Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill in the 1988 film "Working Girl." Twentieth Century Fox/Alamy
This essay is part of HuffPost’s series “This Made Me,” a collection of stories about the pop culture that moves us.
The night I lost my last job in corporate fashion, I walked home crying with an overflowing cardboard box. This had been my biggest role and my highest salary to date: working for the female head of a then-popular flash-sale-shopping website.
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I’d approached the job with giddiness and hope. Four months after I started, my charismatic boss took a mental health sabbatical and didn’t return. She was replaced by the 26-year-old chief financial officer, who promptly told me he was proudly self-sufficient.
“Sorry, but you’re just not necessary here anymore,” I recall him coldly telling me.
It was 2012. I was 31 years old and had a new disdain for an industry I’d once loved. I’d been the executive assistant to CEOs in big-name brand fashion companies for a decade, and the only job I was qualified for was as someone else’s right hand. My résumé was filled with leaders I’d reported to and mostly reflected things I’d accomplished for others but n
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