exactly what our guest did! This season, we're diving deep with inspiring women in tech, and our first episode features the incredible Maria Varmazis. Maria's journey is anything but linear, and she gets real about the challenges of navigating societal expectations, the immigrant experience, and unexpected life detours. From mental health struggles to career pivots, Maria's story is one of resilience, self-discovery, and embracing the power of failure. Whether you're a woman in tech or simply someone who's ever felt like you didn't quite fit the mold, this episode is a must-listen.
This content discusses topics related to suicide and suicidal thoughts. If you are struggling with suicidal feelings, please know you are not alone. There is help available, and reaching out for support is a sign of strength.
You may contact:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 (US) (https://988lifeline.org/current-events/the-lifeline-and-988/)
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 (US) (https://www.crisistextline.org/)
If you are outside the US, please search online for suicide prevention resources in your country.
Remember, you are not alone. There is help, and hope.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Immigrant Experience: A Career Journey Towards Embracing The Stars With Maria Varmazis
Before we dive into our conversation, I have a quick housekeeping note. As many of you know, juggling a full-time job, hobbies, side projects, and trying to maintain a “balanced life” can be quite the challenge the way my eyes rolled, and balanced. Anyway, I haven't always been able to give this show the attention it deserves and I feel guilty about it. Inspired by my lovely friend, Sandra Miller, I'm excited to announce a new structure for the show. Side note, Sandra has a fantastic Substack and podcast. In the new structure, we'll be publishing episodes and seasons and each season will have eight episodes. This episode is the final one for season one, but think of it as a special bonus content for you.
You'll see why, but I'll be starting work on the next season soon. I would love for you to be a part of it. If you or someone you know has a tech journey spanning over a decade or more, or if you want to get involved in any capacity, please reach out to me at BeyondTheBinaryThePod@gmail.com. Honestly, I can use all the help I can get including someone to bounce off ideas with. You can also visit BeyondTheBinaryPod.com to find all the episodes from the season.
Let's dive into the episode. I had the pleasure of chatting with Maria Varmazis, a woman with a unique career journey. She transitioned from Computer Science to Journalism and is now a podcast host. In our conversation, she candidly shares the challenges she's faced and the valuable lessons she's learned. If there's one thing I want you to take away from this conversation, it's that failure can be a powerful teacher, and it should be embraced as part of the learning process.
I want to let you know that this episode is a bit different from our usual tech-focused conversations and discussions. Maria and I both share the immigrant experience but in slightly different ways. Maria is a child of immigrants and is now raising a six-year-old herself. I couldn't help but dive deeper into how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity and parenting. Honestly, my neurodivergence got the best of me and our conversation veered into this fascinating topic. Don't worry, I'll be bringing Maria back for another episode where we'll dive more into her tech experience, which is equally fascinating. Without further ado, let's jump into my conversation with Maria Varmazis. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Maria, it’s good to have you here.
It’s good to see you again.
Maria’s Career Journey
Let's get into your career journey. We talked about you starting your career with Computer Science as your degree, but then you switched to Journalism. Describe that to me. How did you go from Journalism to where you are now?
My sum-up version, it's a mess, but I'm okay with it. It's a wonderful mess that I'm glad for in retrospect. It was very painful and confusing at the time. I went into my undergrad years, graduated high school, determined to pursue a degree in Computer Science. I wanted to be a programmer. This was in the late ‘90s. This was the hot thing. If anyone was a nerd in the ‘90s and the internet was still brand new for the consumer set. That was the thing.
If you were a nerd, you went into Computer Science. That's where you had to go I was a nerdy kid. I enjoyed making my own websites. I taught myself HTML and everyone's like, “You're smart. You should go into Computer Science.” I took a couple of programming classes in high school. I was lucky that my high school offered it and I did well. I figured that should be my career path and I did well in my Math and Science classes too. It seemed like the right way to go. Immigrant kid jackpot. I got into an Ivy League school.
Making your parents proud.
