I knew about the emails for a long time before I said a word. One of my people wrote short emails. Direct. Right to the point. She was trying to be efficient, and she was. In person, she was lovely. Warm, easy to work with, a pleasure. But most of
I was awake at 2 a.m. again. Then 4 a.m. Same ceiling. Same loop. I was deciding whether to leave a job I had poured myself into. For years I'd fought to shield my team from a culture that hard times had stripped bare. Somewhere along
I posted a picture of myself in middle school on LinkedIn. Not a professional headshot. Not the good angle from a conference stage. A photo from the bad bangs and perm era, sitting right next to a caption meant for grown adults who read quarterly reports and buy industrial ceramics
I got promoted to manager, and for a while, I was insufferable. Not loud insufferable. Not the type who yells in meetings. Something quieter, and in some ways worse: I performed the job instead of doing it. I'd been a supervisor for a couple of years by then.
Someone I barely know messaged me to ask if I was okay. Not a friend. A work acquaintance. She'd been reading what I write, and something in it worried her. I sat with that for a few days. Because she wasn't wrong to ask. Look at
The necklace was a piece of clear quartz about the size of a thumbnail. I wore it to trade shows because it reminded me to stay steady in rooms designed to be loud. A coworker looked at it and asked, half-joking, whether I was one of those crystal people.
I made the right call and drove home in silence. Not the good kind of silence. The kind where you don't turn the radio on because you can't stand the idea of a song having an opinion about your day. I had let someone go. It
In middle school I was elected to a group called Natural Helpers. That is a real thing that really happened, and I'd like you to sit with the name for a second, because I did not sit with it for about thirty years. After that it just followed
I got promoted, and I panicked quietly. Not the kind of panic anyone could see. I still ran the meetings. I still hit the numbers. But underneath it, I was terrified someone would notice I didn't actually know how to do this yet. So I did what a
I used to tell myself it was efficiency. People help you when they like you. They follow you when they like you. So somewhere along the way, being liked became a management strategy I never said out loud. It worked. For a while. I softened feedback until it lost its
I sat with a market entry decision for six weeks. Six weeks of spreadsheets. Six weeks of "let me just get one more data point." Six weeks of telling my team we were "close" to a decision while I quietly reworked the same three slides, looking
For years, I wore my full calendar like a badge. Back-to-back meetings. A reply sent at 11pm. Lunch eaten over a keyboard. If someone asked how I was, the answer was always the same word. Slammed. And I was proud of it. Here's the confession. I