Jane pressed her palm to the glass door and stepped into the lobby as if it were a stage.
The marble floors shone like a frozen lake; the receptionist’s smile looked laminated. She had practiced her own smile all morning while the subway rocked her from one advertisement to the next. Welcome to the rest of your life, a poster had promised above a photo of a woman holding a briefcase like a trophy. Jane had laughed at the coincidence, then felt guilty for laughing. She wanted her life to start well.
Two weeks earlier, a congratulatory email had arrived from Halberd & Moss, a multinational with a sharp logo and a reputation, according to every blog she scoured, for “scale and opportunity.” Her parents had taken her to dinner at a place with cloth napkins. Her mother had cupped her face and said, “I’m so proud of you.” Her father, trying for casual, said, “You’re going to do big things, kiddo.” Jane soaked it in; it felt like warm light.
On her first day, a man with a strong handshake and a tie the color of wet clay introduced himself as Mark, her manager. “We move fast here,” he said, as if confiding a secret. “You’ll learn by doing.”
Learning, it turned out, looked like a lot of copying.
In the beginning she didn’t mind. There’s a satisfaction to ordering chaos, to splitting a messy folder into clean stacks. She created color-coded labels for vendors she’d never heard of, drafted emails, scheduled meetings that felt like Russian nesting dolls—one meeting created three more. She swam. She figured out who would answer her messages and who would pretend not to see them. She absorbed acronyms like a second language: QBR, MBO, SLA. At night she fell asleep to the blue glow of a spreadsheet because her eyes refused to let it go.
Week four, the shine wore off like cheap plating. Her team sat in a row of pods that smelled faintly of microwave popcorn. Conversations lived on headsets; jokes were typed, then deleted. At 9:00 a.m., the daily stand-up was not standing and didn’t feel daily, because time inside the office moved like gum on a shoe. Mark would appear, lean on the divider, and say, “Gang, we need to be realistic. Let’s under-promise and over-deliver.” When deliverables arrived, he called them “quick wins” even if they had taken two late nights and a weekend.
“You’re smart,” a senior analyst told Jane by the snack bar. “Smart people float up.” Then he opened a seltzer and walked away. She stared at the bubbles and wondered how many smart people had sunk without anyone hearing a splash.
She tried to do more interesting work. She volunteered for a project about vendor rationalization; for three weeks the project was a spreadsheet with tabs named “v1_final” and “v2_final_final.” When she presented her insights—actual insights, with charts and footnotes—Mark nodded and said, “Great hustle,” then assigned the credit to someone named “the team” in an email to leadership. The next morning he asked her to “own” the logistics of a client workshop. Owning meant ordering muffins and booking chairs.
The office was big on muffins. Every victory was a tray of golden domes. Jane began to hate the smell of sugar at 9:15 a.m. She took smaller bites of herself each day: less laughing, fewer questions, a quiet phone during lunch so she could proofread a deck while pretending to chew. On Fridays, HR sent cheerful newsletters about mental health, accompanied by stock photos of people meditating. She tried the breathing exercise once and felt ridiculous, like someone doing yoga in a closet.
The worst part was the disappearing version of herself—the one who had stayed late at the campus library because she loved the puzzle of turning a messy idea into a clear paragraph; the one who believed story had weight and shape and could move people to act. At Halberd & Moss, everything important arrived as bullet points.
In December, the flu swiped her for a week. Lying on her couch, eyes watery and limbs buzzing, she watched snow creep up the window frame and realized she didn’t miss work. The relief should have scared her. Instead, it felt like a warm bath she didn’t want to drain. She checked her phone: four urgent emails, each more urgent because she hadn’t responded promptly to the last one. She turned the phone face-down.
The following Monday, back in her pod, Jane tried something small and secret: she opened a blank document and titled it “Work I Want.” It felt childish, rebellious, maybe both. She wrote:
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Projects with actual stakes.
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A boss who reads what I write.
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People who ask “why” before “when.”
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Space to do one thing well.
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Room for a laugh that doesn’t live on Slack.
She saved the document to her personal drive under a folder titled “Taxes,” because she knew no one would open it.
Around that time, a new contractor joined the team, an older woman with sharp eyes and a habit of humming. Her name was Lila. She had worked in and around corporations for twenty years and seemed to understand the office’s air pressure. In meetings she didn’t perform attention; she simply listened. Once, after everyone else had left, she lingered by Jane’s pod and asked, “How are you actually?”
