A room with a fresh coat of paint, packed with several brown cardboard boxes with a sticker on each, reminding me about what each box contained. It is hard to imagine that despite all of my years of working that my life and all of my possessions would be summed up in these few boxes that are scattered around this room.

Who could have known that after my years of begrudgingly going to work at that colorless and gray tower in my little cubicle that I would end up trading one box shaped room for another. However, this room is different, it is mine, and it is my first step towards regaining who I am as a person.

My daily life of waking up to the blaring sound of my phone’s alarm, followed by me quickly grabbing breakfast from the fridge that I always have to take on the road with me, and just before entering that tower of despair, I remind myself to put my mask on and that it’ll all be over in eight hours. The moment I entered my company building, just like clockwork, I’m instantly greeted by fake smiles, followed by scripted questions about how I am and how my day is going, as they quickly move onto the next person and ask the exact same question. The surface level interactions were just a way for people to appeal to one another without having the other think about their real purpose in getting close to them, which was to climb to the top of this tower. The golden rule of this tower was to “work together” and that “we are a family”, which felt senseless when everyone was fighting one another in their own way to gain leverage over one another. The mask was a way to protect one-self, to not draw attention to yourself, and as a mask always does, put up appearances. That was not a life to live, but it was my life for the last twenty years.

Today is the first day that I did not need to put on my mask, a feeling that I have not known for many years, and it feels foreign, almost like I’m doing a bad thing. I am a stranger to this land, this isn’t the usual clockwork things that I have become accustomed to, what am I supposed to be doing now? All of these thoughts fill up my head as I stand in my room, and I quickly get cold feet, how am I supposed to live now with a schedule that tells me what I’m supposed to be doing or a superior that has already laid out my duties? Is this really the best decision for me? Was I too impulsive and should I go back and beg for my job back? I felt my heart tighten and my throat start to close up, the fear of uncertainty was weighing on me and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to face it. All I could think about now was that I need some air and I can’t breathe.

As I opened the door to the new world outside, I’m instantly greeted by the smell of fresh dew and grass, a smell that captivated me immediately, and almost like a behavior that I couldn’t control, I closed my eyes and performed a deep inhale through my nose, processing the freshness of this air, feeling it fill up my lungs, almost to the point of straining it, followed by the longest exhale I ever performed out of my mouth, and all of a sudden, everything just felt right. All of the anxiety and fear left my body along with that breath I just exhaled, I just knew in that moment, that I was in the right place, and even if it wasn’t, this is my life to decide and only I can decide what is right and wrong.