Last week,  I was let go from my job.

I was numb.

And then I cried for four or five hours.

Not necessarily because I wasn’t going to be the Catering Manager anymore. Not because I couldn’t imagine my life without the job. The truth is, I had written my resignation letter on June 6 and held onto it for nearly three months.

I think I cried because what happened didn’t align with what I was told had happened.

And that mattered to me.

It still does.

I am deeply attuned to timing—to endings and beginnings, to the strange ways life tells us when something has run its course. I’ve learned to pay attention when something inside me starts whispering that a season is changing.

Sometimes I listen.

Sometimes, apparently, I need a little assistance.

Maybe that’s part of what happened here.

I knew in June that something wasn’t right. I knew it strongly enough to sit down and write a resignation letter.

But I didn’t send it.

I stayed.

I stayed because the problem was never Gateway.

The problem was Goddess.

I loved Gateway. I loved the work, the people, the pace, the production, the insanity of it. I loved walking into a building where three studios might be operating simultaneously and nearly 900 plates could move through the dining room in a day. I loved solving problems. I loved the relationships I built there. I loved discovering that I could walk into that kind of environment and not only survive it, but lead inside it.

So I ignored the letter sitting there.

Maybe that’s another thing I’ve learned.

Sometimes you know when it’s time to leave long before you’re willing to go.

You feel it. You write the letter. You put the truth on paper.

And then you stay.

You stay because there are still people you love. Because there are things you’re learning. Because there are pieces of the experience you’re not ready to surrender. You stay because you keep hoping something will change. Because maybe if you try harder, communicate better, give a little more, forgive one more thing, it will finally become what you keep believing it could be.

But there comes a point when staying in something that continually hurts you begins to hurt you more than leaving ever could.

And I believe life has a way of dealing with that.

Call it the universe. Call it God. Call it circumstance. Call it whatever you want.

I believe there are times when we know we’re supposed to leave something and refuse to do it ourselves, so eventually the decision gets made for us.

And sometimes it isn’t gentle.

Sometimes the door doesn’t quietly open and invite you to walk through it.

Sometimes it slams behind you.

Sometimes the ending is painful and humiliating and final precisely because you kept finding reasons to stay through every quieter opportunity you had to leave.

Maybe that’s what happened to me.

I had already written the resignation letter.

I already knew.

And I stayed anyway.

Maybe the universe didn’t take something away from me.

Maybe it finally removed me from something I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

That doesn’t make the way it happened hurt less.

But it changes what I think the pain means.

Maybe I wasn’t wrong to stay as long as I did. Had I left on June 6, I would have missed people and experiences I wouldn’t trade now simply because I dislike the way the story eventually ended.

Maybe I needed to stay long enough to get what I came there to learn.

But maybe I also needed to learn that once the lesson is over, staying doesn’t earn you extra credit.

Sometimes it just makes the exit harder.

And when I wouldn’t close the door myself, it closed for me.

Not gracefully.

Certainly not the way I would have chosen.

But completely.

And maybe that’s the lesson underneath all the others:

When something continually breaks you, leaving isn’t failure. Sometimes leaving is the boundary you should have drawn long before the universe drew it for you.

So after four or five hours of crying, I eventually found myself asking a different question.

Not Why did this happen to me?

But:

What was I supposed to learn from it?

And maybe the lesson wasn’t simply that shit rolls downhill.

Maybe Gateway was never just about Gateway.

There are places we enter believing we’re there to do a job, and only later realize we were there to learn something about ourselves.

Gateway became a classroom in competence, leadership, power, loyalty, communication, boundaries—and ultimately, letting go.

I learned the work there.

Not theoretically.

I learned it by doing it.

I learned how to walk into chaos and start organizing it. I learned how to make decisions when there wasn’t time to deliberate endlessly. I learned how to solve problems before anyone had time to ask whether they could be solved. I learned how to take care of people while still getting the job done.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned that I was good at it.

Sometimes, if you’re extraordinarily fortunate, the work also puts a teacher in your path.

That summer, mine was Colette VanLoon.

Colette doesn’t work for Goddess.

She works for Paul McCartney.

She has spent four decades in the entertainment industry and has been Paul’s backstage coordinator for eighteen years. In my world, that’s about as close to rock ‘n’ roll royalty as it gets.

She hadn’t planned on spending her summer at Gateway. She came in to help Goddess because her sister, Kim, works there.