We're going to put that name all over the bumper of the car. We're going to drive around town and we finally can tell everyone we did it. We got a kid going to an Ivy. My parents were proud. That was the Columbia School of Engineering. It was like, “Not only am I going to be an engineer at Columbia, I'm going to be in New York.” It was the most exciting thing for a kid from the burbs.
An immigrant, like a kid first generation.
It was extremely exciting. I was very proud. I like a lot of kids who are very college-oriented and especially in immigrant communities, tend to be very education-oriented. I'd been studying for the SAT since elementary school, which sounds crazy to say, but many of us know. Getting into Columbia was like, “I did it. I accomplished the thing.”
I think there were warning signs towards the end of my freshman year at Columbia Seas that I was not happy at all. Engineering school is very tough. There are a lot of weed-out courses and not every Computer Science program is in an engineering school. One does not need to go to engineering school to do Computer Science. That was the course I wanted to take. As difficult as the classes were, more importantly, I wasn't sure that was the path I wanted to be on.
The more I was neck deep in Java, which has its own problems. It's funny when I talk to people who program and I tell them I was learning Java, that is always their reaction is, “Really?” That's why you didn't want to do. I said, “That could be part of it,” but I didn't see myself living that life. You get a sense of what's real and what's not in those college years if you go to college. I think for many of us, it didn't feel right. The fit was off. I figured I was experiencing weed-out course anxiety as many students do. I figured I would just keep trying. Through my sophomore year of college, my course load was very much in the thick of CompSci and my grades were suffering. I was not doing well. Towards the end of my sophomore year, I had a mental break. I contemplated suicide. I had completely messed up. My whole life was academics up until that point.
I'm sorry.
Thank you. I'm okay now. I started college at seventeen. I was very young. My whole life had been school, getting into school, getting into a good school, staying in that school, and graduating and that is how you succeed in life. Being two years into that final stage of what's supposed to be the path to success and realizing that, “It wasn't working for me. I wasn't working for it,” was devastating to everything that I thought I knew. I got lucky in a conversation I had with my parents that summer that did not go the way I thought it would.
My parents saw that I was struggling and essentially. My mother essentially said something like, “We want you to be alive, as opposed to trying to push through.” That was the situation we were in. My father had a harder time. He's passed on now, so I feel weird talking about this, but I'll say it. He was like, “Why didn't you study harder?” He had tried to help me in his own way, but there was a nagging doubt in his mind that I hadn't worked hard enough. If only I had pushed through a little harder, I could have just made it to the end of the four years and that would be fine, but I don't think I would've made it. That was pretty clear after two years of just doing that. I said, “This is just not for me.”
I dropped out of Columbia at the end after two years, and I moved back home with my parents. While all of my high school peers who had many of them also had gone on to good schools, many of them to Ivys, a lot of them working their butts off, I was at home with my parents trying to cobble together part-time, work as a high school graduate, making minimum wage and people going, “What's wrong with you? Why aren't you in college? You're clearly a smart kid.” I did not know what I wanted to do. I did not know what my path should be because I was going to be a computer scientist. That was my path for as long as I could have imagined. The only thing I knew that I enjoyed, aside from being a nerdy girl which I had always been, was the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper.
I loved doing that work in high school. I would frequently be in school until like 10:00 PM working on the newspaper. I loved it. You couldn't tear me away from it. That was the only indication I had of something that I might enjoy doing was something relating to telling stories. It was a whim. It was honestly a bit of a guess. I wish I could say it was an inspired one, but it was the only thing I could think of that I would enjoy doing. I applied to all of my safety schools. I figured this should be a piece of cake to get into, and all of them but one rejected me as a college dropout. It was extremely humbling. The only one that took me in was UMass Amherst. They took all of my college credits from Columbia as well as all of my high school credits. They basically said, “Go, you're good. Just go ahead.”
They put me in their honors program, and I graduated after two years at UMass Amherst. I had an amazing time. I had the more typical college experience, maybe not for engineers as much because they do have a rough time. I enjoyed myself in college for some time. I studied hard. I graduated summa cum laude. It’s fantastic, all that good stuff. I made friends. I had a good time. I got to socialize. I took courses and things I never thought I would take courses in and expanded my mind. I was happy, which was important. I haven't thought about those years in a long time and to this degree. I'm glad to be telling you about it.
