The Promotion That Almost Cost Me Everything

I am writing this anonymously because I still work in the role I am about to describe, and some of what follows would be difficult to publish under my own name. The publication has agreed to my request. I am grateful for that. I am writing because I needed to read something like this several years ago and could not find it, and I think other women in my position might benefit from reading what I would have wanted someone to tell me when I was deciding whether to accept the promotion that almost cost me everything. 

I run a division of a publicly traded company. I am responsible for several thousand employees and a budget in the high nine figures. The role pays me more money than my parents earned across their combined working lives. I report directly to the CEO. I sit at the table where significant decisions get made. By every measure that my younger self would have valued, I have made it. 

I almost did not survive the first four years of having made it. 

The promotion came when I was forty-three. I had been with the company for fourteen years and had worked toward this particular role for at least eight of them. I had been told, by multiple senior people, that I was on track for it. I had built the relationships. I had taken the visible projects. I had delivered the numbers. When the role opened and I was offered it, I accepted without negotiating particularly hard, partly because the offer was generous and partly because I had wanted the job for so long that I could not quite believe it was being offered. I signed the paperwork on a Friday afternoon and went home and opened a bottle of wine and cried, partly from happiness and partly from something else that I did not yet have the words for. 

The something else turned out to be exhaustion. Not the exhaustion of having worked hard to get there. The exhaustion of having known, at some level I had not let myself examine, that I was about to enter a phase of my career that would ask more of me than I had to give, and that I was about to say yes anyway because I did not know how to say anything else. 

The first six months were a blur. I was hiring, restructuring, learning systems I had not previously been responsible for, managing senior relationships I had not previously managed, and trying to demonstrate, every day, that the people who had advocated for my promotion had not made a mistake. I was working twelve and fourteen hour days. I was eating at my desk. I was missing my children's events. I was canceling on my husband. I was not sleeping more than five hours a night. None of this was unusual for someone in a new senior role. I told myself that the intensity would fade once I got my footing. The intensity did not fade. The intensity became the baseline. I got more efficient at managing within the intensity, but the intensity itself did not decrease. 

By the end of the first year, I had stopped seeing most of my friends. By the end of the second year, my marriage was in serious trouble. My husband had not signed up for the version of me that the job was producing. He was kind about it for a long time. He was not infinitely kind. Around the third year, he told me, in a conversation I will not forget, that he no longer recognized the person he had married. He said he was not asking me to quit. He was telling me that the woman he loved was disappearing into the role, and that he did not know how much longer he was willing to watch it happen. I did not know what to say to him. I understood that he was right. I also did not know how to do the job at a smaller scale than I was doing it, because the role itself had been designed around someone giving it everything. 

The third year was the worst. My father had a stroke. I flew to my parents' house for the weekend, then back to work on Monday because we were in the middle of a critical quarter. My mother asked me, in the hospital, whether I could stay longer. I told her I could not. I will carry the look on her face for the rest of my life. She did not say anything. She just looked at me. I went back to the airport. I closed the deal that week. My father recovered. My mother and I have not had the same relationship since. 

My body started failing around the same time. I developed an autoimmune condition that the rheumatologist told me was likely stress-related. I was put on medication that I am still on now. I began having chest pains that turned out to be panic attacks rather than cardiac events, though I had to go to the emergency room twice to confirm this. I gained weight. I lost weight. My hair thinned. My periods became irregular. I had migraines for the first time in my life. I went to my primary care doctor, who told me, accurately, that I was experiencing the physical effects of sustained chronic stress and that I would not get better until I addressed the underlying conditions of my life. I thanked her for the assessment. I did not change anything. I went back to work. 

The fourth year is when I almost left. Not the job. My life. I want to be careful how I describe this because I do not want to be melodramatic about something that was, in retrospect, more about being thoroughly broken than about being suicidal in any specific clinical sense. But there was a period of about three months during which I would lie awake at night and seriously consider whether the entire structure of my existence was something I could continue, and the answer, on enough of those nights, was no. I did not have a plan. I did not act. But I was not, during that period, the person who would have promised to keep showing up if a doctor had asked me to. I was on the edge of something. I could feel the edge. I could not figure out how to step back from it. 

What changed, eventually, was that I made an appointment with an executive coach who specialized in working with senior women in crisis. I did not call her a crisis. I called her a leadership consultant. The first session was supposed to be ninety minutes. She let me talk for two and a half hours. At the end of the session, she asked me what I would do if my best friend told me she was living the life I had just described. I said I would tell her she needed to make significant changes immediately or she was going to lose herself. The coach said, then why are you not telling yourself that. I cried for the next forty minutes. The session went four hours. She did not bill me for the extra time. 

