I spent fourteen years becoming someone the firm could be proud of. Here's what I do now, and why.
I chose finance. Nobody pushed me in. I liked the intensity, the calibre of the people, the pace, and yes, the money. Fourteen years in private wealth at Morgan Stanley, and for most of them I was, by every visible measure, doing extremely well. I was also fighting a quiet argument with myself the whole time about whether I was really meant to be there, and I never gave it much airtime, because there was always another deal, another client, another reason to keep moving.
When my division was sold, I sat in my car afterwards and the thought that arrived was not that I had lost my job. It was closer to being told I was no longer wanted in the family home. I had been Mrs Morgan Stanley for fourteen years, and somewhere in there the firm had stopped being where I worked and become who I was. It took losing it to notice I had handed it that much of me.
What came after was not a clean pivot. It was a couple of years of genuinely not knowing who I was without the title, and a question I had been too busy to ask for two decades. Who do I actually want to be. Not who I was trained to be, or who would keep everyone comfortable. Who do I want to be.
I work now with the women I used to sit beside. The only one at her level in the room. Carrying the book, the board ambitions, and very often the entire operating system of a household, working as though she has no family and running a family as though she has no career. Exceptional, and still, somehow, having to prove it. I know that woman closely, because I was her, and because I spend my days with her now.
What I want for her is simple and it is not modest. I want her to get the seat, and keep it, without breaking into a thousand pieces to do it. I want her to stop leaving parts of herself at the door of every room she walks into. I want her to lead like herself and find that it works better, not worse. And I want her to have one place, completely private, where she can say the true thing out loud and be met by someone who actually understands the cost of where she is standing.
That is the whole of it. I am not here to fix you, because you are not broken. I am here because I see you, all of you, and because somebody should have done this for me, and almost did, and didn't. So I do it for her.