Ugly Betty & me

Making my way to the work of my soul

On September 28, 2006 Ugly Betty premiered on U.S. television. The comedy-drama series starred America Ferrera as Betty Suarez, a recent community college grad with an indomitable spirit. With mismatched clothes, kitschy accessories and adult braces, she’s labeled ugly by those around her, hence the show’s title. Coming from a working class Mexican family in Queens, NY, Betty’s character is deeply earnest, principled and giving. 

She has a dream to write within the publishing world, and through a series of events, lands a job in Manhattan as a personal assistant to the editor-in-chief of MODE, a fictional world class fashion magazine. The series tells Betty’s fish out of water story as she navigates early adulthood and holding onto her values, family and dreams while constantly facing derision from her colleagues. Determined to get her to quit, her colleagues concoct a scheme during her first official assignment. When one of the photo shoot models is indisposed, her boss and colleagues feign encouragement, urging Betty to take her spot. Hesitant, but wanting to be a team player, Betty puts on the skin tight outfit and heels, wobbling out onto set. As she nervously strikes poses, everyone on set starts to smirk until it becomes full-on riotous laughter. Betty rushes off the photo shoot in tears.

In 2006, I graduated from Duke University, a school noted as part of the “Southern Ivy League.” I mention this latter part not to brag, but rather to point out the high expectations placed on Duke grads. Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t head off to Wall Street, a big tech job, an international NGO, med school or law school, but rather I started a one year religious service learning fellowship. At the time, my priority and expectation was that I’d have a career in Christian ministry. My college summers weren’t full of prestigious internships, but rather faith based endeavors. Being a camp counselor at a Christian camp in the mountains of eastern North Carolina, serving as a mentor in my home church and traveling to Ghana (my father’s home country) on a mission trip were my summer activities.  The path was paved for my faith to explicitly become my life’s work. Fast forward one year after college and a cross country move, however, like Betty, I found myself as a fish out of water in a Silicon Valley startup.  

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My first corporate job was at a startup based in downtown Palo Alto. For those unfamiliar with Silicon Valley geography, the small city is just north of the cities that house the headquarters of juggernauts like Google and Apple. I had a generic title of Product and Marketing Associate, essentially doing whatever task I was handed, one which included coordinating a marketing event for over 300 people in India remotely (for those curious, despite the distance it was a success if I may say so myself). That job intimately introduced me to depression and anxiety. Lacking internal empowerment to say no to unreasonable job expectations, I consistently worked late into the night. I often cried in the office’s one stall bathroom. Anger sat in my belly like a hot stone as I let myself be bulldozed over and over. I fortunately didn’t have colleagues that sought to humiliate me like Betty; however, I resonated with her feeling of vulnerability and pain in the midst of trying to do your best in an unfamiliar environment.

About a year and a half after I started the job, one day I sat staring vacantly at my computer screen until a deluge over tears overwhelmed me. My colleague and closest confidante at the company, with all the gentleness and compassion in the world, said, “Nyam, please go home.” I left the office that day and before heading home sat for, what felt like hours, on a park bench close to my home. I don’t remember thinking much of anything; all I remember was the all-encompassing feeling of being broken. After I quit that job, I remember sitting in another park, and I distinctly remember feeling like I had just left an abusive relationship. This first job set the tone for the majority of my working life.

London Eye

By the end of the series, Betty ends up blossoming and moves to London to become a prestigious publication editor for a magazine that better aligns to her interests. At this point, she recognizes the gifts of her earnest, heart centered approach to work and the world. She has become more world wise, embracing her own style and avoiding the traps set by her peers who have their own journeys of personal development throughout the show. Fifteen years after my first job, despite painful mental health struggles exacerbated by work stress, despite multiple instances of leaving jobs without having another lined up, I found myself counted as competent in my work and respected by my former colleagues. While Ugly Betty ended in 2010, I still like to think that Betty and I grew up together when it comes to work life. We found ourselves growing as giants in worlds not meant for us. We found wings in worlds not built for us to fly. 

In 2021 I was working at yet another job where I gave my best, but felt inadequately supported. I looked back on the past fifteen years and in astonishment wondered, where has my life gone? Over that time, I wrestled to keep a full time job while also feeding my creative soul. Most of the time, it didn’t work; at least not in the way I wanted it to. I was too drained after working all day to figure out what to do creatively. The times when I did grow in my creative work was when I took “recovery jobs” in between my agency / tech ones. At those jobs I worked 30 hours or less in much less demanding work and could feel the capacity to turn towards my creative work. Being single and feeling an internal responsibility to help support my parents as they got older though, I felt I needed to work in tech for the high pay. 

