can't handle the heat
chapter 2: when i left (2019-2020)
ily good luck!! u got this
^a note a wrote to myself immediately after finishing the last piece; i knew exactly where i wanted to go, and i knew this would be a painful curtain to draw back.
and i know i can do this!
--
my time with the dream team came to an end in late summer 2019, just after we’d finished a lot of the technicalities and just as the bureaucratic discussions began.
the bittersweetness of this moment will never leave me - - i wanted to see my plan through its fruition but i also salivated at the idea of “not my circus, not my monkeys”.
but it had been a long couple years of gritty work, and i’d seen a few other strong analysts “graduate” from the team into great jobs, so i simply let go. the transition and training of my backfill was funky and imperfect but so is anything real (psst i didn’t know that yet though, and at the time it felt like a threat and failure). i won’t spend time discussing that in detail here because my frustrations were not kind or gracious and they don’t need or deserve validation.
my new team interfaced directly with executive leaders who managed decisions across the world. my new global role involved creating narratives for the downstream business earnings.
some of my work was focused on a specific area - volumes and refining earnings - but at its heart this job was a “jack of all trades” role. in addition to the recurring earnings reviews, i supported hyper-specific analysis of our competitor earnings results in tandem with another teammate. this involved intense data scraping, using proprietary models, reading between the lines of quarterly earnings disclosure statements and attempting to discern the drivers behind our competitors’ decisions. on top of preparation, we also presented competitor results to our CFO on a recurring basis, which meant we handled all questions and follow-up discussions. i also managed reviews of earnings and spend on projects described as “growth”, or high priority activities.
you can imagine i was privy to a lot of human emotion in these discussions.
to be honest, i remember spending the first 6 months simply listening to conversations to figure out who was on the hook for what, and then who expressly was not responsible for X, Y, or Z. it felt like a constant game of tag you’re it, or whack-a-mole - - achieve what you commit to, or be prepared to know the intimate details of the cacophony of variables and players that caused you to achieve more or less than what you promised. there was often grace in acknowledging the complexity of these questions, but always an unyieldingly clear expectation for answers.
of course, my global reporting team was the holder of all the data that a business leader would use to support their perspective, so we would act as the intimate detailers that had to square their circles. this was…frustrating. clarity was in the eye of the beholder, and we were the beholder’s tool to depict it. ick.
at the time i didn’t realize i missed the connection to the day to day, even in the role of finance/accounting.
i did not understand these feelings until i spent a full year on the team. at first i felt panic in the new role because, when compared to my previous role, there was very little technical ownership of process. i found places where i could add consistent process, and i tried to infuse that integrity into any report that i’d complete.
but man, i was missing the independent, gritty work of supporting an earnings creator (instead of now supporting an earnings interpreter).
but i coped.
the job’s hours were (usually) manageable, and when the hours went off the rails it seemed to be for good reason (“ABC is stuck on a meeting with Asia, we have to wait to present this until he is ready”….at 630P on a Friday…to review results that wouldn’t change by Monday…).
i was also making six figures (or at least within spitting distance), so i was a little preoccupied by making it all work.
my boyfriend had been making progress in intense therapy and was working a job he loved; my friends and i went out to dance in bars most weekends. i would sweat out the hangovers with a hot sunday run, and i became a regular at 5AM weekdays at orange theory.
my boyfriend became my fiancé in the most perfect way one chilly november evening. we set our wedding date on our 10th anniversary - October 30, 2020. we took engagement pictures, secured a day of venue and band, i found my wedding dress, it was all happening.
i felt like i was on a path that was tread and lit and secure.
this is where we met in “ok but what happened to your career”.
Enter Mister COVID.
one pre-COVID evening my MOH and i began dreaming about my bachelorette party, and by a stroke of luck we decided to take the trip in March 2020 (instead of August/September). i’ll cherish the long weekend we spent crawling up and down the midcoast of California drinking fine wine and shitty liquor and laughing at nothing. we knew there was some state of emergency in the state of CA at the time, but how the hell could we have really known what that meant was coming.
i arrived home on the evening of march 9th (monday), and by that friday our office had announced a national closure and to work from home until TBD.
there’s probably not much unique to my early pandemic experience; it was almost certainly very similar to yours. but i want to share a few things that were present for me:
immediately upon my return i began obsessively checking my temperature - - i’m talking every hour or sooner if i felt any aches, pains, or fatigue. this continued until i sought online therapy for OCD, and that was when i started to become very very aware of my compulsory thought patterns. i’d continue with the temperature checking for most of the year, but would try to extend the periods of time between checks to challenge the panic thoughts in my brain. the panic found other ways out, tbh, and it would take years of dedicated therapy (and and SNRI) to get a hold of this pattern.
i panic-purchased a peloton two days after we received the WFH order - - i’d been following the burgeoning pandemic in other countries for a couple months at this point and i was pretty sure we were home for a while. i also had been attending orange theory workouts daily and tbh i was addicted to the feeling of results. the idea of having to cope without some form of HIIT exercise scared the bejesus out of me. so i went for it, and by june i’d hit 100 rides. i would spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours each day on the bike, sweating, striving, expressing, sometimes before or after work and other times i’d ride mid-meeting or mid-project. something had been awakened in me with this agency but damn if i knew what to do with it. it got me into shape real quick, and i felt really proud of that.