The work that followed was the hardest work I have ever done. Harder than the work of getting the promotion. Harder than the work of running the division. I had to rebuild my life inside a job that had been consuming it. I had to learn how to set limits on the role without losing the role. I had to repair my marriage without leaving the job that had damaged it. I had to repair my relationship with my mother. I had to repair my body. I had to repair, eventually, my relationship with the version of myself that had agreed to all of this without asking what it would cost. 

I am four years into the repair work now. The job is still significant. I am still in it. I have changed how I do it. I have hired strong people around me and given them real authority, rather than maintaining the illusion that everything had to go through me. I have set limits that I would have considered impossible at the start. I leave at six on most days. I do not check email after eight on weekdays or at all on weekends, unless something is genuinely on fire. I take real vacations now. I take them with my phone off. I have told the CEO directly that I will not work at the pace I was working in years one through three, and that he can either accept the new pace or replace me. He has accepted the new pace. The company has not collapsed. My division is performing better, by most measures, than it was when I was killing myself for it. 

I want to be honest about the cost of the repair. I lost some opportunities that would have been available to a version of me who continued at the original pace. The next promotion that would have been on the table for me, the one above this role, is no longer being discussed. I do not think I will be the next CEO. I made peace with this two years ago. The trade was worth it. The trade was the only thing that allowed me to be alive in the rest of my life, and the rest of my life is what I had almost lost. 

I want to say a few things to women who are considering accepting a promotion like the one I accepted, or who have already accepted one and are in the middle of what I went through. 

First, the role you are being offered may have been structured around the assumption that someone would do it at the pace and intensity that I tried to do it. That assumption is sometimes inherited from the previous person in the role, who may have given the job their entire life. The assumption is not, in most cases, actually required by the business. The business can often be run at a more sustainable pace by a person who is willing to insist on it. The insisting is hard. The insisting is also possible, and the people who do it sometimes find that the job is more tenable at a sustainable pace than it was at an unsustainable one. 

Second, the people around you will tell you, in the first year, that the intensity will fade. The intensity will not fade unless you make it fade. The role will expand to consume whatever amount of yourself you are willing to put into it. The structural pressure is toward more, not less. You are the only person who will set the limit, and you have to set it consciously, against significant resistance, including from your own internalized voice that says you are not earning the role unless you are sacrificing for it. 

Third, the people who matter most to you are paying for your role whether or not you have acknowledged it. Your partner is paying. Your children are paying. Your parents are paying. Your friends are paying. The bill is real even when no one is sending you a statement. Pay attention to what they are losing while you are gaining what you are gaining. The losses are often invisible until they have become irreparable, at which point the role you gained no longer feels like the gain you thought it was. 

Fourth, your body is keeping a record. The autoimmune diagnosis, the migraines, the sleep loss, the panic attacks are not random misfortunes that arrived while you happened to be in a stressful job. They are the bill the body is sending you for the conditions you have been imposing on it. The bill will continue to grow until you address the conditions. You cannot outrun the body. You can only ignore it for so long before it stops you from ignoring it. 

Fifth, and this is the one I most want you to hear, the role is not worth your life. I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean that the role, however significant, however well-compensated, however affirming of your career ambitions, is not worth your actual physical and psychological health, your marriage, your relationships with your children, your relationships with your parents while they are still alive. The role will end. You will be replaced eventually. Your life will continue, in whatever shape you have left it in. The role does not deserve more than your life can sustain giving it. 

I almost did not figure this out in time. I want other women to figure it out earlier than I did. The cost of figuring it out late is not something the role can repay you for. The cost of figuring it out earlier is some loss of advancement, which is real but bearable. The math of which loss is worse is yours to do. I would do it differently if I could do it again. I cannot. I can only tell you what I learned, which is what I am telling you now. The promotion is not always the promotion. Sometimes it is the thing you barely survive. Pay attention to which one you are being offered, and make the decision with full awareness of what you are being asked to give. 

I am better now. I am still in the role. I am running the division at a sustainable pace, and my husband and I are in the slow work of rebuilding, and my children are forgiving me for the years I was not present, and my mother and I are talking again. I do not take any of it for granted. I came close enough to losing all of it that I will be careful with it for the rest of my life. The carefulness is the gift I would not have been able to give myself if I had not nearly lost everything. The carefulness is the only thing the four years gave me that I would not give back. The rest, I would give back. The cost was too high. I would not pay it again. 

If you are deciding whether to accept your promotion, I am not telling you to refuse it. I am telling you to negotiate it differently than I did. Insist on the pace before you start. Build the support around you before you need it. Tell the people you love that you will be careful with them, and mean it, and then be careful with them. The role you take should fit inside your life, not consume it. If the role cannot fit, the role is not the right role, no matter what the title or the compensation suggests. Walk away from the wrong roles. Find the right ones. The right ones exist. I wish I had known how to find one of those four years ago. I am sharing this in case it helps someone else find one before she pays what I almost paid.