THere's No Crying in Corporate

It’s been about a month since I doused my obsolete office job in gasoline and finally sat back to enjoy the flames. My desk-girlie experiment came after years of gig work and on the heels of liberating myself from an inept group of tea-colonizing siblings — now fending for themselves without my melanated hands in the mix, though they literally still use them in their marketing.

Looking for a fresh challenge to flex my business acumen, I landed at one of New York's classically sterile and criminally overpriced gym chains. To be clear: most NYC gyms are either overpriced or overcrowded. Usually both. Then, just to add insult to injury, they’ll expect you to be grateful for the privilege of becoming a walking billboard for their brand.

I was in sales — an industry built on the fine art of polished half-truths, emotionally manipulative storytelling, and making someone else’s millions feel like your small win. The job? Easy. My body was the first pitch. Women needed to see living proof that weight loss was real while Brooklyn dads needed someone to laugh at their self-deprecating comments, and the hardcore gym rats just wanted to know other gym rats were nearby. I represented some version of “motivation” to most prospects.

The only real hurdle? Price. But (ripping this straight from my script), I could never talk anyone out of their wallet, nor would I try, but if you’re serious about a new lifestyle, there comes a moment when you price out the bullshit and price in commitment. That price? Around $500 at sign-up. They get a membership, I get 1.75% commission, and the company gets another annual hostage worth $3.2K.

That’s corporate gym sales in a nutshell. You walk in crying about feeling fat, skinny, post-natal, post-COVID, peer-pressured — whatever your flavor of shame — and I regurgitate it with perfectly-timed guilt triggers, lofty visions of what could be, and then hit you with: “Good news — we take Apple Pay.”

You can’t hate the player. But you can certainly hate the game — because no matter the industry, the hustle stays the same. Everyone’s just trying to make a buck, especially in NYC, where commission gets taxed like it’s your second job. This pressure cooker breeds two main predators: sharks and snakes.

A shark knows their shit. They can sell in their sleep because they probably do. Sharks rarely have a life outside of work — they're obsessed with crushing quotas or comparing metrics like dick size. Usually both.

Snakes? Slimy little coworkers you can’t take your eyes off. They steal sales, manipulate clients, and dry-hump the company’s leg in plain sight. Snakes aren’t necessarily good at the job — just persistent. They skip team-building, opting to tongue the manager’s bleach-blasted asshole instead, and somehow they slither their way into the purgatory of “middle management” — not skilled enough to lead, but useful enough to keep around as a human footstool.

When I think “corporate,” I still picture that ‘90s corner office: leather furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows, a single majestic palm in the corner. Outdated? Sure. But the symbolism sticks — it’s the promised prize for those who climb the mythical “ladder.” Stay long enough. Rim the right holes. Play nice. Someday, the office is yours.

That myth hasn’t changed, just the perks have. Loyalty used to buy you a pension; now you get free snacks and a ping pong table. Companies know we’re wise to it — which is why they’re repackaging middle management as “vertical growth,” with shiny new titles and insulting pay bumps. They’d rather spin the revolving door than invest in the people actually keeping the lights on.

I saw this firsthand — upper management trying to dangle fake futures in front of me like carrots, whispering about promotions that never came, because they needed my output for their bonuses. Near the end, it hit me: most corporate higher-ups are terrified. Of their boss. Of their finances. Of their likeability. Of losing the comfort they brown-nosed their way into. I watched them attempt to sell the lie of trading your time for status; that might one day become wealth.

When my faith wavered, they’d toss the same sentiment at me: “There’s more money to be made if you just stay on the path.” A classic sales tactic. Except here, the currency was time — and even the shittiest sales rep knows that’s a no-refund policy.

I left on a beautifully empty Saturday. Gray skies outside, though you wouldn’t know it from the windowless office I’d been entrenched in for over a year. I looked around, really saw the place — the room that devoured 9 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week. The place where I made over a million dollars in sales for a company that denied me a proper raise, then dangled a shitty little promotion I was supposed to cream myself over.

I bought an IKEA couch with the raise. It worked out to less than $90 per biweekly paycheck.

I wanted to be mad. Mad at the money. Mad at the snake boss stealing sales in plain sight. Mad at the lazy upper management who wandered around like caffeinated Roombas. Mad at NYC for taxing my commission at 40%. But mostly, I sat with the deeper truth: no one put me here but me. No one kept me here but me. And for a minute, I almost choked on the idea that I might’ve actually believed I was climbing a ladder. And that’s how they get you — not by breaking your spirit, but by feeding it just enough to keep you quiet while they bleed your talent dry for profit.

But my soul was leaking out. My relationship was unraveling. My creative work was rotting in the drawer while I clocked in, smiled pretty, and served up digestible professionalism to people I didn’t respect. 

The pill finally went down with a gulp of truth: you can’t keep your whole self intact while doing a job designed around pleasing people. It’ll never be me.

So I packed up my desk, cleared my locker, nabbed a few office snacks and hugged the real ones goodbye before getting scooped by my man in our monster truck.

We didn’t make it a full block before I spotted a trainer I adored heading in. I rolled down the window and yelled from the passenger seat: “Yo! I just quit!” to which she didn’t miss a beat: “Fucking iconic!”

With that, I took my first real breath in months. It wasn’t relief per se — more clarity. The kind you get when you stop lying to yourself about where you are, who you’re serving, and what it’s costing you because the truth is, if you're still convincing yourself it's "not that bad," it already is. The truth is, corporations don't fire creatives, rather seek them for innovation that their flatlined tenured goons can no longer produce— they’ll smother us in fake opportunity and beige benefits until there’s nothing left but compliance. I knew if I’d stayed any longer, they’d have hooked me up to the IV and drip fed me just enough praise to forget I was an artist. I left before they could siphon the last of my joy and sell it back to me in quarterly bonuses and though the anvil of uncertainty lurks inevitably, the taste of freedom will forever outweigh it.