I appreciate you sharing that in this space. I'm moved by that story just you being able to share it and speak to that because it's easy to go, “I went to school. It didn't work out. I did journalism and now I am here.” There are lots and lots of bumps along the way, to speak to those and to speak to the lows and to share with people that could happen, but you can get past that. There's not just one path to getting to where you are. There are twists and turns, zigzags, and all kinds of things before you find what you enjoy. Creating time for that and space for that. Thank you for sharing that inspiring story. I feel that it was painful at times, but I appreciate it.
Thank you for asking. When I was in my twenties, and that story was very fresh for me. I always was afraid to tell people about it because if you summarize it, I dropped out of an Ivy League, and I went to a state school. “You're a loser,” is what it comes off as. I understand that is also going to be the perception. My life has turned out well. I'm very happy with the trajectory that I've had and these extremely humbling experiences that I've had have taught me so much about the world and myself that they have been amazing teachers. Do I wish I didn't have to go through that pain? Of course.
Immigrant Experience: These extremely humbling experiences have taught me so much about the world and myself. They have been amazing teachers.
I would've been here if didn't have to go through that anguish. I don't want to be a Pollyanna and be like, “There's a silver lining,” because sometimes things just stink. They have forced me to confront a lot of things that were maybe easier to not look at and try to be more purposeful about my path in life also maybe being open to making mistakes more so than I would've been.
Taking risks and sometimes disappointing people. This is coming from an immigrant myself and I am an engineer because my parents wanted me to be an engineer and my dad picked up Computer Science for me. I was like, “This is what we're doing then.”
“This is what we're doing.” I get that.
It's hard to disappoint as an older daughter, especially to disappoint your parents. Sometimes you have to do those things. I'm sure your parents are so happy and we talked about that. They're so proud of you and what you have been able to accomplish in your life. You are right. It is in the thick of it. It's so hard to look beyond that and to see the silver lining that we're talking about. I remember being nineteen and things were not working out and it felt like the end of the world like, “This is it. I'm done.”
“What possible path can there be? I don't know anything else. What else is there?” Suddenly you're in this brand new world of, “How do I proceed from here? There's no guide.” My parents had no idea. Nobody I knew had been through anything.
You mentioned your dad was an engineer. No wonder he was like, “Try harder. This is possible. I did it.”
I was and still am a very self-feed nerd. People meet me. They look at me. They're like, “How could you be anything but an engineer? That's clearly who you are.” I tell them, “I'm a journalist and I also do a lot of art.” They're like, “That doesn't fit.” You can be all of those things is what I have learned. One can be all of these things quite happily. Had I taken my father's advice at that time to just try harder, it's very possible I could have graduated or it's a conversation I've had with my engineer husband, had I gone to a different school that didn't insist on Computer Science, being in an engineering school and the curriculum had been different. It's very possible I could have graduated from Computer Science. I think a few years into a career doing whatever front-end, back-end, or whatever I would've ended up doing, I probably would've come to the same conclusion, “It's not what I wanted to do.” Forced it a little earlier than maybe what would've happened, I think I would've gotten there anyway.
One can be all of these things quite happily; it is very possible.
From Cybersecurity To Space
Let's talk about where you are, what you do, and what you've accomplished. Let's share that.
It's another twisting road. That Journalism degree and Computer Science both ended up serving me quite well. My first job out of college was at a business-to-business tech magazine, which only lasted a few more years until a recession happened and it folded. I got laid off pretty quickly after that. I got hired by a cybersecurity company called Sophos not long after my first job. They needed an in-house storyteller was essentially how they spun it. It was corporate marketing. That's officially the role, but it was a lot of front-end work. I was doing a lot of web dev. It was not in the job description. I was like, “I can do that. Let me do that.”
