Signs

The Moment I Knew I Was On the Wrong Ladder (And Everything Went to Sh*t)

It wasn’t that there was a lightning-bolt moment when I knew for sure I was climbing the wrong ladder. It wasn’t some Eureka!-leap-from-bathtub-and-run-down-street-naked epiphany.

Thank God. I wouldn’t do well in prison.

Instead, the knowledge dawned on me over time, much the same way the sun rises- slowly, patiently, with the sky first growing lighter and then, bit by bit, the ground illuminating until everything is plainly visible.

So, no - not a sudden thing.

But there were signs.

Many, many signs over many, many years.

Like how, growing up, I used to draw and paint and write and read endlessly - literally walking around with my nose buried in a book - but then suddenly as an 18-year-old entering university I was declaring Business as a major.

Or how, at 13 years old, I was ignoring math assignments in class so that I could pull out the college-level book I was reading (much to my teacher’s rage) - and then 10 years later found myself staring at numbers on spreadsheets all day and wondering why I was so tired all the time.

Or how I had dreamed of being an actor, a marine biologist, a writer - never an executive - yet somehow felt a strange compulsion to twist myself into a pretzel and pursue that track anyway.

Or the time in my 20s when I experienced my first panic attack, working late at night in the Starbucks corporate headquarters overlooking Seattle’s Elliot Bay. I thought I was having a brain aneurysm and nearly jumped out a window to make it stop.

Or the time I came back to my hotel room in Shanghai, utterly spent, after spending 14 hours in an Amazon-contracted factory outside the city. I had to dial into a conference call with Seattle and burst into tears, live, in the first five minutes from sheer exhaustion and rage.

Or the time I MC’d one of our corporate events with all the humor, energy and sass of the Golden Globes. The crowd loved it. A manager came up to me after the summit, pulled me aside, and said quietly with a knowing smile: “You’re in the wrong job.”

Or the way I started noticing, after a few years at Amazon, that I loved nothing more than a day with no meetings and a 6-page doc to research and write. When I casually mentioned this to colleagues, they looked at me as though I’d said I loved slicing my own fingers off, one by one, to pass the time.

Until one day, as a fully grown-ass adult in August 2019. The day I finally had to pull my manager into a conference room and, with my head lowered in utter shame, say:

“I … I have a health issue. I can’t go into details, but I am going to need to be out for treatment for a while.”

This was true.

But what I didn’t tell him was that it wasn’t what he was probably thinking. It wasn’t some horrific disease like cancer.

I was depressed.

Deeply, horrifically, can’t-get-out-of-bed-anymore, ideating-how-to-end-it-all-with-minimal-blood depressed.

I was also burned out. But that was sort of like having a gaping hole in your living room floor when the entirety of the house is on fire.

And so, through the wonder of German labor laws, I was officially put on medical leave by my doctor for no less than three months.

Three months with nothing to do except go to therapy twice a week, obediently swallow my SSRIs, take my dog on long walks in Munich’s fall-foilaged English Garden, stare at the river, spend an ungodly amount of money at the nursery building a collection of no less than 47 houseplants - and contemplate my utter failure as a professional and human being.

The quiet - the idleness - drove me to the brink of my sanity. The lack of doing - and therefore the lack of being.

This was … existing? This was unbearable.

Until the beginning of month two.

At the beginning of month two, I began to write.

I bought a journal for the first time in years. I spent hours scribbling away at cafes, in hidden corners of pubs, on my couch, on trains. Words poured out of me. I couldn’t stop.

I built a blog, came out of the closet, and started telling my story for the whole world to read.

I kept journaling, privately. I kept writing. I said all the things I’d always wanted to say. Wrote down all the things I’d always wanted to feel - and gave myself permission to feel them.

Allowed the rage, the frustration, the sadness, the grief, the confusion, the anxiousness, the worry, and - somehow, oddly, the relief - to flow.

I gave myself permission to question everything.

Gave myself permission to simply be, and to write, and to breathe, and to sleep, and to cook, and to aggressively kiss my dog, and to dig around in potting soil for another plant with my bare hands so I could feel every gram of dirt under my fingernails.

And late at night on one dark, rainy autumn evening I finally wrote a sentence in my journal that promised to ruin everything I’d built.

The words stared back at me, blank ink on a page in the warm glow of dim lights:

What if I’m living the wrong life?