Michelle McMillan-Holifield ~ Game of Sharks

The object was to jump in the pool, swim to the oth­er side and avoid my girl friends float­ing like Jaws near the cen­ter of the pool. I need­ed to land in the water with enough room between me and their grasp­ing arms that they couldn’t catch me before I touched “base” on the pool’s oth­er side.

Eleven years old. Stocky. Awkward. I was itch­ing to jump straight into their midst—doing so seemed eas­i­er than try­ing so des­per­ate­ly to avoid them when the only out­come I could see was being eat­en. I had trou­ble mak­ing deci­sions even at that age. Sometimes at forty, I still have that urgent itch to dive straight into the arms of failure.

~

My boss sat across from me in my office and direct­ed me to send an email. I had failed to notice anoth­er man­ag­er encroach­ing on my ter­ri­to­ry, appar­ent­ly try­ing to run my depart­ment for me. Though my boss and I heard the same words, we did not per­ceive the same moti­va­tion. Noticing that I did not react, my boss basi­cal­ly laid out, like a speech writer, exact­ly what he want­ed my email to say. He banged his open palm on the desk: “Make no mis­take, Michelle. Everything is a pow­er struggle.”

~

At the pool, the boys’ cool ease turned my world upside down: no cares about the sharks, no wor­ries about the jump. I squished up my toes, antsy, bent for­ward to jump. Michael propped up against the fence. “Not yet,” he said. “Relax.”

Dane crossed his arms over his chest. Again, my mus­cles tensed; I pre­pared for the jump. Dane warned, “Don’t do that. Lean against the fence. Look like you don’t care.”

~

I sat on that email for days. I and the oth­er man­ag­er, who sup­pos­ed­ly encroached on my ter­ri­to­ry, were actu­al­ly doing our best to unite our two depart­ments; we had week­ly meet­ings where we some­times dis­cussed ways to improve com­mu­ni­ca­tions so that we could build up each other’s teams, so of course I hadn’t got­ten the same vibe about his actions as my boss. Nonetheless, there was no way I could get out of send­ing that email since my boss want­ed to be copied on it.

I com­posed a firm but non-accusato­ry email, ulti­mate­ly stat­ing some­thing like, I need to be con­sult­ed before any deci­sions are made in regard to my depart­ment. And then I kept the email in my drafts. And I revised it. And saved it back to drafts. Revised it the next day. Saved it again.

~

My prob­lem was I cared too much about that jump; cared too much about fail­ing. I fol­lowed the boys’ advice, jumped when they told me, mad-pad­dled to base. I’m sure there was some kind of ener­getic surge I equat­ed with vic­to­ry when I was pro­claimed Safe!, but it was not my own vic­to­ry. It was the boys’. It was their strat­e­gy that got us safe­ly to the oth­er side of the pool.

~

Years ago, I observed a friend of mine in her man­age­ment posi­tion and wrote this tiny poem:

Where she falls
her body braces the ladder
so the rest can rise.

When I wrote that poem, I was an hourly employ­ee who need­ed direc­tion more than I could give direc­tion. The “fall” was not fail­ure, but a metaphor­i­cal death from hard-fought bat­tles, from exhaus­tion so preva­lent in the cor­po­rate world. I saw her as a mar­tyr and her cause as the suc­cess of women who came after her.

She even­tu­al­ly quit her job and months after­ward said, “When I was there, in the midst of it, I didn’t rec­og­nize what I was feel­ing was a con­stant anx­i­ety until one day it wasn’t there anymore.”

~

In the Game of Sharks, the men­tal game made me ready to jump straight into the midst of those grasp­ing hands. My work­place felt no dif­fer­ent. There were those who stood, arms crossed, lean­ing against the fence like they didn’t care, who always knew the exact moment to jump. They put in lit­tle out­fac­ing effort and hit their tar­gets every time. They didn’t need to strug­gle for “pow­er” because they already had con­fi­dence. And they owned it.

~

My strug­gle to fig­ure out the right strat­e­gy had been going on since I was eleven. And I. Was just. Tired. I began to believe it takes more courage to walk away from a career you spent fif­teen years build­ing than to stay in the cor­po­rate strug­gle. Walking away is not fail­ure. It’s actu­al­ly anoth­er strat­e­gy with a dif­fer­ent set of hands in the water.

~

My boss even­tu­al­ly left the com­pa­ny. Three years lat­er I am still unlearn­ing the lessons he tout­ed in his own relent­less war for pow­er. For a while, I thought not want­i­ng that fight meant I was a lazy man­ag­er, that I was a naïve for not believ­ing oth­ers were out to push me down, that it was dis­as­trous not to strate­gize how to take out sharks swim­ming in my way. Eventually, with­out a man­ag­er con­stant­ly play­ing chess, posi­tion­ing his staff and col­leagues to always make him­self look bet­ter (even if we end­ed up under that prover­bial bus), when he was no longer stir­ring up my angst to get in the game or get eat­en, I chose to lean against the fence for a while. To breathe, relax, watch, seek out true lead­ers. It’s tak­en some time, but my own con­stant anx­i­ety is almost gone.

~

I still don’t have a per­fect strat­e­gy for suc­cess. I think, now, the key is to adapt. To be bold enough to change course when what I’m doing isn’t work­ing. To rec­og­nize each vic­to­ry, no mat­ter how small. To cel­e­brate the peo­ple who made vic­to­ry pos­si­ble: hard­work­ing employ­ees, peers who offer encour­age­ment, and even two boys who had no idea the impact they had just by total­ly being them­selves in an ado­les­cent Game of Sharks.

~

Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a recent Best of the Net and Pushcart nom­i­nee. Her work has been includ­ed in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Stirring, The Collagist, and The Main Street Rag, among others.