Jane laughed before she could stop herself. “Fine,” she said. Then she shook her head. “Not fine.”
Lila looked like she wanted to say something and changed her mind. “Come to lunch,” she said instead.
They ate dumplings in a tiny place that steamed the windows. Lila told stories about good bosses and bad ones, about giant projects that failed for small reasons. When Jane admitted she had started looking for other jobs, Lila didn’t say, “Stick it out” or “It’s tough everywhere.” She dipped her dumpling in sauce and said, “You’re allowed to want the thing you want.”
“What if I don’t know exactly what that is?” Jane said.
“Then try things until you recognize the feeling,” Lila said. “When you feel it, you’ll know.”
Jane went home and pulled up her resume. It read like a grocery list. She rewrote it to sound like a person. Then she applied, not to dozens of postings—she had tried that and drowned—but to three that made her pulse jump: a community storytelling nonprofit looking for a program coordinator; a small tech company that needed someone to lead customer research and turn interviews into product insights; a city arts council position focused on narrative projects with local schools.
Weeks passed. Halberd & Moss continued to hum, a hive without honey. Mark added “stretch goals” to a shared doc and congratulated everyone for being “warriors” during a push no one had volunteered for. Jane woke at 2:00 a.m. and watched the ceiling. Try things until you recognize the feeling. She applied to two more roles. She wrote a cover letter like a short story, careful and human.
Rejections arrived, like postcards from a city that didn’t want visitors. The nonprofit chose someone with “more direct program experience.” The arts council had “an overwhelming number of qualified applicants.” The tech company wrote nothing at all.
On a Tuesday in late March, Jane had one of those days that compress into a single word: impossible. At 8:30 a.m., an email thread erupted about a deliverable due at noon that no one had assigned. By 10:00, the “owner” was Jane. At 11:42, Mark messaged: “Quick tweak—let’s add a section on competitive positioning.” At 11:49, he wrote, “Also, please coordinate lunch.” By 12:15, leadership moved the deadline to 3:00 and asked for “more polish.” At 6:40, Mark sent a note to the group: “Great team effort. We pulled it off.” He cc’d two directors and forgot Jane.
She stood in the bathroom, hands on the sink, and studied her face. Under the fluorescent light, her reflection looked like a paper cutout: the right shapes, no depth. She heard someone come in, then leave. She took a breath. Another. Her chest felt tight, like someone had cinched a belt across her ribs. She whispered, “I can’t do this,” and the words didn’t sound dramatic. They sounded true.
The next morning she called in sick, but instead of couch and tea, she went to a tiny library branch near her apartment, the kind that seems to exist because someone loves it. She found a corner table. She opened “Work I Want.” She added new lines:
She wrote a resignation letter. She didn’t send it. She printed it and folded it into thirds, like a ceremony only she attended.
When she finally quit, it happened quietly. She booked a short meeting with Mark. He looked surprised for exactly three seconds, then managerial. “Is there anything we can do to change your mind?” he asked, in a tone that suggested the answer he preferred.
“No,” Jane said. Her hands were steady. “Thank you for the opportunity.”
HR offered a script about “bridge building” and “boomerang employees.” She nodded and returned her badge. The lobby’s marble still shone, but she didn’t feel small in it anymore. She stepped onto the sidewalk and the city hit her like weather: horns, dogs, the smell of a bakery, a couple arguing and laughing in the same breath. She stood there and let it all touch her. Then she went home and opened her laptop to the wide, white uncertainty of a job search with no net.
Uncertainty turned out to have a rhythm if you listened for it. Mornings: coffee, three applications, then a break. Afternoons: informational interviews with anyone kind enough to talk. Evenings: a small project she had always wanted to try—a newsletter about working lives, not the triumphant ones but the ones that felt sideways and strange and sometimes brave. She called it “The Second Draft.” She wrote an issue every week and published it to a dozen subscribers, then thirty, then a hundred. She printed out emails from readers who wrote, This made me feel less crazy. She taped them above her desk like constellations.
One day, a message arrived from a woman named Priya who worked at a midsize software company. “We’ve been reading your newsletter on our product team,” it said. “We’re trying to build features that respect the messy truth of how people actually work. Would you be open to talking about a role?”
