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The Worst Day of My Working Life
The irony of the worst workday of my life is that I never made it into the office.
At the time, I was working as a speechwriter for a health agency headquartered in Rockville, Maryland. On paper, my job and career trajectory looked amazing — in the span of two years following the deaths of both of my parents, I had transitioned from working in newspapers for eleven years to a series of communications roles in Austin, freelancing full-time in Texas then in Washington D.C., and then a good friend showed me how to apply for a federal position (because…in order to work in the federal government, you kind of need someone to help you figure out how to do it.)
When I landed in D.C., I realized right away that it would never feel like my forever home the way that New York City does. It was more international than Austin (widely known as a “really great town,” “a cool place to visit,” and “a lot of fun!” but not exactly “a wonderful place to be a writer,” for example) and frankly, I was tired of writing full-time. I know that’s the dream for a lot of people, but when I left newspaper journalism in search of freedom, there was no way to know how exhausting and expensive freedom would be.
So my first day job outside of newspaper journalism that lasted more than a few months was working at a health agency geared toward promoting health equity for…
