A year ago, I was in danger of losing a job I thought I’d retire from.
It wasn’t exciting work, but I believed it was stable — and after everything, stable felt like enough. Then management changed, a new director landed on my team, and I got the distinct feeling she had it out for me. I brushed it off as mean-girl nonsense. Turns out I was reading it right. I was on the chopping block.
Here’s the thing: I’ve lived through some genuinely traumatic things not so long ago, and they left me a firm believer in divine timing. So when my girlfriends pushed me to put my feelers out into my network — before the inevitable actually happened — I did. And it was almost funny how perfectly it lined up. My former boss had just sold her company, and she asked me to come aboard to help transition it into the new agency.
In saying yes, I got to build my dream job.
It wasn’t easy, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. But I didn’t mind being up at 6:30 to answer New York’s questions, managing the team all day, running photo and video shoots into the evening, then working my own projects into the small hours — only to wake up and do it all again. Weekends included. It was the ultimate boss-lady job, and I loved it.
What I couldn’t control was everything around it. The rest of the agency never quite embraced the creative division the way I’d hoped. So we made it plain to leadership: if they wanted this to work, they had to give us teeth — real authority — or we could pivot into a creative services team instead. They chose the latter. Their reasoning stung: they didn’t feel the agency was creative enough to work with real creative leadership.
And so, here I am at the crossroads again.
But I know this crossroads. I know how to stand in it. I look for the helpers — the people, the moments, the small nudges that seem divinely placed in my path to carry me through, and sometimes carry me somewhere better than I’d ever imagined. Maybe that’s a new job. Maybe it’s this new business I’ve built, waiting for its moment to take off. Maybe it’s both.
What if the door closing behind me is the whole reason I’ll finally walk through the right one?
So let me ask you what I keep asking myself: Where are you standing right now — and what would happen if you trusted the timing of it?”
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