1. to shut up in or as if in a pound; to seize and hold; to take possession of
2. to collect and confine (water) in or as if in a reservoir
THE DAM
After eighteen months of spiritual erosion on the job, I could no longer perform the self-evasion of mind necessary to deny the realities of my situation and my culpability for its continuation. I knew what the job demanded and what if offered in return but was mentally incapable of leaving. Fear and pride paralyzed me. I would not accept failure nor forgo stability for the unknown. The financial incentive to remain had at least a surface logic, but my true motivations were complex and powerful and seated below rationality. There was a bizarre resignation to the nature of this abusive relationship, like a beaten dog that won’t run off for sake of scraps and a place by the fire. Half of me screamed to get out and the other said we might die if we leave. I could not continue as a house divided against itself. Willful enough to believe that my relationship with my mind was that of master and servant rather than a partnership of equals, I forced desperate calls for flight from my mind and subverted them to serve the cause they so desperately resisted.
My ill-conceived discipline provided a tremendous power source like altering the course of a river to harness its energy. The unconscious forces I was meddling with were strong enough to fuel the entity I needed to become: a cybernetic organism, half-man, half-laptop built for the sole purpose of adding value. That is to say, a consulting terminator. When I flipped the switch, my vision narrowed to a ruby red laser beam that swiveled from target to target. I obliterated client work. Input caffeine and alcohol; output billable hours. Work life balance? Fuck you. During my first year, receiving 2 ratings on projects for “exceeding expectations” wasn’t even a possibility. There was no way to distinguish a drone amongst drones. But that was then. I wasn’t a drone anymore; I was a fucking terminator, and terminators got 2s.
I actively drove myself to perform like a machine, but my efforts to bend my mind to a singular focus only served to split it further in two. In an environment where creative, human, life-giving pursuits were impossibly out of place, I leaned heavily on my analytic side to survive. The internal imbalance that inevitably arises from such a lop-sided dynamic was a burden I shared with fewer and fewer colleagues; my friends either parted the firm or parted with the offending elements of themselves. To appreciate beauty is to starve in its absence.
Lacking conviction, I continued to defer. I believed I could preserve my integrity in the corporate crucible through sheer will, but you cannot enslave the mind to labor at cross purpose without inviting consequences proportional to the severity of self-deception. The internal forces at play rose higher against my façade. Spillways for the repressed energies of my unconscious took form, psychological outlets that found their way into my life to regulate flow; however, these outlets were often insufficient. To prevent critical overload, a floodgate manifested to discharge all pressure in the system, but, once opened, became impossible to regulate.
SPILLWAYS
My constrained vitality spilled forth through several avenues. Fortunately, obeying these unconscious nudges prompted the formation of positive habits and routines that are still part of my life more than a decade later. First, I started exercising, specifically, lifting some heavy-ass weight. Second, I began routinely committing my thoughts to paper. Third, I fought to preserve my habit of reading. To me, these practices were life-giving. They did not profit me one dollar (on paper) but they profited my spirit. It seems obvious in retrospect, but there was a barrier in my mind that dismissed anything that could not be quantified, measured, or otherwise valued as a waste of time. Somehow, these desires wore through the wall and allowed energy to flow into desperately parched but remarkably fertile regions.
Irrigating the realm of the physical came first. I carved out time each morning to train my body. Every hotel had a gym, so, even on the road, it was simply a matter of setting my alarm an hour earlier, swinging my feet to the floor without hesitation when it went off, then clapping my hands together hard three times at hard as possible. Giddyup, buttercup! Connecting with my physicality was euphoric enough to pull me out of bed on even the worst mornings. Moreover, celebrating the full capability of my own body flew in the face of the sedentary, screen-staring confinement imposed by my job, and I reveled in rebellion. In an environment that prefers you weak, make yourself strong.
My other colleagues who exercised regularly actually referred to hitting the gym as going to church. I balked at this comparison initially but came to understand the parallel in time. In the absence of faith, men still worship. My forty-five minute routine focused my minds and strengthened my bodies, and, over time, I developed an appreciation for the ritual bordering on reverence. Zealotry aside, consistent exercise became a foundational pillar in my life and so it remains.
Complimenting the physical outlet exercise provided was journaling, a practice which became the favored conduit for my overloaded mind. I spread my cluttered thoughts across countless pages for organization, examination, or storage. At the time, I felt the practice was incongruent with the identity I was forming to face the corporate world. What did I have to write about anyway? What use was time spent on something that lacked a measurable return? Terminators didn’t fucking journal. Thankfully, my need overcame my misgivings.
