In 1993, when I was thirty-two years old, I experienced something that resembled a breakdown. Burnout, we’d call it now, but the term wasn’t used so much back then. I was stuck in a corporate job I loathed—stuck, because in a depressed housing market we had a property in negative equity, so there seemed to be no way out of my situation that wouldn’t land me in debt—and also because I was then married to a man who didn’t much feel obliged to work, so that the weight of it all fell on me.Article continues after advertisement
My situation was complicated by my fear of returning to childhood poverty and a lifelong fear of failure, and if I abandoned a promising career on a seeming whim, I would for sure be considered, by my family and peers, to have failed. But at the heart of my intense psychological distress was the growing realization that my occupation didn’t in any single way reflect the person I’d always imagined I would become. I was not only inhabiting but actively facilitating a world in which profit was everything. I was supposed to be better than this. I was supposed to be living in a different story—but irritatingly, I had no idea at the time what that different story might look like.
