years
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jill Gardner, family president at the Laird Norton Company. It has been edited for length and clarity.When I married my husband, Doug, I also married into his family business. My husband and his cousins are the fifth generation of his family…
Three years ago, my family of three left New Zealand for Kobe, Japan, desperate for a total reset. We were running on empty, exhausted by skyrocketing living costs, limited career growth, and relentless financial stress.We already loved Japan as tourists, but moving here permanently felt like a massive gamble. Instead,…
It’s never fun to be let go from a job, but finding out that you lost a role in what would go on to be a $197 million movie because your mom wouldn’t allow you to get a haircut? That one stings.In Hayden Panettiere’s memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,”…
I found home in a person before I found it in a place. In January 2017, I met my now-husband — a 6-foot-3 Indo-Fijian man with kind eyes and a deep, soothing voice — on Bumble in Canada.At the time, I was a New Yorker living in Toronto temporarily. I…
I spent over 10 years at Meta, joining in 2012 when the company was still called Facebook and the newly acquired Instagram team occupied just two rows of stand-up desks in a half-filled Menlo Park campus.As a global director, I helped lead a creative group launching campaigns with Marvel, Disney,…
Growing up outside Boston, I loved the city’s arts and culture scene. Loading audio narration… Spending weekends in bookstores and thrift shops, hunting for unique vintage clothes, made me feel cosmopolitan — worlds away from my homogenous suburb. As a queer kid, that was a lifeline.In fact, I loved this…
After months of job hunting, my husband had finally received a great offer, one that even came with a higher salary and title bump. Loading audio narration… The catch is that the role was based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, about seven hours from where we’d lived in Washington, DC, for…
The year was 2006. Pluto had just been downgraded to a dwarf planet. I was obsessed with my Motorola Pebl flip phone and iPod. It was also the year I started paying down my student loan balance after completing my MBA. Loading audio narration… For 20 years, this student loan…
I grew up in early 2000s Los Angeles, which is to say I grew up believing it was the center of the universe. Loading audio narration… Not metaphorically — literally. Everything sparkly seemed to happen there: movies, fame, ambition, reinvention. Even failure felt cinematic.For over a decade, I assumed this…
Time is a thief. When each of my four children was born, I thought they would be little forever. The baby and toddler years are so all-consuming that it seems like they will never end. But I learned, quickly, that the axiom that the days are long but the years…