my fiancé began cooking every single day, so in support i started managing our kitchen inventory like an accountant would; i wanted to know how much reserve pasta, rice, beans, water, etc we had on hand at any time, and would be ready to haul ass to HEB (or order via Amazon) anything i felt was running low. this quickly spread from the kitchen to the entire house, and i started bulk-purchasing cleaning supplies from Amazon. to this day we are still working through the boxes of disinfectant spray i ordered in 2020. our guest closet was filled to the brim with extra supplies - boxes upon boxes, crevices filled with crap that we might need in the event of emergency. looking back, i think a lot of this reaction was rooted in my experience with emergent weather - specifically Hurricane Harvey. my sense of control was rooted in having the right “stuff” to feel prepared and man i was trapped in that loop. i also started sanitizing our grocery purchases one by one. due to my intense fear of contamination, we did not eat a single takeout meal for three months. maintaining sustenance became a chore from hell.
my boundaries around alcohol lost all meaning, and i drank so much wine on my couch. i would work at my desk, frustrated or overjoyed with how a particular meeting would go, and counting the minutes until 430P when i could pour myself a glass (or take a peloton ride, then immediately pour a glass -- you think you can have pleasure without earning it?!). first glass would bleed into a second with dinner, and then i would either finish the bottle over TV and head to bed or we would decide to watch a movie, in which case i’d open the next bottle so i’d have a full few glasses to process whatever entertainment was on screen. restaurants started offering cocktails to-go, so once my fear of contamination was quelled, i would find a heavy drink to pair with whatever we picked up to eat. hangovers and puffiness were regular morning greetings for me, but i didn’t have anywhere to go and i could work it off on my peloton, so was anything really wrong? (pssst. yes.)
we had a front-line view to the BLM protests in houston because we lived in an apartment that overlooked the streets of downtown. these were the first demonstrations in my life where i honestly felt challenged between showing up for what i believed in, and holding the status quo. my fiance attended a couple marches, and i was plauged with anxiety about his safety and our livelihood, but i also knew his choice was the right one. i think this was when my spine began to straighten and i know i didn’t trust it. (pssst. red flag!)
sometime in april i accepted that the pandemic wasn’t going anywhere before october, so we started chatting options for our wedding.
our reactionary response was to simply postpone until october 2021, which we started to do. about halfway into the contract renegotiations, i realized a big expensive party was not my priority while witnessing multiple global crises. the more i sat with that, the more i affirmed i felt that a big ass wedding was not our style.
in may, the city of houston announced the reopening of the county clerk’s office. suddenly there were dates available at the courthouse to get married as soon as end of the june. my fiance was turning 26 in august, so a benefits change was already in our plans before the wedding. why not just do it all in one fell swoop?
as much as i loved (love) our people, i loved (love) our intimate relationship, and the idea of eloping at the courthouse grew brilliant to me. as soon as we could get our parents comfortable with the idea, i scheduled our marriage license and courthouse appointments.
we were married by a harris county judge on july 2, 2020, in a quiet courtroom with only the three of us and two bailiffs present.
we wore masks during the ceremony - his black, and mine lacey, beaded, white; our vows sincere and muffled through cotton - and the judge stepped away as we removed our masks to seal our promise with a kiss.
one of the bailiffs offered to film the ceremony on my ipad, and i’ll never have words to express my gratitude to this complete stranger who eternally captured the moment we committed our lives to each other, the joy on our faces clear as day. we surprised our grandparents on facetime with wedding rings, and later that summer our families threw multiple surprise parties to celebrate our nuptials intimately and safely.
we rewatched our wedding video a million times with a million different people in their homes, holding their hands. what a gift this was.
we spent august on an extended vacation in the mountain woods of georgia (a place that’s always been second home to me), and i had a lot of time to reflect in freedom. i remember floating on a noodle in the middle of a lake, somewhat alone as i’d drifted off from the dock where my family sat, and images of a new life pieced themselves together in my brain.
B and i had kept close contact during the pandemic, and around this time she started encouraging me to think about what i would want to look differently in terms of work. i began to build hope for an ideal workplace where i could commit all this time and energy into something that would also pour back into my heart.
i hadn’t realized how empty it felt to devote my brain into something only intended to take.
yes, i was compensated for my work, but man i was not feeling fulfilled.
i was feeling raw and quiet and loud and empty all at once. and i was confused because my bank accounts were growing, and my power was increasing, and my communities were shifting, and shouldn’t this be what i want?!
come september i knew my soul was calling for me to shift my work to something that truly gave me fulfillment, and i interpreted that as a call to change industries.
by october i would spend most of my downtime applying to a million different jobs in finance and accounting all over America (houston’s labor market was dominated by energy, i.e. oil and gas).
i lost count of the workday accounts that i had to create. i have a list in my phone tracking all the outstanding applications i had floating around - it landed around 55 but i stopped tracking this by november (it was too much to both apply and interview and manage all these applications and keep my day job and ride the peloton oh my god).
also in october i cut my own bangs. lmfao.
over the months of interviews, two jobs stood out as potential yes’s for both me and the employer…one was a job in corporate finance with peloton (typing this out i could shake past cait she was so dedicated and so silly and that’s why i love her!).
the other was in corporate finance with a fashion retailer. i opted for the retailer because their company was more established, the product ignited something creative in me, and the location was philadelphia. i felt the northeast calling to me, but i’d been to NYC (where peloton was located) and i knew it was too overstimulating a place for me to live.
time continued, the potential job in philly started to become a reality, so i told our families over thanksgiving that i was looking for new work and probably leaving the city and state. it was emotional, it was heavy, it was one of the hardest conversations i’ve ever had to have. i felt like a failure and i felt my soul begging me to keep going in that direction.
i received the job offer in early december and signed my acceptance within a week. i held so much hope that this role would give me a space to churn out work for an organization aligned with my needs, so much hope that we captured a video of me accepting this offer, and in it you can see fear deeply settled in my body while the radio behind me talks of a COVID vaccine. this moment meant so so so much to me.
i thought i was getting out of the kitchen…but really i was just jumping into the belly of a whole new beast…(to be continued)