Jane googled the company and liked what she found—not a glossy giant, not a scrappy chaos either. Their careers page didn’t use the word “rockstar” once. She spoke with Priya for an hour. They didn’t talk much about tools or frameworks. They talked about users as people, about interviews as conversations, about the square peg of human behavior and the round hole of a ticketing system. Priya asked good questions and listened the way Lila did, with her whole face.
The process was not instant, but it was honest. They sent Jane a problem to explore: “Interview three users and tell us what we’re missing.” She loved the assignment so much she worried it didn’t count as work. She scheduled calls, asked open questions, and let people talk until the real thing appeared under the practiced thing. She wrote up the patterns like a story—beginning, middle, possibility—sprinkled with quotes that still had the heat of the person who said them.
They offered her the job a week later. It wasn’t the highest salary she had seen, but the way they talked about time and attention felt like oxygen. On her first day, her new manager said, “We hired you for your judgment. If something doesn’t make sense, say so.” She waited for the rest, the bit about “moving fast,” the portfolio of platitudes. It didn’t come.
The work didn’t make her a hero. It made her useful. She designed research plans, sat with customers on shaky video connections, and wrote narratives the team could carry into design and engineering. In one meeting, a product manager pushed back on her framing. “Are we sure we aren’t just telling ourselves a nice story?” he asked. It was the kind of challenge that would have shrunk her before. Instead, Jane smiled. “Let’s test it,” she said, and they did, and the story bent and got truer.
She still had hard days. There were sprints that sprinted past sense, and bugs that gobbled weekends. But someone always noticed the person who had done the noticing. When she stayed late, it was because the work mattered and her fingerprints were on it. When she needed help, she asked, and people helped. On her three-month check-in, her manager said, “I like what your writing does to this place.” Jane walked home lighter than when she had arrived.
One Saturday, she met Lila for coffee. They hadn’t seen each other since Jane’s last week at Halberd & Moss. Lila looked the same: sharp eyes, hummed snippets of melody as if music followed her like a stray cat.
“Tell me everything,” Lila said, and Jane did. She talked about Priya, about customers who were funny without meaning to be, about the tiny ceremony of naming a problem correctly. She expected Lila to give her a line about “finding your calling.” Instead, Lila sipped her coffee and said, “Feels like you’re learning your shape.”
“My shape?” Jane said, amused.
“Everyone has one,” Lila said. “You’re a person who turns noise into a story people can act on. You tried to do that in a place that wanted numbers to pretend they were stories. Now you do it where it counts.”
They walked to the park, and the city did its afternoon show: a skateboarder performing fearless physics, a toddler negotiating with a pigeon, a saxophone spilling out of a subway entrance. Jane thought about the version of herself who had stared at a bathroom mirror and said, I can’t do this. She wanted to tell that Jane: You can do the next thing. She wanted to tell anyone who felt stuck at a desk swallowing who they were: You’re allowed to want the thing you want. Even if you can’t name it yet, you’ll know the feeling when it arrives.
On Monday, she opened her laptop to plan interviews for a new feature. She drafted questions like doors she hoped people would walk through. She slipped the printed resignation letter from Halberd & Moss out of her desk drawer and unfolded it. The paper had softened at the creases, like a map used on a good trip. She smiled, then slid it back between the notebooks she kept for ideas.
At lunch she wrote the next issue of “The Second Draft.” The subject line read: “Leaving is a way of choosing.” She told the story the way she wished someone had told it to her: not like a leap from a burning building, but like stepping off a train that had started going somewhere you never meant to go. She wrote about fear, which always came in costume as responsibility. She wrote about relief, which people are embarrassed to admit. She wrote about work that feels like oxygen, not fireworks.
When she hit publish, a reply landed immediately from a reader she didn’t know. Thank you, it said. I am packing my desk at a job that looks good on paper and bad on me. Your words made it feel less like a mistake and more like a path.
Jane closed her eyes and let the message settle. Then she turned back to her questions, to her calendar, to the small tasks that add up to a life. Outside, the city kept being itself. Inside, she kept being herself, too. And this, she thought, was the real surprise: not that she had found a better job, but that she had found a way to keep the part of her that loved stories alive, and to give it something useful to do.
She saved her document and smiled at the filename: “Work I Want—Ongoing.” The cursor blinked at the end of the line like a heartbeat, steady and sure. She didn’t need a poster to tell her anything. The rest of her life wasn’t waiting anywhere. It was here, with its breathing and its mess, a story she was finally choosing to write.
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