This Isn’t Random

Sunday mornings were supposed to feel like rest. Instead, I would wake up with my chest already tight, the dread already settling in. I did not have to go to work until Monday. My mind was already running through the week ahead: the deliverables, the meetings, the emails I had not answered over the weekend. I had been managing homework and meals and bath time and everything else that falls to a mother when she is, for all practical purposes, on her own. The twins were still small. Their older brother needed things too. At the time, I felt that Intel did not care what my home life looked like. What mattered was whether I had the answer. Whether everything under my ownership was running smoothly. Whether I could shine.

Every year, we had what was called a brag sheet. We had to list out the things we had done that year. We needed to shine in order to even be considered for a promotion. The culture rewarded visibility. It rewarded self-promotion. And I was a woman who had spent her entire life working hard in the background, believing that if I did enough, someone would notice.

They did not notice.

I went sixteen years without a promotion.

Sixteen years of delivering, performing, solving, and carrying. Shrinking myself small enough to avoid drawing the wrong kind of attention. Because that was what I knew how to do. I did not know it had a name yet. I did not know it was a pattern. I knew that something inside me kept pulling me back into the same posture: head down, work hard, do not make waves, do not take up too much space. Then wonder why nothing changed.

By the time Sunday morning came around each week, I was already spent. I would get to the point of being in tears. I could not concentrate. There was an overall sense of dread that hung over everything. I did not want to go to work. But I could not afford not to. I was a single mother with no safety net. The only place I could try to get relief was through work, because I could not take a break from the kids. I would press my way through fall, through winter. By springtime it would really start hitting. By May, I would hit that brick wall. Every year. The same wall. The same month.

I did not yet see the cycle. I kept walking into it.

If you had looked at my life from the outside during those years, you would have seen a woman who had it together. An engineer at Intel. A mother of three. A woman who showed up, handled her business, kept things running. I managed the finances, the school activities, the household, the emotional temperature of every room I walked into. If something needed to be done, I did it. If someone needed something, I gave it. That was the deal. That was the unspoken contract I had been living under since I was a child.

I had my armor on. I had it on for so long that I did not remember ever not having it. The armor looked like competence. It looked like responsibility. It looked like a woman who could handle anything. But underneath it, I was exhausted in a way that no amount of rest could reach. I had fatigue that rest couldn't cure.

My ex-husband was controlling. And I stayed. I stayed the way I had learned to stay. By giving more. By trying harder. By making myself smaller so there would be less to criticize. The more I gave, the more he took. I was carrying all the weight financially, spiritually, emotionally. I kept thinking that if I could just get it right, if I could just figure out the combination of effort and sacrifice that would make things work, the pressure would ease.

It did not ease.

I had been married about thirteen years when the stress of the marriage and the stress of Intel and the stress of managing twins and an older son alone all collided. I had so much on me. And my husband was not with me. Not absent in the dramatic way people picture when they hear that. Present in the house, but checked out from the partnership. I was doing everything alone inside a marriage.

That intersection (the marriage not going well, the constant pressure at work, the feeling of being stuck) was where the weight became more than I could carry in silence. Not the kind of collapse that happens all at once. The kind that builds slowly, load by load, while you keep performing as though nothing is wrong. Because that is what you have always done. Because that is what you were taught.

I was the oldest child. A sensitive child. Always trying to please.

My father was a strict disciplinarian. He was not necessarily physically abusive to me, but what I witnessed between him and my mother I can only describe as physical and verbal abuse. And for me, the message was consistent: good was never enough. I could have done a hundred things correctly, but if I got one wrong, that one erased everything else. I learned early that love was conditional on performance. That safety depended on anticipating what someone else needed before they had to ask. And that my feelings were not welcome in the room.

He did not allow a show of emotions. Going to my grandmother's funeral, going to my grandfather's funeral, he had a problem with us showing sadness. He felt that it was weakness. Any show of emotion other than being happy. You were supposed to not let the world know that anything was wrong.

So I learned not to let the world know. I learned to hold everything inside my body and keep moving. I learned to shrink.

My mother spent a lot of time doing damage control before damage...

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