My Stomach Growled Through the Entire Interview
Three panelists, one empty stomach, and a soundtrack nobody acknowledged.
The first growl arrived during the phrase "tell us about yourself," which is exactly when my body decided to answer on my behalf.
I had skipped breakfast for reasons that made sense at 6 a.m. and made none by 10:30. The logic went: eat nothing, avoid the risk of spinach in teeth, arrive light and sharp and hungry in the metaphorical sense only. I ironed my one good shirt on a towel on the floor of my rented room. I rehearsed my strengths in the mirror until they sounded like someone else's. I took two buses and walked the last stretch past a row of food carts, and the smell of onions frying in oil followed me into the lobby like a stray dog that knew something I didn't.
The interview was for a content associate position at a company whose office had a glass wall, a fiddle-leaf fig, and a receptionist who said "they'll call you in" with the neutrality of a border official.
Three panelists. I still remember them with the clarity you reserve for people who have witnessed you at your worst. A man with silver glasses who tapped his pen in waltz time. A woman with a red folder she never opened. And at the center, a senior manager with the calm of a lake, the kind of stillness that makes you louder by comparison.
"Tell us about yourself," said the lake.
And my stomach said, clearly, at conversational volume: mrrrrowwwwl.
It was not a subtle sound. It was the sound of a door opening in a horror film. It was a whale answering another whale. The pen stopped its waltz. The red folder shifted one centimeter. Nobody said anything... and in that silence I made the first great mistake of the morning: I pretended it hadn't happened.
I began my rehearsed answer.
My stomach provided the string section.
Here is what they do not tell you about a growling stomach: acknowledgment is the only exit, and every minute you delay, the price of the exit goes up.
At minute one, you can laugh and say "excuse me, I skipped breakfast" and the room laughs with you. At minute eleven, the sound has become a fourth panelist, and mentioning it now would mean admitting it was always there, like a guest you failed to introduce and can no longer name.
So we all pretended. All four of us, plus the fig.
I answered a question about content strategy over a low rumble. I answered a question about deadlines over something that can only be described as plumbing. When the man with silver glasses asked about my "greatest professional challenge," my stomach produced a sound so long and so structured that it had, I swear, a beginning, a middle, and a thesis.
The woman with the red folder pressed her lips together. Not unkindly. The way you do at a funeral when a child says something true.
I kept going... Sweat gathered at my spine. I heard my own voice listing my strengths, and underneath it the mutiny of my body, and I remember thinking, with genuine wonder, that I had spent the whole week preparing answers and my stomach had prepared a counterargument.
Then came the turn I did not see coming.
The lake, the calm senior manager, leaned forward to ask the final question...
Her stomach growled back.
Not a polite growl. A full reply. Same species, same register, unmistakably the same language. The room went so quiet that the air conditioning sounded judgmental.
She looked at me... I looked at her. And she said, without a flicker of embarrassment, "I also skipped breakfast. The 8 a.m. review ran long. Should we just admit that half this room is starving?"
I laughed the way you laugh when a fever breaks. The pen resumed, allegro now. The red folder finally opened, and it turned out to contain nothing but a printout of my writing sample, which she slid across the table and said, "This paragraph. Why did you end it there?"
For the next ten minutes we had an actual conversation, the kind interviews are supposedly designed to produce and almost never do.
I forgot my rehearsed strengths. I told the truth about a project that had failed and what the failure had cost me. Our stomachs called to each other across the table like ships in fog, and nobody pretended anymore.
I did not get the job.
The email came nine days later, two lines, "impressed by your candor," position filled internally, best wishes. I read it standing at the same food cart I had walked past that morning, eating my second plate of chhole, because some corrections must be made ceremonially.
Hunger is honest. It was the only part of me in that room that refused to perform.
Here is the part I didn't expect. That night I couldn't sleep, so I did what I do with everything my dignity cannot hold: I wrote about it. What came out wasn't a diary entry. It came out with line breaks. A poem about a body interrupting a performance, about the sounds we agree not to hear in rooms where everyone is pretending. I sharpened it for a week, then posted it on a community wall for poets, half expecting silence...
A stranger commented that she had once sneezed seventeen times during her thesis defense. Another wrote about his shoe sole flapping open during a wedding toast. The comments became a small anthology of bodies refusing to cooperate, and I understood that I had accidentally written about something bigger than an interview. Months later a writing exercise asked for "a moment your body betrayed you," one of those prompts that pries open a door you had painted shut, and I wrote the second poem, the better one, the one about my father clearing his throat before every lie.
I have a decent job now, at a smaller company, where I was interviewed by one tired man who ate a sandwich during our call and offered, sincerely, to wait while I got one too. I took him up on it. We chewed at each other over video like two old farmers, and I knew I would accept before he finished asking.
But the real inheritance of that morning is smaller and stranger. I keep a granola bar in every bag I own. Laptop bag, gym bag, the tote with the broken zip. Not because I am organized. Because I now know that the body keeps its own calendar of appointments and does not consult you, and that the only dignity available to any of us is a little advance planning and a willingness, when the sound arrives anyway, to be the first one in the room to name it.
Some nights I still think about that senior manager, whose name I never learned properly, whose stomach answered mine like a rescue flare. Whoever got the job, I hope they eat well. Whoever runs interviews in glass rooms with judgmental figs, I hope they remember that the moments that stay are never the rehearsed answers.
They are the growls. The true sounds. The ones the whole room hears and only the brave acknowledge.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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