I was a nine-to-whenever-the-work-ended type of chick.
For most of my career, I understood what it meant to work until the work was done. I didn’t watch the clock. I watched the work.
I wasn’t trying to keep up with the Joneses.
I was trying to learn the playbook.
I studied other women.
The hair. The shoes. The poise. The demeanor. The attitude. The facial expressions. The way they walked into a room. The way they spoke to men. The way they occupied space.
It didn’t come naturally to me.
For as long as I can remember, the women I looked up to were corporate women. Women who were taking positions men had traditionally held and making them their own.
I was a little girl in the late 1980s watching Working Girl, Baby Boom, and 9 to 5. I watched Sigourney Weaver. Diane Keaton. I watched women who had careers, offices, ambition, money, power.
I wanted that.
My father made sure I understood early that I was supposed to aspire.
I remember saying maybe I would be a secretary.
He immediately corrected me.
You don’t want to be a secretary.
You don’t want to be a nurse.
If you’re going to be a doctor, be the doctor.
If you’re going to be a teacher, be the principal.
If you’re going to work in an office, be the guy in the corner.
So I learned.
I learned how to climb.
I learned how to perform.
And somewhere along the way, I became very, very good at it.
I also became a grinder.
I worked in New York City. I worked hard and played hard. I remember those years everyone is nostalgic about now—the early and mid-2000s, when we’d go from the office to the gym to happy hour without ever going home.
We were all still in our office clothes.
The suit came off. The workout happened. The makeup got touched up. The suit went back on.
Then we went to the bar.
That was life.
And I didn’t question it because everyone around me was doing the same thing.
This was adulthood.
This was ambition.
This was what successful women did.
Except I was also a deeply creative person.
And I learned something much later than I should have:
Corporate America doesn’t necessarily reward creativity.
It rewards creativity when creativity produces something the organization can monetize.
A creative idea that doesn’t drive a market, a demographic, a revenue number, or some other measurable outcome is often just noise.
That was difficult for me to reconcile.
Because I loved the work.
I loved figuring things out.
I loved analysis. I loved systems. I loved building roadmaps and seeing how all the pieces connected.
I didn’t hate working.
I hated the performance around working.
And then I had a child.
In 2019, while I was pregnant, I started hearing the whisper.
Slow down.
My body was telling me.
My mind was telling me.
Slow down.
Then the pandemic happened.
And I couldn’t.
Not because I didn’t want to.
Because I didn’t know how.
I wasn’t equipped for slowing down.
I was equipped for survival.
So I kept going.
Eventually, I became a completely different person.
I was trying so hard to keep everything together that it felt like I was holding my entire life together with a bobby pin.
At any moment, everything could collapse.
I was managing a house of cards.
I had a demanding career. I was going through a separation. I was raising a four-year-old. I was building a new relationship. I was navigating family problems. I was dealing with my own health.
I was trying to be everything to everyone while barely recognizing myself.
And I was exhausted.
Not I need a vacation exhausted.
I mean the kind of exhausted where you realize the person you have become is no longer the person you recognize in the mirror.
Then we came out of COVID.
And something changed.
I watched everyone start putting the costumes back on.
The suits.
The offices.
The commutes.
The meetings.
The performance.
And I remember thinking:
Why are we doing this again?
For a lot of people, returning to normal was comforting.
For me, it was impossible.
I couldn’t unsee what I had seen.
The pandemic had stripped away the illusion that all of this was necessary.
And when the world started putting the illusion back together, I couldn’t convince myself to believe it anymore.
I still tried.
Because that’s what I knew how to do.
And then came 2023.
2023 was the year everything started coming apart.
Not one thing.
Everything.
Piece by piece, the life I had been holding together with a bobby pin started unraveling.
And the work was the final straw.
Being pushed out wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the last thing that happened after an entire year of things falling apart.
By then, I was already exhausted. Already questioning everything. Already realizing that the way I had been living wasn’t sustainable.
And somewhere in that year, I started doing something I had rarely done before.
I started counting.
Not just the hours I was being paid for.
Billable hours.
Non-billable hours.
The work that technically counted.
The work that somehow didn’t.
The calls.
The preparation.
The follow-up.
The administrative work.
The things that had to get done whether anyone considered them work or not.