And somehow, through that strange intersection of timing and circumstance, I got six weeks working beside her.

Six weeks of mentorship from someone with forty years of experience doing this work at the highest level.

You cannot learn that from a book.

You cannot read your way into forty years of knowing what happens backstage when the stakes are high. There is no textbook for the instinct that comes from decades of walking into rooms, reading them correctly and knowing what needs to happen next.

I got to watch it.

I got to ask questions.

I got to learn from it.

And Colette gave me something beyond the mechanics of the work.

She had the benefit of coming into the environment with decades of experience behind her and seeing it through a lens I simply didn’t have yet. Her perspective gave context to things I had already been noticing and feeling for myself.

She didn’t create my concerns.

Remember, the resignation letter was already sitting there.

But sometimes the most important thing a mentor gives you isn’t an answer.

It’s a lens.

Colette helped me trust what I was already seeing.

The illusion was no more.

There is something almost poetic about the fact that one of the greatest gifts Goddess gave me was bringing Colette VanLoon into my life.

For six weeks, I got an education I could never have bought.

And I’ll carry that one with me.

I also learned something about the kind of leader I never want to become.

I experienced a style of management that, from my perspective, relied heavily on fear and intimidation.

The problem with intimidation is that it only works when the person on the receiving end is willing to be intimidated.

I am not intimidated.

I’m not easily frightened by titles, authority, raised voices, posturing or someone else’s need to establish dominance. Unless you’re a serial killer holding me captive in your house of horrors, I’m probably not going to be afraid of you.

But underneath the joke is something I believe deeply:

Intimidation is not leadership.

There is a difference between having authority and needing someone else to feel small in order to prove you have it. There is a difference between commanding respect and demanding submission.

Fear can produce compliance.

Intimidation can produce silence.

Neither one produces trust.

And this summer taught me something else about what happens when you begin using your voice.

You can express yourself calmly. You can take accountability for your own part. You can say, Here’s what I could have done differently, and here’s what I need to be different going forward.

People respond to that in very different ways.

Some people hear you.

They may not agree with everything you say, but they recognize that you’re speaking in good faith. Sometimes they even appreciate it. They adjust their behavior. The relationship gets better because honesty has created room for mutual respect.

And then there are people who double down.

Your calmness doesn’t calm them. Your accountability isn’t met with accountability of their own. Your boundary isn’t received as information about how to work with you.

It’s experienced as a challenge.

That taught me something important:

You can communicate a boundary respectfully. You cannot control whether someone receives it respectfully.

And another person’s reaction to your boundary doesn’t automatically mean the boundary was wrong.

Sometimes healthy communication improves a relationship.

Sometimes it reveals one.

There was another lesson in all of this about loyalty.

I originally hired a staff of fifteen.

By the end, I was the last one standing.

I don’t say that as some declaration of martyrdom. Hospitality has turnover. People leave. Circumstances change. Seasons are hard.

But one particular experience stayed with me.

An employee walked out in the middle of a shift. Her departure left six uncovered shifts behind, and the responsibility for figuring out how to staff them landed with me.

And we did it.

My staff rallied in a way I will never forget.

People canceled doctor’s appointments. They came in on scheduled days off. They rearranged their lives. Some worked sixteen-hour days. I covered shifts myself.

Together, we filled every hole and kept things moving.

I was incredibly proud of them.

Later, the employee who had walked out was rehired because she was needed to work dressing rooms.

There was no conversation with the people who had absorbed the consequences of her leaving. There was no acknowledgment of what they had sacrificed to keep things running.

Not even a simple thank you.

Two of my employees quit after she was brought back.

That stayed with me.

Not because I believe every management decision requires consensus. It doesn’t. Leadership sometimes means making decisions people won’t like.

But leadership also means understanding that decisions communicate something.

My staff didn’t need a parade.

They needed to know that what they had done mattered.

They needed to be seen.

Never ask people for extraordinary loyalty and then treat that loyalty as ordinary.

People remember whether you noticed.

They remember whether you thanked them.

They remember whether you stood up for them after they stood up for you.

If my people show up for me, I will show up for them.

If they carry something heavy, I will notice.

If they give more than the job requires, I will never behave as though I was simply entitled to it.

And when they save my ass?

I’ll say thank you.

Every single fucking time.

And somewhere in all of that, I had to acknowledge something about my own loyalty, too.

I gave a lot to this job.

I missed vacation. I came in on my days off. I showed up with thirty minutes’ notice when I was needed. I was often the last person there at the end of the day.

