The Award I Won After I Stopped Caring
Recognition finally arrived, years after I stopped setting a place for it.
The trophy is holding down a stack of takeaway menus in my kitchen drawer, which is the most honest job it has ever had.
For nine years I wanted that award the way some people want a person. Employee of the Year at our firm came with a glass obelisk, a speech, and your photo in the lobby for twelve months, slightly too large, so that you spent a year walking past an enormous version of your own face. I wanted it so badly that every December I wrote a private list of reasons I deserved it, then spent January pretending the ceremony had not happened.
I did everything the wanting told me to do. I answered emails at 11pm with a cheerfulness that should have alarmed somebody. I volunteered for the projects nobody wanted, the ones that arrive wrapped in praise and detonate in March. I laughed at the regional director's jokes with such commitment that my cheeks ached in the taxi home. One year I skipped my cousin's wedding for a product launch that was postponed the following Tuesday.
Every year, the obelisk went to someone else.
Once it went to a man who had been at the company eight months and mispronounced my name in his acceptance speech while thanking me.
I clapped. There is video. My hands are a blur of enthusiasm and my eyes are the eyes of a hostage.
The Year the Wanting Broke
What broke it was not wisdom. I would love to tell you I read something profound on a mountain.
What broke it was my father's heart attack, mild as these things go, on a Sunday in October.
I was sitting in a hospital corridor that smelled of disinfectant and old coffee, listening to a machine somewhere going beep with unbearable calm, when my phone buzzed with an email asking whether I could "jump on a quick call" about slide formatting.
I stared at that email for a long time... Then I laughed, alone, in a hospital corridor, the kind of laugh that makes strangers move their bags closer.
Dad recovered.
Something in me did not... or rather, something recovered from a much longer illness. I went back to work in November and simply stopped performing. Not stopped working. I want to be clear, because people hear this story and imagine I became a rebel with my feet on the desk. I worked the same hours, roughly. But I stopped narrating my work to the people who mattered at ceremonies. I stopped forwarding my wins upward with a little bow attached. When the detonating projects came around wearing their praise, I said, "No, I don't have capacity," a sentence I had previously believed was illegal.
In the evenings, suddenly owning my own evenings, I went back to writing, which I had abandoned around the same time I started wanting obelisks. I found an essay online about why safe poems lose, tucked away on a writing blog I still read, and it rearranged something in me, because I had been writing safe emails, safe reports, a safe life. I started entering a monthly poetry contest, not to win... or so I told myself, though the first rejection still stung like a paper cut in lemon week.
By the third month the sting faded into something better: I was making things again, and nobody's photo went in any lobby, and the work was the whole reward, an idea I had heard my entire life and understood for the first time at thirty-eight.
I wrote a lot that winter about my father, about mortality, about the strange accounting we do with our years. Most of it landed somewhere between hope and terror, which I have since learned is where most true things live.
Then, of Course, the Award
You already know what happened, because irony is the only reliable department in any company.
The following December, fourteen months after the hospital corridor, my name was called at the ceremony.
I was at the back near the pastries, having attended only because attendance was gently mandatory... and I genuinely looked behind me. The regional director said my name twice. Someone pushed my shoulder. I walked to the front with a napkin still in my hand, a napkin with a mini eclair on it, and I want history to record that I did not put the eclair down. I received the glass obelisk with one hand.
The speech they read said things like "steady leadership" and "someone the whole team trusts" and "brings calm to every room." Not one line mentioned the years of 11pm emails.
Everything they praised was a thing I had started doing after I stopped trying to be praised.
They gave me the award for the person I became once I stopped auditioning for it.
Afterward, my colleague Renata, who has survived four restructures and does not waste words, clinked her glass against my obelisk and said, "You know why you got it this year?" I said I had theories. She said, "You stopped wanting it. Wanting leaks. Everyone can smell it." Then she took my eclair, which I felt was earned.
She was right, but she was only half right, and the other half took me longer. It was not just that the wanting leaked. It was that the wanting had made me worse at the actual job. All those years of managing my visibility were hours not spent being useful, and worse, they made people flinch, because nobody fully trusts a person who treats every conversation as evidence for a future ceremony.
When I stopped collecting evidence, people started telling me the truth, and a person who hears the truth becomes, almost accidentally, good at their work.
I gave a four-sentence acceptance speech. I thanked the team, mispronounced nobody, and got out. In the taxi home the city slid past the window, all those lit towers full of people wanting things, whole skylines of wanting, and I felt an enormous tenderness for every one of them, including the version of me who clapped like a hostage all those Decembers.
Here is what I would tell her, if taxis ran backward. The award was never going to fix the thing that wanted it. The thing that wanted it was fixed in a hospital corridor by a beeping machine and a bad email, and by evenings given back to words, and by learning to write toward new beginnings at an age when I assumed all my beginnings were behind me.
My photo hung in the lobby for a year, slightly too large. I walked past it most mornings without looking... and the not-looking was not discipline. I had simply stopped needing its opinion.
The obelisk came home with me because leaving it on my desk felt like a shrine. My niece asked if it was a wizard thing. I said yes, obviously. Then it went in the drawer, where it does honest work at last, keeping the menus flat, catching the light for two seconds whenever someone in this house gets hungry and goes looking for something they actually want.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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