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"So I was hired into my second job through my first job. I was really qualified—I was the top candidate they wanted, I negotiated my salary, did the whole thing. I felt like, 'I am woman, hear me roar.' And I…found the job to be incredibly difficult. I went through the first six months—eight months even—feeling like, 'they’re going to fire me, I am 100% going to get fired, I don’t know how to do this job, I am in way over my head, etc., etc.'
So I was there at the company for about two years, and as the story plays out, obviously I get my footing—everyone has that transition period, that sense of imposter syndrome of, 'I don’t deserve this job, I’m never going to figure it out.'
But I worked on the biggest account they had in the agency by myself. Now, as a 27 year old woman, I can see that being a 23 year old woman in that agency for the first time, that it is entirely the fault of my superiors that I had such a work load alone. So, of course I was driving myself into the wall working until 8:00PM, 11:00PM, 7:00AM sometimes to get projects done, working on multi-million dollar campaigns. It was bonkers now that I think about it. And it makes me so upset because I had the weight of the world on my shoulders, but no one told me I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. They let me think what I wanted to think—they let me feel inadequate and under-qualified.
And so six or eight months later, once I got my footing, I felt like, 'yes, I know what these words mean, I know how to spin templates—I am woman again, hear me roar.' And I’m starting to think about my growth in the company. I had my one-year review, it went really well, except for the part where my boss let me fall on the stake for the fact that, how do I put this, that the transition was hard for me. At this point, I hadn’t come around to realize that it wasn’t okay that I was put in that position to begin with, and then to come to find out many months later that that once upon a time, it had been two people doing my job. At that point, I still didn’t know that.
So, I being who I am, such a perfectionist and a loyalist—if you tell me to do something and you’re paying me to do it, I am going to deliver it to you on a silver platter. And I think to a degree that’s women in general, because we work twice as hard—tooth and nail—to overcompensate for this image we’ve been given. That you have to earn your place—that you have to be twice as good as a man to sit at the table. And I’ve had those moments where I say something and a guy seven pay grades above me says it five minutes later and no one acknowledges it.
So one year comes and goes, and I was looking for this personal accolade of a promotion. And it doesn’t happen. And they say, 'it’s not in the budget, it’s too soon, the last person who was promoted wasn’t promoted for three years…' And so, what is it that’s been shoved down our throats? That we’re over-entitled Millenials? So I swallow those words, they don’t taste right, but I swallow them anyways. I think, 'okay, I’m a little too young, I’m a little too eager, maybe they’re right. And you know what, I’ve had a tough year, not everything was perfect, and maybe that’s what they mean and maybe that’s why I’m not being promoted…'
What happens next? This dim-witted, ill-equipped, unprofessional, truly not-good-at-his-job MAN—only guy in our department—gets promoted. He worked on one account—an account that maybe brought in half-a-million dollars. I worked on the account that if that company would have left us, the shop would have folded. And we had a couple thousand people in our shop. We were a big name. And I worked on the biggest account in that agency. And I never let myself have that.
And I knew exactly what was happening. I am a nice person, but I’m too old and have too much self-respect to go around pretending I like people that I don’t, to go around kissing asses of people who are unkind, who are egotistical, who would walk over me any day of the week to get to where they’re going—I won’t do it. Because I knew that I would leave this job one day, but I will not leave myself."