I stayed when staying cost me something.

And I don’t believe any of that entitled me to special treatment. I understood the job I had accepted. I understood that leadership sometimes means being the person who shows up when nobody else can.

But there is a difference between expecting someone to do their job and treating their willingness to continually go beyond it as though it costs them nothing.

Sometimes all I needed was:

Thanks for coming in. I know this was your day off.

Or:

Thanks for staying. I know you had somewhere else to be.

Hell, once it could have been:

I know you had tickets to see Brandi Carlile at Madison Square Garden. I know what you gave up to be here. Thank you.

That’s it.

Not a bonus. Not an award. Not a parade.

Just recognition that there was a human being on the other side of the job description.

Because people will do extraordinary things for work they care about and people they care about.

But extraordinary effort should never become so expected that nobody remembers to say thank you.

That experience changed the way I think about leadership, too.

Never become so accustomed to someone’s dedication that you stop recognizing it as a choice.

Because God, did I learn something about carrying things this summer.

Responsibility. Expectations. Other people’s problems. The needs of my staff. The demands of production. The things that needed to happen because somebody had to make them happen.

There is pride in knowing you can carry a tremendous amount.

There is wisdom in knowing when to put it down.

Being capable of carrying something does not mean it was ever yours to carry.

And maybe this is where the lesson reaches beyond work.

I’m tired of giving and giving and giving and getting almost nothing back.

I’m tired of being the person who stays longer, tries harder, forgives more, carries more and keeps believing that if I just show up one more time, give one more chance or prove myself one more way, eventually someone will understand what I’m worth.

I’m tired of people recognizing my value only after I’m gone.

And maybe most of all, I’m tired of staying in places I already know are toxic because some part of me still believes I can love them into becoming something different.

Or that if I work hard enough, give enough or become indispensable enough, I can somehow earn the treatment I should never have had to earn in the first place.

That’s a hard thing to admit.

Because there is something noble about loyalty.

There is something beautiful about perseverance.

There is something admirable about being the person who doesn’t give up easily.

Until there isn’t.

Sometimes staying isn’t loyalty.

Sometimes it’s abandoning yourself in order to prove your worth to people who have already demonstrated that they don’t know what to do with it.

And I don’t want to do that anymore.

I don’t want to keep auditioning for a place in rooms where I’ve already proven I belong.

I don’t want my absence to be the thing that finally makes someone understand what my presence was worth.

I don’t want to keep pouring myself into people, relationships, jobs or situations that require me to become depleted before I finally give myself permission to leave.

Maybe that’s the fence.

Not a wall around my heart.

Not becoming cynical. Not withholding love. Not keeping score every time I do something for another human being.

Just finally understanding that reciprocity matters.

That being generous doesn’t require being endlessly available.

That compassion doesn’t require self-abandonment.

That loyalty doesn’t mean staying indefinitely.

And that knowing my worth means I have to stop repeatedly placing it in the hands of people who require me to prove it.

I don’t need to give less.

I need to become more discerning about where I give.

Because I don’t want to become someone who loves less deeply because I’ve been hurt.

I want to become someone who finally understands that loving deeply includes me, too.

This was also the first time in my life I’ve ever been let go from a position.

That was new.

But if I’m being truthful, I wasn’t entirely surprised.

For some time, I had felt the temperature changing.

I felt increasing pressure after I began pushing back—after I started questioning decisions, challenging things I believed needed to be challenged, and speaking up when I found myself dealing with the consequences of decisions I hadn’t made.

There were times when I felt I was cleaning up messes I hadn’t created.

Eventually, I stopped doing that quietly.

I pushed back.

I asked questions.

I challenged authority when I believed authority needed to be challenged.

And I understood that doing so might have consequences.

What I wasn’t prepared for was what happened when I was let go.

I have always understood that people make decisions I may not agree with. Businesses make decisions. Managers make decisions. Sometimes those decisions mean you lose your job. I can accept that.

What I had a much harder time accepting was being given an explanation that I did not believe was true.

Maybe that sounds naïve, but I genuinely never believed someone would look me in the eye at one of the most vulnerable moments of my life and tell me something untrue simply because saying it made the situation easier for them—or because it would make the ending hurt more for me.

And it did hurt.

Not because I believed what was said.

Because I couldn’t understand why it needed to be said at all.

Being fired was enough.

There was no reason to make me question my value on the way out the door.

