I’m 55 with a college degree, working in retail to stay afloat. It’s been hard to get past the shame and find purpose.

I’d been up since 4 a.m., sitting at my computer with an email ready to rescind my acceptance of a customer-service job at a large department store.

It was August 2025, and I was supposed to start that morning. Shame had me hovering over the “send” button.

I wondered how it had come to this. I had a college education, decades of experience in social work, and had spent the last six years writing for major publications. Yet here I was, back in a department store, doing the kind of customer-service work I had first done as a teenager. Only now I was 55.

I didn’t think the work was beneath me, but at my age, I believed I should be “further along”…