I was working in Lotus Notes and SharePoint doing bizarre. I made a ticketing system in SharePoint, which is the most horrible thing I've ever had to do in my life. I'm like, “I'm the marketing person doing that. Why are you asking me to do this?” but I did it and did all sorts of web dev but also corporate marketing. I was doing customer videos, all the stuff that companies need to tell their story. I was out there learning how to do that. That was an apprenticeship on the job learning.
More importantly, I was learning about the cybersecurity industry from the inside, which was something that I knew a little bit about from a ComSci point of view. One of my jobs when I was at Columbia was to be like an IT house call. I was going to people's rooms and my computer's broken. He helped me fix it and I'd be the person helping them run a virus check or something. That was my level of experience. It was a good job.
You will be amazed at the weird things people were putting in their computers. This was back in 2001 when people had the giant towers. It was quite funny that my knowledge of the industry was very limited when I got this job at a cybersecurity company. At the time there was talk about trying to go public. That was a whole other thing. It didn't happen, but that was the talk at the time. I dove into cybersecurity, learning from the subject matter experts, the researchers who I was working with hand in hand, trying to get their stories out there and accompanying them on media calls. It was fascinating. A common refrain I would hear was, “You know a lot more about this stuff than the typical marketing person,” then I would be like, “There’s a funny reason for that.”
That ended up serving me well in the course of my career. I was at Sophos for some time. I bounced around from a couple of startups in the meantime, then I got hired by another cybersecurity company a few years later called Rapid7. I was there when they were quite small all the way through their IPO. I was doing a lot of corporate communications, community work, and social media work. I bounced around a lot in the marketing team.
This was probably early in the social media era.
It's def very different from what it is now. I could not do a social media manager's job nowadays, but this was when Twitter was perhaps reaching its height to its actual height. Video was starting to be a thing. It was still a lot of text-based work and image-based work. The video wasn't as huge. When I was at Sophos, Twitter was brand new. I remember one of my very first presentations to the entire corporate marketing team globally was, “There's this new platform called Twitter.” I had to try and convince them that it was a thing that maybe we should look into, which here we are nowadays. That was quite funny looking back on it. Those two cybersecurity companies had very different experiences, but especially at Rapid7, going through the small to IPO skyrocket was quite an experience. It was intense, but I learned a lot. Now I am a podcast host talking about space, not cyberspace.
Tell me how that happened.
After working at Rapid7 for a number of years, I decided that I needed to slow down. That life was wearing me out. I was working crazy hours. The job was fun but very intense. I don't think I had very good personal boundaries around it. Frankly. I don't think it's the job as much as it was me.
How many years into your career journey did you have that realization?
It’s about a decade. I was in my very early 30s. Isn't that funny how that works out?
Isn't that interesting?
It takes about a decade. I remember when I turned 30 I remember thinking this is the age at which a lot of people start wondering if this is the right thing for them. I remember telling my then-fiance fiance now husband, “I'm going to ride this wave as long as I possibly can. I will stay at Rapid7 as long as they will have me,” because I loved the work. It was a lot of fun. My personal boundaries around work were none. I was working some crazy hours, some weeks, not because anybody was asking me but because I wanted to. It was taking a serious toll on my health, mental and physical.
My doctor had like, “You need to look out for yourself because this is not good.” At the beginning of 2016, I told my boss, “I want to go freelance. This has been fun but I need to leave to save my own sanity and my health.” I decided to do freelance marketing. Four days into my freelance gig, my father had a stroke that killed him. My life got completely turned upside down four days into my new phase of life. The timing was just unbelievable. All the clients that I had lined up were ready to go, my father was in the hospital for a month and then I was mourning his death afterward for a few months.
I was a mess so I had to start my business all over again. About half a year later, I was pregnant with my daughter. My doctor had told me I could never get pregnant. I had been told that that wouldn't be happening. My daughter was not a surprise, but she was unexpected in a good way. I was told that this would not be happening. She was very welcome, but then I was on maternity leave trying to build up my business yet again for a 2nd or 3rd time. Every time I was able to do it, I was able to get new clients, I was able to get the work done, it was amazing in the course of two years I had to reinvent my freelance business 2 or 3 different times. I was doing freelance cybersecurity marketing and podcasting at that time.