There is a difference between being difficult and being unwilling to make someone else’s difficulty invisible.

I don’t know what role my willingness to push back ultimately played in the decision to let me go.

But I do know this:

I can live with losing a job because I spoke up.

I would have had a much harder time living with myself if I had learned to stay quiet.

That’s one reason an inquiry is underway, and I’m willing to let the facts establish what happened rather than pretend I know every conversation that occurred behind closed doors.

But I know my own experience.

I know when I began feeling the pressure.

I know when the dynamic changed.

And I would rather live with the consequences of having spoken up than keep a position by becoming someone who doesn’t.

I can learn diplomacy.

I can learn when to choose my battles.

I can even learn that sometimes being right isn’t the same thing as being effective.

But I will never learn to confuse silence with professionalism.

There is still an inquiry underway into what happened at the end, and I intend to see it through.

Not because I want my job back.

I don’t.

What I was subsequently told had happened does not align with what I experienced.

There is a discrepancy there, and I intend to understand it.

If the record is wrong, I intend to correct it.

Because this isn’t about winning.

It’s about integrity.

Mine.

There are things I can walk away from.

A job is one of them.

A title.

A paycheck.

An organization.

Even a place I genuinely loved working.

But my integrity, my work ethic and my heart are different.

Those are mine.

And if you call those things into question, I will fight you to the end of the fucking earth for them.

This isn’t a fight to get something back.

It’s a fight to set the record straight.

Sometimes boundaries aren’t about walking away quietly.

Sometimes integrity requires you to stand exactly where you are and say:

No. That is not an accurate account of what happened, and I will not allow someone else’s version of events to become the unquestioned record simply because it came from higher up the organizational chart.

I can hold compassion for the people involved and still demand accountability.

Those things aren’t contradictions.

And there is one fence in particular I know now:

You may take my position. You do not get to take my character with it.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

That’s not bitterness.

That’s experience.

There is a kind of compassion that exists before you’ve been tested, and another kind that exists afterward.

The first believes that caring deeply will somehow be enough.

The second understands that caring deeply without boundaries can get you chewed alive.

Compassion learns where the fence goes.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

You can learn competence, authority and leadership without surrendering your heart and compassion.

You can become stronger without becoming harder.

You can understand hierarchy without worshipping it.

You can recognize politics without becoming political.

You can learn how power works without allowing power to become the thing that defines you.

You can forgive without volunteering for the same lesson twice.

And you can love something while acknowledging that something within it wasn’t right.

I don’t want to leave this experience carrying resentment.

I’ve carried enough.

Something doesn’t have to end well for it to have been worth something.

I can be deeply disappointed by how something ended without rewriting everything that came before it.

Both things can be true.

I can wish the ending had been different.

And I can remain profoundly grateful that I was there.

Because I still love Gateway.

I love the people there, and I will miss some of them deeply.

I also know that some of those relationships won’t end simply because my employment did. There are people I expect to stay in contact with, friendships I hope to carry long after this summer becomes a story about something that happened once.

Because those people were there.

They saw me.

They watched me work.

They saw my dedication, my compassion and my leadership. They saw the long days, the problems solved and the people cared for. They saw who I was when things were going beautifully and, perhaps more importantly, who I was when they weren’t.

So I’m not worried about what the people who actually worked beside me know about my character.

I know what I brought into that building.

And I know there are people inside it who know, too.

That’s one of the reasons I refuse to let the way this ended rewrite the summer that came before it.

I can be angry about the ending and still love the place.

I can challenge what happened and still be grateful for what happened there.

I can leave without pretending I never belonged.

A job can end without every relationship inside it ending with it.

And some of the people I met at Gateway are people I very much hope to carry with me.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life.

I’ve had the extraordinary privilege of being able to do almost everything I’ve ever really wanted to do, and I don’t take that for granted. I’ve reinvented myself more than once. I’ve walked into rooms where I didn’t know exactly what I was doing and figured it out.

And I leave this summer feeling as though I somehow accumulated ten years of experience in a single season.

Some of it was exhilarating.

Some of it was exhausting.

Some of it was beautiful.

Some of it hurt like hell.

I’ll take all of it.

I’ll take the lesson and move on.

I was offered a position as a tour caterer this fall.

It was an incredible opportunity, and I was genuinely honored to be asked.

But even as the offer was being made, somewhere in the back of my mind I already knew I wasn’t going to take it.

Touring would mean being gone for a month at a time, sometimes longer.

