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.