My daughter was four months old when I got asked by former Sophos colleagues of mine to guest on their cybersecurity podcast. For reasons I will never understand, but I'm very grateful for, I ended up being very popular. They asked me to come back over and over to the point that people would come up to them at events and ask where. Here I am, freelancing at home with a baby spitting up on my shoulder and apparently I'm popular. It was very weird.
I kept doing that work over the years. I got scouted by my current employer while still freelancing because I went to a NASA event on my own as an artist. They didn't realize that I was into space, but I'm a giant space geek. They said, “She can podcast and she likes space and we're looking for a host for a new space show that we're doing.” That was luck. I was ready to move back into full-time work at that point. My daughter was going into kindergarten. I was like, “I am ready to lean back in a little bit.” The timing worked out. It was a coincidence. Here I am, a year late still doing it,
Hosting a podcast.
It's a daily show about space.
That's one of your interests. It's not that you went to school for it, you pursued it or any of that sort. It’s just something that enjoy “hobby” or one of your passions and here you are.
It's not like talking about the fun more like the sciencey part of space. It's the industry and the business part of space. Me doing a lot of internal comms work for companies, it's a lot of understanding how that works and doing business-to-business reporting. That's what my background was in journalism as well. It's still using a lot of the arsenal of my skillset. In this case, it is also talking about an area that I happen to have a lot of personal interest in. There's a big overlap with cybersecurity, which is part of the pitch that they gave me. It's been in the news a lot lately too. I end up talking about cybersecurity a lot in the show, which delights me. It's like, “Yes, I'm using everything I've ever learned in this job.”
Computer Science, your two years of journalism, your time at Rapid7, doing corporate marketing, and then one of the subjects that you are passionate about. All of it coming together.
It congealed. I feel extremely lucky that that happened.
A Child Of Immigrant Parents
It's nice to thank luck or something. It sounds like you've also worked hard to be where you are today and to find these opportunities and put yourself out there. Going to a NASA event as an artist, that's cool, then going on a podcast that's pretty cool. There's a level of you are trying to learn on the job. You're trying to hone those skills. You could say luck, but there is a significant amount of hard work and perseverance.
Thank you. It's very kind of you to say. As you can tell my dad was a very big deal in my life. I was very close to my dad. He often affectionately called me half an engineer, which sounds like a dig, but he meant it, nothing but love. He meant it with love. As in, “Those two years of engineering school counted.” I'm the one who still does not just tech support for my family, but I'm the one who does like all the building and anything that requires doing something that's requiring the build. I'm that person.
My father dubbed me half an engineer. I wear that with pride. I'm not a full engineer but half of one. I'll take that. He often told me that I had a knack for landing on my feet, which both my parents have been through so much as many immigrant parents have us as their kids. We want to let them know that their sacrifices were worth it because we know how much they gave up to give us a better shot at life. For my father to say like he knew that I'd find a path forward because I have always managed that, that he had that faith in me.
I'm still getting choked up thinking about it how he had that vote of confidence because my dad had been through so much in his life, lots of war and starvation. He'd been through a lot. That meant the world to me because I had such a soft life in comparison to what my parents went through. It's because of them and their sacrifices that I was able to grow up in suburban Massachusetts and comfort. I don't take that for granted at all.
There's a level of burden that you carry, not in a bad way, but as a child of immigrant parents, you carry a heavy burden not just like Asian parents making them a proud level of burden, but there's an extended or more intense version of that. My Indian parents are great at reminding me even though they aren't immigrants, but they're very good at reminding me the sacrifices and things like that. I feel like carrying that intense burden and trying to prove myself to not just my parents because I want to make them proud, not to prove myself to them but to prove myself to the world.
That you're worthy of being the next step. They did all this and they tell you they did this for you. Were you worthy of that? I now know as a parent myself my parents don't want that for me. They didn't want me to feel that way. They never said that to me explicitly, but I felt that way. That's not their fault. This is just my part of the equation. That expectation was that I hosted on myself. My dad never said, “You must be worthy of this.”
