By the end of 2011, I had gotten really down on work. I let my beard go long, such that I was receiving comments from co-workers, and had put on a few pounds. Yoga was harder than ever, and rare that I got to it, and I was starting to forget passwords to frequently visited websites. I felt frail.

It was then I realized I had created this specter of fear, which followed me. It was like a thick, billowing balloon that I had breathed air and shape into with my own self-doubt.

Now it reminds me of past failures that didn’t matter: getting fired from a job waiting tables, then thinking, it’s really okay that I’m not a good waiter. I can recover from that. But to not try and fail at what I knew I should do, that wasn’t okay.

Categories: Corporate America

Tags: inspiration, Memoir, writing