It Apparently Takes a Catastrophe

Most people find their calling. I found mine twice — both times while the world was on in crisis.

Most people find their calling. I found mine twice. Both times while these unanticipated but incredibly life-changing events were happening.

The first time, I had been teaching for two weeks when the towers fell. The second time, I had been working in cybersecurity for five months when the world locked down. In both cases, I'd barely had time to find the bathrooms before everything changed.

I didn't start in crisis. Crisis struck while I was trying to get my footing.

Did the catastrophes make me? I’m not sure, but it arrived before I'd fully become anything, and I had to figure out who I was in the middle of it.

The Shock of 9/11

The 9/11 version of this story is the one I've been writing for twenty-five years. It's the one where I was living in Charlestown,  close enough to feel the world tilt, far enough that the smoke was somewhere else. Where I showed up to teach kids who were old enough to be scared and young enough to need someone to pretend they weren't. It's the one where I learned, faster than I expected, that I was someone who could do that. Who wanted to do that.

Teaching was my life for the next fourteen years, until I left the classroom in 2015, trading lesson plans for bylines, cobbling together a freelance writing career focused entirely on cybersecurity. It was an unlikely pivot that somehow made complete sense. I had spent years explaining complicated things like Shakespeare and Socrates to people who didn't want to hear them. Turns out those skills prepared me for security journalism.

Then Came Covid

By the time COVID arrived, I had just landed something that felt like a real career—a full-time role with a vendor behind the largest cybersecurity conference in the world. I was finally, after years of freelancing on the margins of the industry, in the epicenter where the entire industry came together. The opportunity to travel to San Francisco and Singapore and perhaps places around the world was definitely a draw for me as was the idea of going into an office to see colleagues three days a week, evidence that even before Covid companies had embraced the hybrid workforce.

And then the rumblings of a virus started to cause concern. We followed the headlines and had on-going discussions about the increasing concern of the coronavirus. A few vendors pulled out of the event, but still the world didn’t quite understand how devastating its impact would be.

I came home from San Francisco in February 2020 and watched the industry I had just joined figure out, in real time, how to survive a global shutdown. Meanwhile, I was doing the same thing in my living, mediating arguments about who got to go to school in which room, trying to be a functional employee and a present parent and a calm person, often failing at all three simultaneously.

The 28-year-old version of me would have found this insane. She also would have had no idea how much she could handle.

Neither did I, honestly. Until I had to.

The Person Who Was Left Standing

Here is what I know about myself that I didn't know at 28, a single woman living in Charlestown while the world rewrote itself: I am someone who finds out who she is when the ground moves. And it’s the greatest gift my parents ever gave me, though I don’t even know that they realize it. They pushed through obstacle after obstacle. Whether a challenge or a crisis, a death or a recession.

My mom lived by two mottos:

1. You have to pick yourself up by your boot straps and move on

2. You think your life is tough—just look around and you’ll quickly find someone else who has it a lot worse

My upbringing taught me resilience and perspective, and those are the character traits that have allowed me to succeed despite even the most devastating events my generation has known. When everything external falls away — the plan, the routine, the version of the future you were counting on — what's left is just you. Who you actually are. What you're actually made of.

At 28, with no one depending on me, I found out I was someone who could show up for other people's children in the middle of unthinkable things. That I wanted to. That it mattered to me in a way I hadn't expected.

At 40-something, with a husband and two kids and a new job and a pandemic rewriting everything in real time, I found out something else: that I was still her. That the woman who had cobbled together a career out of sheer determination, who had walked into a classroom two weeks before the world changed and stayed anyway, was the same woman now navigating Zoom school and a remote job and a global shutdown from her living room.

Two careers. Two catastrophes. One person, still figuring herself out.

It didn’t take these catastrophes, but from each, I definitely learned who I am, and I know that I was raised to be a survivor.