One ordinary day, at a company I worked for, two senior leaders called me into a meeting room and told me to give up my role.
I asked what they meant.
They said I was to hand over my work to someone on my team and move away from my desk.
Why? I asked. I knew it was not performance, I was surpassing my targets, and everyone in that room knew it.
They gave no reason. They simply said I had to leave the role. And when I asked what I was to do instead, they encouraged me, warmly, professionally, to leave the company and find another job.
It remains the strangest conversation of my working life.
So there I was: employed, but with no portfolio, no work, and no desk.
Let me describe this situation properly, because I have never met anyone else who has lived it. I still had a job in the legal sense. A salary arrived. But I had nothing to do and nowhere to sit. The design of the arrangement was obvious, it was a resignation letter, pre-written, waiting only for my signature.
I did not feel compelled to provide it.
Instead, I showed up. Every single morning, at 8am sharp, I walked into that building. I sat at whatever desk I found available, a professional nomad in her own workplace. I made sure they saw me. If the plan was for me to quietly disappear, the plan had not accounted for who they were dealing with.
You may remember the girl who was sent to a school where teachers expected the worst of her, and responded by being immaculate. She grew up.
But showing up was only half the strategy. The other half: I started job hunting inside the organisation.
I went from leader to leader, department to department, and asked one question: can I help you? I sold my skills. I lobbied for work. I did the thing I once told you about, I said what I wanted out loud, to anyone who would listen. It was humbling. It was uncomfortable. The corridors knew what had happened to me, and I walked them anyway, daily, with my CV essentially printed on my forehead.
After about a month, one leader made me an offer.
Product management. A role I would never have thought to pursue, every role I had held before was behind the scenes, operational, no revenue responsibility. This one came with ambitious business targets. Actual revenue. Actual growth. I had never grown business in my life.
I said yes anyway. But first, he needed me to speak with the head of the department I would join.
The department head and I had worked together for years. He knew me. Still, we had to have the honest conversation: could I do work I had never done? There were gaps in my skills and we both knew it. I promised I could learn, and I made the case that my past experience would serve the role in ways that were not obvious on paper.
He agreed to take me on.
And then, as I was about to walk away, he said, and I quote, “I hope you are not pregnant. There are already three pregnant women on my team!”
Reader.
That very morning, I had taken a home pregnancy test. I was about six weeks pregnant.
I told him the truth, because that is who I am. And he told me he could not have another pregnant woman on his team.
So: no desk, no role, and now, no offer. The job hunt continues, I thought. I could have written the resignation letter, goodness knows the situation kept suggesting it. But there was a new baby on the way and two older children at home. Quitting was a luxury; provision was a duty. I resolved to keep hunting, jobless inside my own employer, one corridor at a time.
A few days later, a letter arrived.
I was appointed to the role. In that team. With the three other pregnant women, who were about to become four. Something changed that department head’s mind, and to this day I let that remain between him and his conscience.
I took the role. I learned on the job. I took a short course to close the gaps I had promised to close. And then I excelled, properly excelled, revenue targets and all. By the time I went on maternity leave for my third baby, I was back in good standing with the very people who had taken my desk.
And here is the part that still astonishes me: that role changed the entire direction of my career. Product management led to innovation leadership, the work that lights up my world to this day, the work this whole series keeps circling back to. The most humiliating chapter of my career was, in disguise, the doorway to the best of it.
The lessons of Day 27, earned at full price:
You do not have to accept the story being written for you. They wrote “she resigned quietly.” I showed up at 8am and wrote something else.
Dignity is not the same as pride. Pride would have quit to avoid the embarrassment of desk-hopping and corridor-lobbying. Dignity did the embarrassing thing daily, because there were children to feed and a future to build.
And the gray, always the gray: the people who took my desk handed me, without meaning to, the career I was actually built for. I did not owe them gratitude. But I would be lying if I said the door they slammed did not swing me somewhere better.
If you are currently in a season where someone has taken your desk, literally or otherwise, do not confuse their decision with your ending.
Keep showing up. Keep asking. Keep selling what you carry.
Somewhere in that building is a letter with your name on it.
Come back tomorrow for Day 26: I don’t need a more aesthetic kitchen.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
