I woke up this morning despairing. I have really been sucking at my job lately, for a variety of reasons (our move, Bjorn’s demanding summer hospital schedule, and my new side gig have constrained our free time and provided neverending distraction during work hours; universities are dead in the summer; I am hitting a pretty routine patch of writer’s block brought about by boredom and insecurity) and the thought of rolling in for yet another day without a deadline pressed down on my chest, making it hard for me to lift myself out of bed. (I forgot to mention I have become addicted to deadlines.) On my way out of the house, I wrote my first rent check for the new place and slipped it under my landlord’s door, trying not to think about how the dollar amount more than canceled out the two-week paycheck that just went into my bank account last night.

I rolled in to the office 10 minutes late, which is pretty usual for me. Sometimes I come in earlier than anyone else in the office, when I actually have to get stuff done, and there are many days where I wake up at 6 to write at my kitchen table. But despite these unsung displays of productivity, I just can’t seem to fall into a routine. It’s been almost eight months, and I can’t think of a single week when I’ve showed up at 9 every day.

I did my usual slunk past the unnaturally chipper 40-year-old dude who sits at the receptionist desk, a delicate dance made much harder by the fact that my left shoe broke on my walk this morning. (Never brag about how your cute vintage flats only cost $2 at a Goodwill knock-off. You are asking for it.) I sat down in my desk chair, and just as I was slipping into a pair of back-up Old Navy flip-flips—and thanking god most everyone took a four-day weekend, thus mitigating the impact of my footwear faux pas—my editor’s boss’s boss leaned into my doorway.

“Can I just talk to you when you get a second?” he asked. “No rush.” And with that, he turned and walked away.

I panicked a little. Would someone finally call me out on being late? Did they notice that I haven’t published anything in three weeks? I went into the ladies’ room to put on mascara. I remembered the date: July 1.

Mind you, I have never had a real job where things like the fiscal year and job titles and performance reviews mattered, or even existed as anything more than abstract concepts. My paychecks were invoiced. My job titles were nothing more than bylines or positions on a masthead. The quality of my performance was indicated to me by whether someone called me back for another story, passed my name along for another job. For the first time in my life, I was going to have to acknowledge the power of The New Fiscal Year, the fresh start, the trimming of the fat and the 3-percent raise for the remaining lucky few.

Somehow the broken shoe seemed very significant in all of this. I could not walk into this man’s office in flip-flops, or I would be fired. I put the broken shoe back onto my left foot, then noticed that in the course of my morning walk a very large blister had developed on my right (again, $2. And so cute!). That foot, too, had to be painstakingly wedged into its shoe. I limped down the hall. If I was going to be fired, I would not be fired in rubber footwear. My dignity would never recover.

“Come in,” my boss mouthed. He was on the phone. I sat down, trying to find something to stare at. Some crude crayon drawings lay on the table in front of me. I remembered his sons, probably 3 and 4, whom I met once when I was working late on a Friday. Both boys were running up and down the hall, and the younger one stopped in front of my door and stared at me. Then he put something very small and plastic into his mouth. “Give me that,” I said. The boy shook his head. I got up and stuck my hand out in front of his face. He spit the toy part into my palm. Just then, my boss appeared. “Sorry,” I said, handing him the toy apologetically, as if I had just tried to choke his child. “Sorry,” he said in response. Then I went back to writing.

My boss got off the phone.

“I assumed you’ve already gone over all of this with K—,” he said, referring to yet another man who is in charge of me. He plucked an envelope from a stack and gave it to me, but I could not bring myself to open it. I am really bad at masking emotion on my face and thus extremely wary of surprises.

“I haven’t discussed anything with K—,” I said.

So then, envelope still sealed, my boss explained that I am being promoted. To a title that is in a higher pay grade. Which means a 16 percent raise.

“Everyone here loves you,” he said, which translates to: C— loves you. C— is his boss, handmaiden to Drew herself. If for some reason you have to travel all the way to the Yard and past two locked doors with their accessory receptionists to sit on her Rococo couch, you either did something great or something really, really stupid. Then he actually said, “C— loves you.” I laughed. I often laugh at things he says in meetings or to me, because they are so incongruous with reality. Sometimes this makes my boss frown, but in this case it made him smile. He enjoys nothing more than being seen as benevolent, and the least I could do to show my appreciation was leave this particular outburst open to interpretation. Then I went into the bathroom and cried.

No one here knows about the second job I took a month ago to ensure we could pay our bills and Bjorn’s tuition. No one here knows how bored I am, how safe and easy it is to do 98 percent of the work that I do. I suspect everyone knows that I have no friends here (the “Everybody loves you” part of my boss’s spiel really brought the lols more than anything), but I am not sure if they know how alien they seem to me. They speak in elevator talk even after we get off the elevator. They are all married and stable and just back from paternity leave. They dutifully like each other’s photos on Facebook. They all talk openly about “how we can get credit for this with C—.” Just last night, at a bar with my old coworkers who are now just my very good friends, I had a great time making fun of my officemate (simultaneously the most familiar and the strangest to me after the six months we’ve worked together) for constantly saying on the phone, “I don’t know if I have the bandwidth for that.” Of course she doesn’t have “the bandwidth,” everyone agreed, because she’s not a computer. She’s a human. We all had a laugh, and then we drank some more. And I was grateful to be reminded that I am human, too.

This is how life happens, I suppose. The universe is not interested in playing fair. When I first graduated from college I was nearly incapacitated by the indifference of the world to my ideas and skills and (up to that point) unchecked ambition. I had always hoped that success would project outward. I thought it would stem from effort, from fulfillment, from internal satisfaction. I had worked so hard my whole life—or worried so much about not working hard enough—that I had never considered that rewards could just be handed out indiscriminately.

I became a little hardened in that first horrible year after college, but I was also humbled. After a lifetime of having my basic needs met by doting parents and generous college scholarships, I learned that I’m not above hustling for rent money. I learned that there’s no inherent value in financial independence. I’ve learned (mostly) to stay out of other people’s business and just assume that they’re doing what they need to do to get by, which is fine. And now I’m learning that just as there’s not that much shame in failure, there’s not that much glory in success.

What’s terrifying is that I’ll finally have to figure out what does matter.