As a little girl, I’ve known since I could walk that I wanted to have it all - I wanted to travel the whole world in style, be my own boss and be surrounded by nice things. As I got older, societal norms began to erode my confidence in achieving these goals on my own; I was told that the best path to the successful life I dreamed of was to work for a large corporation and climb the corporate ladder.
So I did just that. While in college, I manifested my then dream job of working in Marketing for a Fortune 100 company and was able to create that reality for myself shortly after I graduated. I got to travel the world in the front of the plane, eat some of the finest foods and attended some epic events. From the outside, it seemed like I had the best job and life on the planet. But little did people know that I was feeling so much anxiety and burn out from the endless nights and weekends I was working. Not only that, the amount of drama and gossip that went around in our office felt like I was in high school again, and I was struggling to make time for the self-care I needed so badly.
I barely had a social life outside of work and the only time I got to see my family was if they visited over the weekend or during a quick holiday visit to see them. It was clear early on that in order to get ahead, you had to play that “corporate game.” So I did, and was quite good at it. I was adaptive, agreeable, involved, supportive; really I was anything that was needed of me, anything but myself. But I was too busy to be able to identify why, at the end of the day, I felt so gross and phony. So I stopped playing, let more of my individuality show at work, and that’s when I stopped getting the promotions and pay raises. I felt like I wasn’t being valued by certain leaders because I wasn’t your stereotypical corporate employee. Although I loved my job and it paid decent money, there were parts of it that I hated, leaving me to feel stuck, stagnant and unfulfilled in my life.
