I was terrified that my life would be meaningless if I couldn’t choose how to spend my time, and I figured I’d never have to claw my way out of the system if I stayed on the periphery. I could have gotten a more stable job that would have allowed me some time off – the kind of job that came with benefits like health insurance and paid leave and sick days – but employment always felt like a trap. When I should have taken a break, I took on another project. When I wasn’t working, I was trying to win a new contract. On paper I’d been free, but I had never really allowed myself to feel freedom. It was the kind of life that seemed luxurious but was actually precarious and unpleasant: I had plenty of opportunities to travel while I worked for the founders of companies I didn’t believe in, helping them sell crap the world didn’t need, while justifying the placement of my every comma. I was coming to the end of a three-year stint of back-to-back freelance branding gigs. I went on this vacation to Barbados right after deciding to start a marketing agency with a friend back in New York, who’d quit his stable, well-paying job to go into business with me. Which, everybody knows, means: Yes, girl, you’re a goner. And I was doing my best to bear it, making these guttural croaking noises like some kind of distressed tree frog. When I say hot, I mean that Jay was boiling kettle after kettle of water and pouring them into the bag. And my foot, swollen to the size of my thigh, was plunged into a heatproof vinyl bag filled with hot water and vinegar. My breathing was that awful, ragged kind: five short gasps in for every breath out. I didn’t understand why he’d bothered with it – I wasn’t sure I was going to live long enough to worry about a sunburn. I was sitting in a rusted-out wheelchair, swathed in a towel like a newborn, with Jay’s enormous straw gardening hat flopped crooked on my head.
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