You’re the Right Person to Lead This Team

One morning, after I was let go, I went back into the empty office and made some images.

I had been there twenty years. For most of that time, I was not a person with a job. I was the job. The role, the meetings, my colleagues and team, the things I was trusted to protect. It told me what I was and I believed it.

Some of what I made is purposely absurd, because pouring your whole self into something and being dropped as if it never mattered is absurd, and then you realize how little it ever really mattered. The emotion is not absurd, though… I was distraught and measured at once. Lost, unsure, worried, focused. Making something in an attempt at distraction, perhaps that was my entire career.

I keep building myself out of things that belong to someone else. Selves handed to me, worn for years, taken away before I ever decided they were mine. I believe each one while I have it. I am always surprised when they go away.

Then it was gone, and I was still there.

What stays with me is not that it ended. It is how much of myself I gave to something that did not need me, and did not even notice when I left.