0. an end

the start of a new series

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

My beginning was abrupt. I can remember it as clear as I can still hear the recruiter offering me my dream job. I jumped in the ocean afterwards, and between the crackling of salt and the crashing of waves the realization - that everything had just changed - washed over me.

Life was at my fingertips; I was almost 27.

So I flew to LA - with my golden ticket to a golden dream - and I bought expensive sunglasses and leased an expensive car and nothing was as it had been. Which is to say that it was like the movies - in that I thought I was important now - in that the trappings trapped me.

Of course, I told myself they wouldn’t. That I’m not that kind of person; which, of course, was a lie. Of the worst kind - that’s told unknowingly and to yourself; that doesn’t just obscure the truth but obscures the person; that leads me to latch onto power and wealth as an identity instead of a tool; that makes me a tool - malleable, to my material source.

Was that the end? The sunglasses, the car; or was it something else?

Was it the moral corruption? The day I advised my team against buying movies with LGBTQ leads because our data indicated ‘limited audience size;’ because the company removed diversity from its culture memo; because I once cared about things like representation - had believed, once, that it mattered - and now it didn’t; and even though one of my bosses quit that day all I thought about was the politics of her leaving and not the reason beneath it.

Was that the end? When she left and I stayed because my golden dream had become a gilded cage?

No - it still wasn’t - because shortly afterwards I locked myself in a closet, during the Super Bowl, and rather than watch my new hometown team win its first championship with people I hoped to call friends, I apologized for the background noise and adjusted my deck again; and even this wasn’t the end because I still hadn’t burned out yet. Or, rather, I had burned out - twice already - only to recover and decide, each time, that it was worth it after all; to hang onto my golden dream in this golden town where nothing is as it seems.

And still, I wonder, if that’s not the precise point that I lost my optimism - hollowing out those very dreams I thought I was choosing; ensuring, ultimately, that they’d never come true - or at least not in the way I had hoped.

“You’re so in it,” a friend who’s no longer a friend told me, one night, as we circled the block we both lived on. Of course, she was so in it, too - though her anger - from burning out, again and again, hoping, each time, for some different outcome - had yet to erupt like mine had. I was telling her about how I stayed up, the night before, drawing org charts in the shower, wondering if the costs of careerism are only realized after they’re incurred, if I’m running out of time - as I stared at the hair fallen around my drain - to become someone else - to live the fulfilling life our ‘success’ had forgotten to give us; that if this was the dream then why did I feel so empty; that if I felt so empty, then why was I here?

I had been re-org’d again, to a job both bigger and worse than the one I had before, and couldn’t tell if my old boss was trying to crush me or promote me. My therapist at the time was trying to convince me to quit when all I wanted was help - with crushing anxiety - and so I talked about it, with a trusted mentor at work, who told me that this place isn’t for everyone - that the meds worked - and I cried because I still wanted things to work there - because I had worked - so hard, for so long - to get off the meds that she and everyone else in this golden town seemed to need to get through the day.

Which is all to say that the therapist fired me, when I refused to look for another job, and then the job fired me, too - but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because those still aren’t the moments where this chapter ends and the next one begins.