Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

That often my only right there was whatever had to happen in the next thirty minutes to incite or narrowly avert catastrophe or catapult me into a future I both dreaded and desperately wanted.

I like to work, and I want my work to leave a wake.

In each of those places I’d had the momentary thrill of knowing my life had expanded a little more.

“We probably couldn’t prove with data that a typo hurts the business,” she says, “but they’re still wrong, because they make the brand look dumb, and dumb isn’t trustworthy.”

Maybe expecting myself to work here and look presentable and light my own home is just too much, and it takes professional sister-wives to make the center hold.

I had no idea at eighteen that my basic bodily autonomy would still be in jeopardy at forty-two. No one tells you it will never, ever stop.

You try so hard to be good at things you don’t actually want to do. You never ask yourself if maybe you should just stop doing them.

Now needing time to think starts to feel again like a career-limiting weakness.

That this entire company is built on the fear of being exposed as merely human.

But the anger that formed in my throat, as usual, has settled into something blue and cool that feels more like lucid disappointment, and not even over Josh’s decision itself so much as the lack of thought behind it.