During a dead quiet return flight, it was so loud inside my head that I could not concentrate on the work in front of me. Then, my thoughts simply burst out. I didn’t have a notebook at the time, so I flipped over a stack of meeting notes and wrote on the backs of the pages in a continuous stream until the plane touched down. The tranquility that followed was incredible. From then on, I reserved my flights home exclusively for this purpose, and my weekly ritual of journaling remains inviolable to this day. Realizing you possess the ability to take down your own confession and act as your own therapist with no more than a pen and a few blank pages is a priceless.
Third, and sadly most fleeting, was my affinity for reading. My preferred access point to imagination was blocked: the longstanding infatuation I felt for good fiction faded along with my ability to fulfill it. The trouble began with opting for books I “should” read and not ones that set my mind aflame. For fifteen years I read before bed with remarkable consistency, but now when I reached to my nightstand it was to retrieve some increase-your-producitity-at-work-fifteen-habits-of-highly-effective-drones garbage, i.e. chicken shit for the soul.
The non-fiction wolf didn’t need any more food, but I couldn’t sink into the fantasy and science fiction books I devoured in my youth nor summon the fortitude to wade through the dense classics I studied in college. It all seemed pointless. How could I justify reading at night, fiction or otherwise, when my project was on fire, and, in six hours, I would have to run into the flames? I was in fight-or-flight. A caveman wouldn’t work on his favorite hand tracing with a sabretooth tiger circling outside; he’d sharpen his stick and sleep with one eye open. Of course, I argued that work stress did not equate to an apex predator stalking the carpeted hallway outside my four-star cave, but the boulder on my chest refused to listen.
Ultimately, two out of three ain’t bad. I gorged on the odd fantasy book on calm weekends and kept up with the gym and journaling. Maintaining these habits kept me plodding along, but, even collectively, they relieved only a fraction of the pressure. I had the right idea but could not fathom how grossly insufficient my approach was for the situation. I couldn’t exercise my way out of the bone deep exhaustion that sets in when you knowingly serve a false purpose. Nor could I journal my way out of loneliness and lack of direction no matter how many question mark riddled entries I produced. Occasionally, I found a few precious hours of escape within the pages of a good book, but the instant I closed it, or, most often, well before, my own story took over. I needed a way to discharge a much greater volume of pressure before the structures inside me failed catastrophically. As it happened, I was already familiar with such a mechanism.
THE FLOODGATE
Throughout my twenties, my primary coping mechanism was alcohol. To open the floodgate, I drank to a point just shy of oblivion but slipped beyond just as often. The initial relationship I formed with alcohol wasn’t strictly healthy, but the impetus for consumption was mostly positive. In college, drinking had social, celebratory connotations. There was a sense of comradery when the time came to crack a beer with the lads after class or tap a keg for a party; however, there was also plenty of drinking being done to navigate complex emotion. Late night chats after heroic doses of brown liquor were the only way many of us could summon the vulnerability necessary to confide in each other about the pain we held closest.
I fondly referred to these drunken, deeply personal exchanges as Irish Therapy sessions. As a copper-haired descendant of the Emerald Isle myself, a limited capacity for expression seemed completely natural. Who could fault a person for protecting their weak spots? I would do things differently if I could, but that’s not how life works. We used the tools we had. My friends and I didn’t know what “trauma” was or that therapy was even an option “normal” people consider; we just had shit we needed to talk about and a vehicle to open up with people we trusted. I wouldn’t trade those exchanges for anything, they were part of a healing journey, but turning to alcohol in times of stress, uncertainty, or powerful emotion greases a very dangerous groove and is an approach I would strongly caution against.
Conveniently for me, it followed that bonding in consulting was shockingly similar to bonding in the fraternity. Consulting was (and still is) a drinking profession. Relationships were built over drinks. Regardless of level, employees drank hard, particularly at firm sponsored events. It was not uncommon to see partners, male or female, become overtly lecherous around analysts 20-30 years their junior. My hollow legs allowed me to float in the quicksand, but it’s myopic to consider alcohol tolerance a strength. Still, I could drink all night with partners or clients or fucking Andre the Giant if needed, and, bizarrely, it was a good way to build trust. I hoisted partners into cabs after raucous outings multiple times.
The client side was no different. I gambled alongside a pharma exec until 4:00 in the morning while he confided about his floundering marriage. This was not an uncommon scenario. Counterintuitively, these extracurricular elements of the job seemed to provide more energy than they cost. Nights out with colleagues provided an unfettered counterpoint to rigid obeisance by not only blurring professional and personal but also manifesting opportunities for career-ending decisions.
Even at safe remove from the elbow-bending influence of the herd, life on the road invited an ongoing romance with the bottle. While tumblers of gin and soda seemed to materialize in my hand at team dinners and client functions, the siren song of an empty hotel bar or airport lounge presented an equally autonomic allure. Alcohol had become inextricably entwined with unwinding from the day. Paradoxically, one might imagine that after a sixteen hour Monday, you would sleep like a dead man. In reality, that was rarely the case. After time-zone changes from flights and a mainline injection of work stress, rest was elusive.
