If I Could Help One Person — Part Thirty-Seven · New

Knowing My Worth

Just shy of twenty dollars an hour. And the ladder I see before me.

Let me sit with that number for a moment, because I think it deserves to be looked at directly. Not flinched away from. Not softened with context or qualified into something more palatable. Just seen.

Just shy of twenty dollars an hour. That is what the market decided I was worth after well over a decade of corporate and public sector service. After years of navigating bureaucracies, managing relationships, solving problems that did not come with instruction manuals, and showing up — reliably, professionally, fully — in rooms where I was often the only one who had read the room correctly.

The seventeen-year-old working the drive-through at McDonald's is making roughly the same. Possibly more, depending on the state.

I am not saying that to diminish what that teenager is doing. Work is work. Showing up is showing up. But I am saying it because the contrast is stark enough to be funny, and I have learned that when something is too painful to cry about, sometimes the only honest response is a short, quiet laugh at the absurdity of it all.

The Number and What It Means

Humbling is the right word. Not humiliating — humbling. There is a difference, and the difference matters.

Humiliation is what happens when someone takes your worth and throws it back at you like an insult. Humbling is what happens when the universe quietly, firmly reminds you that you are not where you thought you were — and that the gap between where you are and where you want to be is real, and measurable, and yours to close.

I have been humbled before. Sobriety was humbling. Losing things I thought were permanent was humbling. Sitting across from a hiring manager who looked at my resume and saw a liability instead of an asset — that was humbling too. But humbling is not the same as broken. Humbling is the thing that happens right before growth, if you let it be.

I accepted the offer. I said yes to just shy of twenty dollars an hour. And I want to be honest about why.

Why I Said Yes

Because I see a ladder.

Not a metaphor. An actual, visible, climbable ladder — rungs I can count, a direction I can name, a destination I can describe in specific terms. And when you have been in free fall long enough, a ladder — even one that starts lower than you expected — is not an insult. It is an anchor. It is the thing you grab onto before you start climbing.

I have spent enough time in my life focused on the paycheck. On the number. On what the number said about me, what it meant, whether it was enough, whether I was enough. That math never worked out the way I wanted it to. The bigger the number, the more I needed. The more I needed, the more I drank. The more I drank, the less I was actually worth — to myself, to anyone.

So this time, I am trying something different. I am looking past the number. I am looking at the ladder.

What the Market Knows and What It Doesn't

Here is what I have come to understand about the job market, particularly for women over forty who are re-entering after a gap, or a crisis, or a decade of doing things that don't translate cleanly onto a resume: the market is not a fair assessor of worth. It never has been.

The market knows your most recent title. It knows your gaps. It knows whether your keywords match the algorithm. It does not know what you survived to get here. It does not know the meetings you ran, the crises you managed, the relationships you built and maintained and leveraged in ways that never showed up in a performance review. It does not know what it cost you to keep showing up, or what it took to start over.

The market is not wrong about me. It is just incomplete. And I am not going to spend my energy arguing with an incomplete picture. I am going to spend it filling in the rest.

That is what the ladder is for.

On Worth That Isn't Measured in Dollars

I want to be careful here, because I have heard the "your worth isn't your paycheck" speech before, and I know how hollow it can feel when you are looking at a number that doesn't cover your rent. I am not going to tell you that money doesn't matter. It does. It matters enormously, especially for women, especially for women who have spent years in financial situations that were not entirely their own.

But I do think there is a version of worth that the paycheck cannot capture. The version that shows up in how you carry yourself into a room. In whether you can look at yourself in the mirror without flinching. In whether the work you are doing is moving you somewhere, or just keeping you still.

I am sober. I am present. I am, for the first time in a long time, actually available — to the work, to the people around me, to the version of myself that is still becoming. That is worth something. It is worth something that does not show up on a pay stub, and it is also, I believe, the thing that will eventually change the number.

Ready to Climb

I am not going to pretend this is easy. Starting at the bottom — or close to it — when you have been somewhere higher is a particular kind of hard. It requires you to set aside a certain amount of ego, a certain amount of the story you have been telling yourself about who you are and what you deserve. That is not comfortable work. But it is honest work. And honest work, I have learned, is the only kind that actually builds anything.

So I am focused on the ladder. Not the paycheck. Not the number. Not the comparison to the seventeen-year-old at the drive-through, who is, for the record, probably doing just fine and does not need me projecting my complicated feelings about labor markets onto her shift.

I am focused on what comes next. The next rung. The next room I walk into. The next time someone asks what I can do and I get to show them, rather than just tell them.

It was humbling. And I am ready to climb.