By the time I left home, at 18, I felt emotionally beat up, inherently broken. Though I would not be diagnosed with PTSD for decades, I exhibited hypervigilance, an overdeveloped desire for control, nonstop self-blame and the feeling that it was all my fault if something went wrong. These qualities made almost every essential part of living — love, family, friendship — nearly impossible to manage. That is, almost every essential part of living except work.
Childhoods like mine can affect people in ways that make employment, let alone career advancement, difficult. But for me, this dynamic was flipped sideways: I was unnaturally driven to prove my own competence; so unable to absorb criticism that I’d work to avoid it at nearly any cost. In corporate parlance, employees like me tend to be proactive, high-performing, self starters — in short, a manager’s dream.
For more than a decade, I wound my way up and through the ranks, living for the next promotion, a high performance review or simply a pat on the back. I worked in cutthroat women’s magazines and in toxic Fortune 500 corporations, in scrappy start-ups and high pressure Hollywood production companies.
No matter how unrealistic the goals — quadrupling site traffic in two months, leading a team of five to do the work of 20 — I met them, often at a high cost to my relationships and my health. I conflated success with happiness, productivity with value. Again and again, I sought out high-challenge, high-stress jobs. I thrived when I felt bad. It was a skill that I’d been practicing my entire life.
But by the morning of my manager’s all-caps diatribe, I’d somehow had enough. Maybe it was the therapy I’d recently started or maybe it was the wisdom of age, but I didn’t answer my boss’s messages. Our meeting never materialized, and the crisis simply dissolved.