It's something that you just end up absorbing. They don't explicitly say these things to you. It feels like something that you need to do to let them know that their sacrifices were not “wasted,” but a lot of heaviness there.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all. I grew up in an area where there were a lot of other Greeks and Greek Americans around, but I only had like one casual Greek American friend. All my other friends were also immigrant kids of various different ethnicities. All of us had different languages spoken at home from each other. All our foods are different. That means all our get-togethers were so delicious.
All of us are different from our home cultures. In many cases, my friends were the immigrants themselves. In other cases they were like me, they were the child of immigrants. We all felt that. That was a uniting thread for a lot of us. It was all different for each of us in our own way, but that was definitely a similarity. I don't think it's a coincidence. We didn't seek each other out. It just happened that way.
I personally feel that as an immigrant myself, I have more things to talk about or relate with when it comes to another immigrant than another Indian that was born and raised here, and has been here for years and their family has been here for years. It doesn't matter whether you come from whatever part of the world, but moving to a country, trying to find that confidence back where you move around the world or your world. Growing up in India, I knew the language, the norms, how to speak and what to say. It wasn't perfect, but at the same time, there was a level of confidence in who I was and what I was about. I remember moving to this country and after a year and a half when I went back to India after grad school, there was like, “I realized I felt the confidence again.”
I understand how to live here. It's not that the rules are written down somewhere. There's a level of, “I get the customs. I get the language. I get what they're trying to say. I get the slang.” It's beautiful how you can be from the opposing side of the world but moving to a new country is such a different experience that there's a lot to connect on that part.
It's heavy. My parents, you, and folks who are immigrants you have at the hardest.
There's a different level that I can't comprehend. I can't imagine it.
That is probably not also a coincidence why I often encounter other children of immigrants doing the job that I do because we're used to straddling different worlds and asking the question that maybe a lot of people feel is a dumb obvious question because we have to. My parents didn't know many or any American idioms aside from ones that were in their like learn English books. I grew up in Massachusetts where every other idiom is sports-related or Catholicism related. My parents don't know American sports and we're not Catholic.
As a child of immigrants, we're used to straddling different worlds.
I'd be like, “What does that mean in my American accent?” My teachers or neighbors would go, “Why don't you know what that means?” It's like, “My parents aren't from here. They don't know those idioms so I need you to explain that to me.” You get over that embarrassment of like, “I don't know what that means.” I still even as an adult find myself doing that like, “You need to explain what that means because I do not know. I never heard that one.”
It's an outsider experience even though you are not an outsider. I am the outsider so it's fair that I'm having an outsider experience. Your parents had an outsider experience, but your experience of being like, “I was born here. I am from here.” You are still having that outsider experience.
I remember in high school my friends and I were like, “What's a prom like? Why is this such a big deal to all of our American classmates?” None of us went because we were like, “What is this? Why would you go to this?”
Try explaining it to immigrant parents like, “I'm going to go to this dance party with a guy.”
Also, probably alcohol and sex. That was an absolute no. I also didn't understand. I was like, “Why? I don't get it.” We are like, “That doesn't sound like fun.” I'm not speaking for everybody. My friend and I were like, “Eh.” I remember I had a teacher pull me aside and go, “You need to understand this is a very important American upbringing experience that you need to have.” He was concerned for me that I wasn't going. I was like, “No one's explained to me why I need to go to this.” To this day, I'm like, “I don't think I missed much.” That example always stood out for me because I'm like, “What is that? Why is that a thing?”
Motherhood
We can talk about this. I want to know so many things. I have completely thrown out all the questions that I had, tech, immigrant experience, and things of that sort. I don't even think we're going to get into Rapid-fire because there's no time. I'll probably have you over again. You mentioned your daughter. I want to know about that aspect of it, that through the line of being raised by immigrants yourself, how is that impacting how you are raising your daughter nowadays?
Do you want me to bring it back to tech as well? I can do that.
It's up to you.
I'll follow your lead.