The number kept climbing.
I was working roughly 60 to 65 hours a week.
And at the same time, I was trying to raise a child.
There were calls while my child was asleep.
Calls while my child was awake.
Moments when my child had to occupy herself because I had to work.
I was constantly trying to figure out how to manage both.
Work demanded more.
Motherhood demanded more.
Life demanded more.
And there was only one of me.
I kept trying to make the math work.
Eventually, I realized the math was the problem.
There weren’t enough hours.
And I couldn’t keep sacrificing myself to make the numbers work.
That was when something finally broke.
Not my ambition.
Not my ability to work.
The belief that this was the only way to work.
So when the final piece fell, I didn’t rebuild the house of cards.
I walked away.
It wasn’t some beautiful, cinematic moment of enlightenment.
It was more like the final push.
The kind of push where life stops whispering and starts yelling.
But looking back, I don’t think it happened to me.
It happened for me.
Because I needed to stop.
I needed to be a mother.
I needed to be a partner.
I needed to be a person.
I needed to figure out who the hell I was underneath all the roles I had accumulated.
And here’s what surprised me:
I didn’t become less ambitious.
I didn’t stop caring about excellent work.
I didn’t stop solving complicated problems.
I didn’t stop building systems.
I didn’t stop doing analysis.
I didn’t stop creating roadmaps.
I just stopped believing I needed a conference room to prove that I could do those things.
I eventually realized I didn’t necessarily need to work in corporate.
I could work corporate adjacent.
I could take everything I had spent decades learning and apply it without living inside the machine.
And I did some of my best work that way.
My best analysis.
Some of my best roadmaps.
Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever done.
And I did it without needing to become someone else first.
That was the revelation.
The work was never the problem.
The performance was.
Today, I work from home in the Upstate of South Carolina.
I’m often barefoot.
I’m usually wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
Sometimes it’s Doc Martens.
Sometimes it’s Harley boots.
That’s about it.
There was a time when my shoes had to match my purse, which had to match my belt, which had to match my suit.
I had an entire visual language for being a successful woman.
Now I can sit barefoot in my house and build the same analysis I would have built in a conference room wearing a Hugo Boss suit.
And the analysis doesn’t know what I’m wearing.
Neither does the system.
Neither does the roadmap.
Neither does the strategy.
The work is still good.
Maybe better.
Because now I’m not spending half my energy performing the role of the person doing the work.
I’m just doing the work.
At 47, my metrics are different.
Twenty years ago, success was about climbing.
More money.
More responsibility.
A bigger title.
A better office.
A more impressive resume.
Now I measure something else.
Energy.
Time.
Where I spend it.
Who gets it.
What gets it.
My career is no longer my identity.
And that’s probably the biggest shift of all.
I used to think that becoming the woman in the corner office meant I had made it.
Now I think making it means having enough ownership over your life that you can decide what the corner office is worth to you.
For me, it wasn’t worth it.
And maybe this is the part I couldn’t have understood when I was that little girl watching Sigourney Weaver and Diane Keaton.
I thought I was watching women become powerful.
What I was really watching was women learning how to occupy a world that wasn’t necessarily built for them.
So I learned how to occupy it, too.
I learned the language.
I learned the clothes.
I learned the rooms.
I learned the politics.
I learned how to walk into a room full of men and make myself impossible to ignore.
I learned how to build the strategy, run the transformation, solve the problem, and then explain to everyone else why the problem existed in the first place.
I became the woman my younger self was looking for.
And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t need her anymore.
Not because she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
She got me here.
She taught me how to fight.
She taught me how to think.
She taught me how to work.
She taught me how to take up space.
But she also taught me that I had to keep proving that I deserved the space I occupied.
I don’t believe that anymore.
I don’t need the suit.
I don’t need the office.
I don’t need the title.
I don’t need to be the first one in and the last one out.
I don’t need to be exhausted to prove that I care.
I don’t need to perform ambition for anyone.
I can still build the system.
I can still see the pattern.
I can still walk into chaos and find the structure underneath it.
I can still do the work.
I just get to decide what the work looks like now.
At 47, I don’t want the corner office.
I want the corner of my own life.
And that, it turns out, is a much better place to sit.
I learned the playbook.
I know it by heart.
I just don’t need to play anymore.