And I knew I couldn’t do that.

My children still need me.

Maybe they don’t need me in all the ways they did when they were little. That’s the strange evolution of motherhood. The job changes constantly, but it doesn’t simply disappear because your children get older.

At the end of the day, before the career, before the adventure, before the money and before whatever impressive thing I might be able to put on a résumé:

I take care of my people.

That’s who I am.

I spent twenty years as a stay-at-home mother.

I wouldn’t trade those years.

But now I want something that belongs to me, too.

My independence and autonomy are deeply important to me.

I want my own work.

My own money.

My own path.

My own name on something I built.

I don’t have to choose between being a mother and being ambitious.

I have to decide what kind of ambition fits the life I actually want.

And then my daughter reminded me what that life looks like.

When I told Avery what had happened at Gateway, her response caught me completely off guard.

“Oh, thank God.”

I laughed.

But I don’t think I fully understood until that moment how much my being gone had affected her.

I had spent the summer measuring the cost in sixteen-hour days, exhaustion, staffing problems and everything else that comes with trying to keep a complicated operation moving.

I hadn’t stopped to consider that someone else had been keeping track of those hours, too.

My daughter.

That night, Avery curled up next to me on the couch.

She gave me back rubs.

We snuggled together and watched a movie.

Nothing remarkable happened.

A

And somehow, after the summer I’d just had, it felt remarkable.

There were no radios going off.

No staffing problems to solve.

Nobody needed me in another studio.

Nobody was asking me to carry one more thing.

My daughter just wanted her mom.

And her mom was home.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Band-Aid.

But there was something else in that moment, too.

I want to be the kind of mother—and the kind of woman—who can look her daughter in the eyes and know that I lived in a way I would be proud to see her live someday.

I want her to know that being honorable still matters.

That honesty matters.

That integrity matters.

That sometimes doing what you believe is right will cost you something.

And that the cost doesn’t make it wrong.

If my daughter ever finds herself in a room where staying quiet would be easier, I want her to have seen a woman who was willing to speak.

If she ever has to choose between protecting her position and protecting her integrity, I hope she remembers which one her mother chose.

There will be other opportunities.

Other kitchens.

Other projects.

Other doors I haven’t even imagined yet.

But there will never be another season of my children’s lives exactly like this one.

My career can wait for another opportunity. Their lives won’t wait for me to come home.

And perhaps there is another reason I’m supposed to be home this fall.

I finished my novel just before I started working at Gateway.

Then Gateway happened.

For the next several months, the book waited.

Now I think it deserves what I couldn’t give it this summer.

My time.

My editor loves it.

She believes it could do well.

I guess we’re going to find out.

Because of all the things I’ve been fortunate enough to do in my life, at the end of the day, I think my heart has always belonged to writing.

Because writing has always been more than something I love to do.

It’s how I understand things.

When something happens that I can’t quite make sense of, I write my way through it. I put the pieces on the page and move them around until I can see the shape of what happened—and, more importantly, what it meant to me.

Writing gives me distance without requiring me to disconnect.

It lets me feel something completely and still step far enough outside of it to ask better questions.

In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing here.

Last week, I cried for hours.

Today, I wrote.

And somewhere between the first sentence and this one, the story changed.

I didn’t get my job back.

I didn’t get all the answers.

Nothing about yesterday became untrue.

I just gained perspective.

Maybe that’s what writing has always done for me.

It doesn’t change what happened.

It changes the distance from which I can see it.

And sometimes that’s enough to finally understand where the fence goes.

So this fall, I’m going to write.

I’m going to send the queries.

I’ll take the rejections if they come.

And I’ll keep sending them anyway.

I’ll give this book its chance.

And I’ll give myself mine.

Gateway taught me that I can do hard things.

Goddess taught me that being capable of carrying something doesn’t mean it was ever mine to carry.

Colette taught me to pay attention.

My staff taught me what loyalty looks like.

My children reminded me where home is.

And somewhere in all of it, I learned what kind of leader I want to be—and what kind I never want to become.

Tell the truth.

Put down the weight.

Rest.

Take the lesson with you.

I’ve been through the fucking thing now.

I know where the sharp edges are.

I know what isn’t mine to carry.

I know where the fence goes.

For twenty years, I gave my time to raising the people I love most.

Now I’m ready for some time that belongs to me, too.

Not instead of them.

Alongside them.

And I know exactly what I want to do with it.

I want to write.