This conversation is lovely and I think I'm probably going to need you to come back so we can talk about how you've seen cybersecurity change over the last decade and things like that. There are more questions I have.
I have so many thoughts on that. sure. I would love to.
Let's talk about how being an immigrant and walking in those two boats or worlds at the same time, has impacted your experience as a mother and how you're raising your daughter.
This is one of those things where I'm sure there's a Greek American reading to this right now going, “This could not be more different from my experience.” Mine is unusual even within the Greek American community for a number of reasons. I don't have a large extended family around. I have my mother, that's it. My only sibling, my brother lives far away, but I see him when I can. He lives far so I see him a few times a year. I don't have that stereotypical giant network of extended family around. It is a stereotype in the Greek American community, but it's there for a reason. I don't know if it's just because I live in Massachusetts and up here we're very reserved.
I know Greek Americans in New York and New Jersey, everybody knows each other and each other's business. I've been to a gazillion weddings down there. It's not quite the same up here, but I'm also introverted. I don't have a giant community enveloping us. I'm not religious anymore. That is a part of it. I'm not part of the religious community that completely divorces you from the ethnic community in the United States many times, which is a whole other show on its own, to be honest. I also did not marry a Greek person. My husband is French-Canadian-Polish-English. He's one of those typical White guy American Mutt. Two generations back, his family is immigrants too. It's not that far back. we don't share ethnicity at all.
Our daughter is a mix of lots of different things, but because I am the one with a strong ethnic tie, she goes to a Greek school. My mom and I speak Greek to her. We took her to Greece this past summer to meet my uncles and aunts. I took her to the graveyard where my grandparents are buried. We took her to my mother's village where my mom and my grandmother were born. I don't know if she'll remember any of that, but I will remember that I took her there. I took her to the beach where I used to vacation with my dad where he and his brother would ride their bikes as kids. There's so much history in these places that we took her. I'll remember that I took her there and for me and my relatives, that was very important for my mother especially.
She's going to have to figure out her own way and her own identity. I gave her a very ethnic name for a reason. I didn't want that part of her history to be erased because that is ultimately what often happens in America. I wanted her to have something to hang onto. My parents are both Greek from Greece. That is not her story. Hers is going to be her own. I hope I'm not passing on my awkwardness, but I probably am about like, I don't know idioms, I don't understand why we do certain things. I ask weird questions like, “Why do we do it this way? I don't get that.” I'll get into these conversations. I'll ask questions and people go, “Stop asking that question. That's annoying.” I'm going, “Have we thought about why we do this thing this way?” Valentine's Day was one. I'm like, “Why are we doing this? This is crazy.” Stuff like that.
Immigrant Experience: I didn't want that part of her history to be erased because that is ultimately what often happens in America, and I wanted her to have something to hang on to.
Are you the older or the younger sibling?
I am the younger sibling and my brother is five years older.
I was going to say this sounds so much like my sister.
Is this like a younger sibling thing?
She moved here and started asking questions like, “Why won't I be allowed to do something?” I was like, “This is just a visa policy,” or something like that. She's like, “Okay, but why.” “I don't know. I've been in this country for ten years and I've never questioned why this is a visa policy. Why are you like this?”
This is why my brother and I argue. If you ask my brother, he'd be like, “Maria is the most annoying person on the planet. She won't stop asking her damn questions.”
I find it inspiring. I'm many years in this country at this point. She moved a few years ago, and she's just like, “Why is this a policy? Why can't I do this as an immigrant? I already have all these things. My visa allows me to do this. Why?” I'm like, “Do you know racism and they want to keep their jobs for Americans?” She's like, “I want the hospital to tell me that.”
As she should. If they're going to be racist, they should own up to that and be like, “We're being racist.” It's not good but make them say.
“I'm not going to ask it now, but wait, I will ask it one day.” I'm like, “I've never thought about asking these questions. I can only work these many hours. I can't do a side job. I can't move whatever the policies are and I just work within that.” She's like, “I don't know what to tell you.”
