Life Interrupted by an Office
I landed at a midwestern marketing agency right out of grad school, which felt—for a while—like winning the lottery. I had an MFA, rent to pay, and not much of a plan beyond “I’d like to write, please.” The agency gave me a salary, health insurance, and a badge that opened doors. At twenty-something, that felt like adulthood.
The work started small: emails, web pages, blog posts. Words with a purpose, even if the purpose was “convince someone who’s already half-interested to maybe fill out a form.” Over time, the vocabulary around what I did shifted. I wasn’t writing anymore; I was producing “assets,” “deliverables,” and “collateral.” The job became less “think this through” and more “feed the machine.”
I watched people who fit the culture—loud, upbeat, always on—move up. I didn’t. That’s partly on me. I’m not built for the rah-rah energy of sales floors and pep-talk all-hands. But there was also a basic mismatch: I wanted to make things that meant something; the place needed things that could be billed in fifteen-minute increments.
The vibe was a familiar corporate cocktail: a little frat house, a little startup cosplay, a little “we’re a family here” in the handbook, followed by org charts that quietly contradicted it. Not evil. Just that particular flavor of modern office where everyone’s supposed to be grateful for the privilege of being overextended.
My Body Opts Out
While all of that was happening, my body was slowly unplugging itself from the fantasy of a 40-year office career.
MS does not care about marketing strategy. My vision dimmed; fatigue came in hard. Tasks that used to take an hour started taking three. I went from “sure, I can stay late” to needing to budget energy just to make it through the day, then make it home, then still be some version of a husband and father.
To the organization’s credit, there were accommodations: flexibility, remote work, understanding on paper. I don’t want to pretend that didn’t matter. It did. But there’s a difference between support that lets you thrive and support that keeps you technically present while everyone quietly wonders how sustainable this is.
On my side of the screen, it felt like trying to run complex creative work stuck on low battery. On their side, I’m sure it looked like a performance chart with a slow, uncomfortable slope. Nobody was the villain, exactly. But the system we were all inside had no good way to say, “This job, in this form, no longer fits your body or your life.”
The Offer You Could Refuse (but Probably Shouldn’t)
Eventually, the tone shifted.
The conversations moved from “How can we help you do your job?” to “What might the future look like for you?” And then one day, there it was: a severance offer. Not framed as punishment or failure. Just… an option. A very pointed option.
Layered on top of my disability and the accommodations already in place, it was hard not to read it as: we’d rather help you leave than risk this turning into lawyers and paperwork. No one said that, of course. Corporate language is built to glide past anything that sharp.
The agreement was long, dense, and written in the usual legal Esperanto. Somewhere in the middle of a paragraph—tucked between other harmless-looking points—was the non-disparagement clause. Not bolded, not titled “By the way, here’s the part where you promise not to talk much about us.” Just a quiet little sentence saying, in effect: we’ll pay you, but let’s both agree you won’t publicly shred us on the way out.
I signed. I was exhausted enough that relief eclipsed anger. There was sadness and grief, too—almost eight years is a long time to pour yourself into something, even ambivalently. But mostly, I felt like someone had finally admitted what my body had been saying for years: this wasn’t working.
After the Badge
Once I was out, something strange happened. The institutional gravity let go.
I applied for SSDI and LTD, half expecting to be stuck in bureaucratic limbo forever. Instead, they came through. For the first time in a long stretch, my financial reality wasn’t tethered to whether I could grind out another campaign or write copy with eyes that didn’t want to focus.
There’s privilege in that, and luck, and a lot of paperwork. I’m painfully aware that not everyone in my position gets that outcome. But the contrast was stark: for years, I’d been trying to hold up my side of the office bargain—show up, push through, exceed expectations—while my body quietly filed an appeal. Stepping away revealed how much of my identity had been swallowed by performance reviews and “career trajectory.”
From a distance, the whole thing looks less like a career path and more like a cultural script I was handed: get a job, stay loyal, inch upward, retire if you make it to the end. My disability tore a hole in that story. The severance package was the company’s way of smoothing the edges of that tear. SSDI and LTD, strangely, became the first honest acknowledgement that the script was never written with bodies like mine in mind.
An Early Exit, Not a Failure
I don’t hate the place. It was, in a lot of ways, a lucky first landing: I learned how business writing works, how clients think, how metrics are massaged into meaning. I met people I respect and still care about. One leader in particular fought to make sure my exit was dignified and materially fair; I’ll be grateful for that for a long time.
But I also can’t pretend the office life I was sold is still my north star. I’m not going back to chasing promotions in a culture I never fit, trading my body’s limited energy for performance scores and pep talks.
Call it an early retirement from someone else’s narrative—I never wanted the years to retirement anyway,, so I’m grateful. I’m out of the building, out of the forty-year plan, and finally honest about the fact that my time and health are not line items to be optimized. Whatever comes next won’t be perfect—but it will be mine, and it won’t require a badge to prove I belong there.