My go-to method of drifting off with a good book was now impossible. I was too preoccupied to focus. With insomnia becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, I decided to concoct a remedy. After a few weeks of single subject human trials, I had a formula for irresistible oblivion: a minimum of two glasses of red wine taken with dinner followed by two anti-allergy tablets and a big swig of cough syrup. I called it the ‘Dryl and the ‘Quil, Sarah called it my night-night medicine, and a sane person might call it an unmistakable warning sign. Unfortunately, it takes uncommon wisdom to heed fair warning without first experiencing the disaster it cautions against, and, at twenty-three, uncommon wisdom was exactly what I lacked.
After another indistinguishable week putting out fires and dosing myself with booze and bootleg sleeping potions, returning to the home office each Friday was an explosive change of gears. If our full crew of wound-up, type-A throat-slitters was in from the road, the night was guaranteed to be nothing short of bacchanal. We were a squadron of Jekylls alight with the anticipation of release. Drinking in the office started no later than 4:15 with the first person to crack a beer in the bull pen becoming a de facto Pied Piper for the rest to follow after.
Once we left our corporate confines, we really started in. Dinner? Fuck dinner. The girls usually insisted on getting apps somewhere for safety’s sake, but that didn’t alter our critical path. Each drink twisted the spring of my jack-in-the-box id one turn closer to bursting forth in a coarse display against control. I never drank with the intention to become a monster, but I knew Hyde was a possible outcome and still chose to proceed. The chaotic energy of the open floodgate led to all manner of destruction, but the urge to take my hands off the wheel and let my unconscious drive, even if it crashed, was irresistible.
YEAR END
Reaching the two-year milestone with the firm was the single hardest thing I had done in my adult life to that point, but I took little pride in the accomplishment. It was a hollow sort of honor; the kind I imagine a soldier might feel having carried out morally grey orders. Indifferent to the increasing incidences of downstream damage, the consulting terminator had delivered the goods. My client work was sterling, and my utilization rate was beefy. I received all 2s on my PEs aside from my first and only 1 (recompense for the aforementioned late-night casino/marriage counseling session I provided gratis). After a year of steady billing that allowed for just five of my now forty-six banked vacation days to be taken, my utilization sat at an impressive 90%. I had performed like a machine.
Despite sparkling client work and a utilization metric well above target, I failed to secure the year-end evaluation ingredient that mattered most: significant pull amongst the firm’s leadership. I was nobody’s “guy” so to speak. To make matters worse, my wayward counselor left the firm halfway through the year, and the manager who was assigned to advocate for me during the meeting had his own favorites to push. Ratings had to follow a normal distribution, like a bell curve; only so many folks could receive 1s and 2s. With only my results to speak for me, I was promoted from Analyst to Consultant but took a 3 rating which stuck in my throat.
It’s remarkable that a single number could convey so much information. Receiving a 3 at the end of year two essentially meant I had been friend-zoned by the firm: it had better options to pursue but still wanted to retain me as a dutiful thrall. To hold our attention, the firm kept a juicy incentive on the table in the form of a full-ride to business school contingent upon returning to the firm for two years of service after graduating (anyone up for another set of golden handcuffs?). Had I received a 1 or 2, I would have been sponsored the following year. Now, having been jilted, I would need to grind for another year hoping the same hard work would produce a different result. That was option one. Option two was to accept a hard truth: that 3 meant my career at the firm was already dead. The outcome I wanted was not on the table no matter what the firm implied. I was going to be “counseled out” regardless, and my slow walk to the door had already begun.
Anyone who has lost time (and likely dignity as well) as a result of an overlong period of unrequited affection knows which of my options was best. When you’re in the trenches, things are less clear, but I knew I could not carry on like I had been. Emulating a killer robot from the mid-80s for the benefit of an entity I had grown to resent for its simultaneous expectation and disregard of the full capacity of my labor was a non-starter. It was time to reassess.
In two years, I had put a few items in the win column: I had remained long enough for my golden handcuffs to be unlocked, performed well enough to be promoted, and created some financial breathing room thanks to a prodigious savings rate. I was in a position where leaving the firm was possible, but I was too tentative to swing without another branch in sight. Fuck it, I thought. If I can’t go all in and I can’t quit, I’ll coast. If the firm really did want my head, it would have to build a case to fire me, which gave me a good six months or more before the axe fell. Until then, I would perform the duties of my job unencumbered by aspirations of advancement while formulating an exit strategy and banking as much blood money as possible.
Onward. Always.
Half Good Hiker