To be fair, immigration is an absolute mess. It's super unfair. I have so many friends in this similar situation. It kills me.
You asked questions. It is good. We need you.
It’s very annoying. I annoy everybody, but I own up to it. I don't know if it's necessarily my personality. I'm not sure. I think it was born out of the necessity of, “My home context does not include this thing. I genuinely do not understand what it is that you are asking of me or what you are telling me because this is brand-new information. I'm not asking to be annoying. I genuinely need this explained.” Unfortunately, a lot of times those things are often automatic things that people don't think about. I'm asking them to explain a thing they've never had to think about. People don't like that.
No, but it's good. Tell me that your daughter has picked up on that and she's asking all kinds of questions.
She definitely has and I love that. It makes my job as a parent much harder, but I think it's a very important trait. It's one that my husband and I both want to nurture. Recognizing that we are answering a lot of questions all the time, explaining and sometimes negotiating on things we wish we didn't have to. It's very important, especially for girls and women to feel that confidence to push back on things. Especially, if we're talking about important things like consent and autonomy. To trust that gut and be like, “I have a question about this. This doesn't feel right. Can you explain this to me, please?” To feel like you're allowed to take that space and ask that question because we're often made to feel like we can't and you're stupid for even thinking of it. Maybe I am stupid for thinking of it. I'm still going to ask.
It's very important, especially for girls and women, to feel that confidence to push back on things, especially for important things like consent and autonomy.
You're not. I think it's beautiful. I love hearing stories of women, my generation, when we're raising kids, like this generation is raising their kids, sometimes the kids are sassy and annoying because they're asking questions. As an outsider, thank you for raising them to ask all kinds of questions. I can't wait to be 60 and watching all of these kids kicking ass and being like, “Our generation raised these kids.”
Being a little on the outside of that one, but generally, my generation, because I'm older than you, it was like, work within the confines of what you've got of the systems that exist and definitely don't rattle the cage and don't question why things work the way they do. If you work hard you'll succeed in them. I like that people much younger than me are going, “Those systems stink.” I hate to sound like a broken record. It does make me think of my dad who often said, “Sometimes the system needs to fail.” He experienced that many times over like, “You got to question why sometimes things are the way they are and say, ‘That's not working.’” My fellow elder millennials, that didn't work out so much for us.
I love that you're extending that freedom to make her own choices, make mistakes, take those risks, and hopefully not feel the burden. You can only control so much and maybe she will feel the burden too. Who's to say? It sounds like a freeing experience in terms of questioning “authority” because she's beginning with questioning her parents who are the “authority.”
On paper.
It's beautiful, like extending the freedom, the choices, and the abundance of, “You can't say it again. You can't say it enough.” Taking risks and making mistakes. I hope you are proud of yourself.
If there's only one lesson I impart to my daughter failure is the best teacher. Especially in the tech world, we say it a lot. Whether or not we give people the space to make those mistakes is a different situation. I'm extremely lucky and extremely privileged that I've had the space to make some mistakes and be able to recover from them. I hope my daughter will feel that she can try to take some risks and be safe that failure is a great teacher, honestly.
Immigrant Experience: Failure is the best teacher.
I like how you're tying it all back with a lot of making mistakes in tech. Some of us.
That is a phrase I've heard so much in my career. Fail hard and fail often. Go for it. It's like, “Am I going to be on a pip if I do that?” What does that look like?
This has been a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your story and being vulnerable. Thank you for just indulging my questions and me. I think we will have to do another one so we can talk about your tech journey and discuss more. I had a chance to pick your brain and your experience as a kid raised by immigrant parents. I totally went into it. Thank you.
Thank you for giving me that space and honestly asking the questions. This is the conversation I have with my friends all the time. I don't think I've ever talked about any of this on a show. I'm honored and feel blessed that you asked. Thank you for giving me the space because there's nothing more important to me than this story.
You are very welcome.
I appreciate it.
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About Maria Varmazis
Podcaster, journalist, and content creator with over 15 years experience in telling stories that engage and delight. Always happy to geek out over space and cybersecurity, both professionally and personally!
