by
Carrie Sun
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Because I did not know how to get off the call I ended up being late to my three-hundred-dollar-an-hour therapy. When I arrived I talked a mile a minute about how I felt paralyzed by the need to make some big decisions. “I want to quit my life,” I told my therapist. “But I promised him five to ten years. I’ll feel like a total hypocrite if I break my word.”
“You made that promise,” she said, “with all the information available to you then. And now you have new information. You are allowed to change your mind.”
As I made my way to Meru, I thought of Elisabeth, who had called me again after I tried to quit. We talked for ninety minutes. “I get it,” she said. “It’s still the most catty, intense girl-fighting culture, right?” I thought of how Val and Erin were not on speaking terms and avoided each other in the halls. I do not remember what had caused their fallout, but I realized then, with each step I took, that we, the assistants, were not to blame for our infighting. I had thought that maybe Sloane and Courtney were my adversaries—no, it was the Carbon culture that pitted us against one another. We did not share information. Institutional memory was siloed. We had zero standardization across roles (except being in charge of calendars). We received no central messaging. We had no channels to resolve work issues, like how our jobs mean the willingness to do anything at any time and with a smile. The supervisor-feedback form was littered with goes above the call of duty, eager to help, persists, volunteers. We could never say no to our superiors so we said no to one another. Carbon could easily give us more resources and yet we fought over arbitrary limits, like receptionists’ time. Carbon’s executives had told us they did not want us gossiping with one another out of privacy concerns. I now saw this as a cover for the fear of what would happen if we came together and talked.
My ice cream was melting fast. “If you’re going to inherit everything soon, why don’t you go ahead and do the thing you want to do?”
“Because I’ll feel guilty inheriting something I didn’t work for. I think if we, you know, you and me, if we have a future, if I work a few more years at the company, then we will never have to worry about money ever again.”
“So, if I’m hearing you, you’re working at your family’s company to lessen the guilt you feel for inheriting your parents’ wealth?”
He paused, then said, “Basically. Yeah.”
“You used to talk about starting this or that or— You had dreams. What happened to them?”
“It’s not just money, though. It’s a lot of money.”
“Yes and no—”
“Uh . . .”
“Yes, it’s a lot of money. But it’s also just money. I am confident that you and I, if we remain together, with or without your inherited wealth, could make a living. The only thing in short supply is time.”
“But to live the lifestyle we want—”
“Don’t factor me into this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want that lifestyle, I really don’t. In fact, I hate it.”
“You don’t care about having hundreds of millions of dollars for our future?”
“It’s your inheritance, not ours, and certainly not mine. Also, the New York apartment is owned by your family’s trust, not even you.”
“But if you’re married to me, then it is ours.”
“That’s the thing—only if I’m married to you. I want to have things, own things, have equity in things that are not contingent on you. I don’t want to live in your house.”
“I’m offering you the chance to never have to worry about money again in your life.”
“And I would rather live in a half-a-million-dollar house that I own than a ten-million-dollar one in which I’m squatting.”
“So, let me get this straight: You don’t want to live in our, uh, extremely luxurious Manhattan apartment many people would die to live in?”
great convo love this for her
He fell silent. So did I. I heard the crunch of fallen leaves and the happiest barks of unleashed dogs in a nearby dog run. Slowly, quietly, Josh asked, “You would give up hundreds of millions of dollars for the freedom to do your own thing?”
I looked across the street at a neighborhood deli and thought of my parents. The first thing I remember telling myself I wanted to be when I grew up was “the opposite of my mom.” I had been so intent on defining myself as the antipode of her that I failed to see how that mindset shortened the umbilical cord I had tried to cut loose. She yelled; I would be calm. She judged; I would be tolerant. She saw danger; I would know no fear. She changed her mind randomly; I would be so consistent and logical and rational—and thus, unchanging, because how do you reason and decide your way into insight, revelation, becoming a whole new person?—that I would drive myself into paradoxical corners from which I saw no escape.
Looking back at Josh, I knew if I wanted the freedom to do my own thing, I would have to give him up—and give up Boone, and, in a sense, my parents. I would have to give up all the gifts they continued to offer me because a gift weighed down by the imposition of gratitude becomes an expectation; over time, it becomes debt. “I have wasted my life,” I said. “But it’s okay. I will begin again. My parents did it in their thirties and if they can do it, so can I.”
nice
Not a day went by at Carbon when I wouldn’t have a fleeting thought about how I had achieved a childhood dream of mine. Mom’s and Dad’s tongues were sharper than knives, and often I felt like their honing steel, but their hearts were—and have always been—softer than tofu: they put everything into giving me a shot at the American dream, the one and only way I saw and felt their love. Even when I did not have the time or appetite to eat lunch, which was most days, and even during the period in which I was bingeing, I needed the psychic comfort of having the dumplings there at my desk, just in case. My orders expanded to include shumai and hargow and jiaozi but no wontons. Hated wontons. I kept ordering and ordering and wasted a lot of food. I had gone from free to reduced to regular to overindulgent lunch. I would think of my mom, whose father’s rule at mealtime was never to leave a grain of rice uneaten on the plate; and of my dad, who would stay out past midnight delivering Domino’s pizzas during icy, snowy Midwest winters, in hopes of more quarters in tips; and of myself, again, my thoughts returning as guilt and self-loathing, so nauseating were the emotions they would only make me want to binge more.
girl u dont need to do this
But I did not grow in the ways that he or I had expected. I don’t believe I grew at all. I changed—radically. I transformed. I did not swing from one side of a pendulum to the other; I removed the pivot. This could not have been a total surprise. As every Carbon document would remind you in the footnotes: past returns are not indicative of future results.
heh