Every time I returned to a full-time role though, I found myself in the same downward spiral towards depletion. I got much better at setting boundaries, but even at my peak level of self-advocacy and self-preservation, I got burned out. Even at my peak level of communicating clearly and consistently to my employers what I needed to do my best work, I felt crushed. Through the years, I struggled. I felt like a failure for continuously hitting this breaking point and needing to leave the world of tech. I felt the metaphorical finger was pointed at me for not having better boundaries, even though I heard peers echoing the same experiences of exhaustion and frustration that management disregarded their needs. As a creative, I felt uncommitted because I couldn’t stay up for long hours after my day job to work on music or writing because I needed to sleep in order to work in the morning. 

Me in Portugal during my 2022 sabbatical

In 2021 at age 36, I felt the delicate and inevitable sense of my mortality. Was my life going to be one debilitating, draining job after another until I died? I began the process of planning a one year sabbatical. Now in 2024 on the other side of that sabbatical, I’ve crossed a threshold, and I can’t go back. It’s not often expressed in the context of work and career, but I find myself full of grief. I’m grieving the ways my good will and work ethic were exploited. I’m grieving all the time and energy I gave to institutions that didn’t care whether I flourished or not, still reeling from the impacts to my physical and mental health. I’m grieving all the ways I didn’t get to cultivate my creative work, the work that comes from my soul.

The two years following my sabbatical have been mired in uncertainty, personally and globally. They have been filled with moment after moment of confronting my inner demons, fears and insecurities on the quest to create a meaningful life and career. I can recognize now that my soul has been trying to make a way for me. My intuition has been clearing the way for the greatness, glory and brilliance that can only come from the unique expression of who I am. In the midst of this sacred work though, I still struggle with survival. After all, brilliance does not always lead to bread. Prolific artists, including people like Vincent van Gogh, died in destitution, so why should I expect to be different when I’m not even a prolific artist? Nonetheless, something inside me is making a way for the most profound work of my life to emerge. 

I hold the ashes from my life so far, but even now, life is teaching me how to alchemize. Teaching me the way to surrender, the way to crack open hope in a tender heart. The way to make sparks from ashes and rivers from tears. To make myself a garden even if I am late to bloom. Sometimes I feel that all I think about is how my life didn’t unfold how I expected it to. Even though I have seen how this path has served me, I continue to wrestle with the residue of bitterness and resentment. I battle with stories that someone else’s path to their soul work has been easier because of a certain life circumstance that I don’t have. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. I can only believe that the journey to unearthing what is uniquely inside of you is excruciating work for all who take the risk to attempt it. I’m working on my faith as it’s not easy taking your life down a new path on the cusp of 40. Many of my peers are pinnacling in their careers -- director of product, head of product, VP, CPO, Founder. Outward indications of societal ascension. I can’t know their ambitions or what work calls to their souls. Perhaps it is right there in those corporate spaces--perhaps not. 

I had to fight to get where I am in my product career. From being a shy, unsure, soft spoken young woman who never imagined entering the corporate world to a competent, respected practitioner. Despite the pain, there is so much I hold with pride, but corporate America is rough for sensitive souls like mine. I have always been introspective and artistic, but I felt that my career demanded that I be harder than I was (although I’m sure former colleagues wouldn’t describe me as hard). I never felt I could be my full gentle self at work. Life is constantly ambiguous, but the one thing of which I am very clear is that I don’t know much. What I do know is that you have to fight for your soul when it comes to work. Whatever you need to do to keep yourself sane, healthy and grounded--do that and do it unapologetically, even more so for us sensitive souls working in corporate. Don’t be ashamed if you need to take a moment to cry or shout out your frustration by yourself or with people that you trust. 

And don’t be afraid to take all that you have learned and put it in service to your vision of life and work. If you’re like me, the bruises from your career came from hard falls. All those experiences can now be alchemized, and you can make them into what you want. So I say to myself and to others who are setting themselves on a new trajectory “late in life,” keep going. I know you may feel foolish because it seems others are on more steady, clear, proven paths, so what the hell are you doing?! But there’s a reason something inside of you won’t let you be content with your status quo. There’s a reason you keep trying to find or make a way to the work of your soul. I’m figuring it out too and haven’t arrived, but I offer my imperfect story to say, keep going.