She tilted her head to see through the arched entry separating the dining room from the kitchen, immediately clocking my obstacle. “Absolutely,” she said with resolve before pushing back in her chair.
“Hey, Nat,” Chris said when she reached the cooler.
The stilted, sharp, “hi,” she gave him in return could cut glass, and I smirked to myself.
I twisted the cap off the water bottle after she handed it to me and sipped it slowly. Why did Chris have to be here and remind me how easy I was to drop? It made me feel even worse about my appearance and mental state today. Luckily, I managed to avoidspeaking with him using similar tactics for the rest of the party. He never approached me, either. Probably because I didn’t give him any openings to do so.
If he even wanted to.
One hour and a loud, off-tune rendition of “Happy Birthday” later, Natalie and I left together to head back to my apartment.
3
We took seats opposite each other on the train, and Natalie dove into her social media feed on her phone. Since moving to an in-house job, she’d started a page about her favorite New York restaurants. She was always our go-to person for restaurant recommendations, so it was fun seeing her turn her foodie hobby into an actual side business.
While she scrolled and tapped away, I looked out the window and ruminated about why this party—and seeing Chris—had made me feel sooff. Even though I was glad I went, for some reason, it spurred an uneasy feeling in my bones—a disquieting, uncomfortable doubt, like I thought I knew where I was going, but somehow, I got lost.
Chris and I broke up for the last time right before I started my first year at the firm. Even in school, it was always on-again, off-again. Chris alternated between showering me with love and praise and withholding it. Every time he withheld, I would eventually get fed up, we’d break up, then after not enough time had passed for me to get over him, he’d come back, say he still loved me, and pull me back in.
But when we moved to New York, where he was from, after law school graduation, it became clear he only wanted me to be a partof his law school life. He was always going out with his friends—men and women—and never invited me. It didn’t feel right to me. I was his girlfriend, the woman he was supposed to love, why wouldn’t he want me around? I got so upset one time we fought that I asked him if he still even loved me. It took him so long to answer that I stormed out, saying I was leaving for good. Even then I hoped he’d stop me, hoped he’d apologize and do better. But he didn’t. I never heard from him again.
It wasn’t just losing him that hurt, it was losing the future I’d pictured for us: moving in together, getting married, starting a family. Seeing him while being surrounded by friends and acquaintances our age thathadgotten married and started families was a brutal combination. I still wanted those things, but I hadn’t had a boyfriend—or even connected with anyone in a meaningful way—in over five years. It was hard to picture a future that included those milestones when I didn’t have anyone to picture doing them with. I didn’t have time to go on dates with any regularity because of my job. And who would want to date a stressed-out workaholic like me, anyway?
I’d come to terms with the fact that Chris wasn’tthe one. But the depth of the rejection I felt when he ended our relationship was so overwhelming that some part of me still wasn’t over that feeling. He made me feel like I wasn’t good enough.
So, like every other time I’d felt like I wasn’t good enough, I coped by working harder. In reality, I could attribute some of my high performance at Peters & Dowling to Chris. After the breakup, I threw myself into work. I had the highest billable hours in my associate class for the first two years, and got a reputation as a go-to associate, some partners telling me I was partner material as early as my fourth year. The validation I felt each time I received praise for my work and my hours helped me build back a bit of my self-confidence, even though it wasn’t quite the same.
And for a while, I found the work interesting enough, thrilling enough—analyzing companies, figuring out what they had to offer, locating the skeletons in the corporate closet, thinkingthrough how to solve them. I liked negotiating, and loved the feeling when we got our way on a particular point and the client was happy.
I’d worked on early investments in dozens of companies that went on to become household names. I’d negotiated mergers between major corporations for hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, of dollars. Each time I would send the closing announcement press releases to my parents and Drew, they were enthusiastic.
This is amazing, congrats!Mom and Dad would say.
Very impressive,Drew would say.
I did it,I would think every time another big deal closed or another partner expressed enthusiasm about my future at the firm. I proved everyone wrong that had ever doubted me. I was smart, talented, and accomplished. I made great money. After just six years, I’d paid off all my law school debt. And in three more years, I could be a big law firm partner with a million-dollar paycheck. The success I had wanted—needed—since the day I got my rejection letter from Franconia Academy was within reach. Mine for the taking.
But in six years, I hadn’t stopped to ask myself: Once I got that promotion to partner, would I finally feel content?
When would it be enough?
And what was I missing out on to get there?
In answer, the image of the unadulterated smile on Tyler’s face as he watched his daughter play at her second birthday party flashed through my mind.
“Eek! The literal chef of the restaurant I featured on my page last week commented on my post!”
My gaze whipped from the cloudy train window to my friend.
She was wiggling in her seat, grinning ear-to-ear like she won a trip to Bermuda.
My cheeks tugged upward. “That’s awesome, Nat.”
“Now I have to decide what to say.” She wiggled again and settled back into her phone.
My hand reached for my own phone in my bag, but I stopped myself. Checking it didn’t bring any joy. I didn’t have a passion or a hobby like Natalie did. And if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t love my work anymore. I wasn’t sure if I ever had.
I think I just loved the validation.
