The Light at the End of My Spreadsheet

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

My editor's note was diplomatic, the way good editors are. It arrived first as a comment in the Google Doc — a small flag in the margin — and then again in a letter, which told me he'd thought about it carefully enough to write it down twice. The ending of my memoir, he said, was too dark.

He wasn't wrong. I'd written thirteen chapters about nine layoffs across fifteen years, about being labeled a bad fit so many times I started to wonder if the label was accurate, about the physical cost of working inside broken systems — cracked teeth, stiff shoulders, anxiety I'd mistaken for personality. I had brought all of that to the page and then closed the door on it without finding the window. The manuscript was finished. It just wasn't resolved.

The problem was I didn't know what I'd left out. When you're that close to your own story, the missing piece doesn't feel missing. It feels like restraint. Believe it or not, restraint is my default position.

What I'd left out was my spreadsheet.

A few years before I started writing the book in earnest, my husband got laid off from his longtime job as a 3D artist at a government agency. He has his own spreadsheets — meticulously maintained ones, though they're mostly devoted to the comic books he collects. When Marvel announced that Brett Goldstein was playing Hercules while we were house hunting, my husband was suddenly sitting on books that had quietly become valuable. I thought he'd just gotten lucky. He'd known exactly what he had and what it was worth before the announcement made it obvious to everyone else. My husband and I keep separate records of our expenses. He ran his numbers when his unemployment benefits ran out and came out the other side with clarity. I watched him do it and filed it away as something I'd get around to eventually. Meanwhile he sold those books and that was part of our Roanoke house down payment.

About a year later, we went to see Mr. Goldstein's stand-up show in DC. There was a big jar in the lobby to write down questions for a Q&A that he did at the end of his show: one person asked for Hannah Waddingham’s number, for example (they had to try I guess). As for me, I wrote a thank you note instead. It felt like the least I could do.

When it was my turn to analyze my own spreadsheet— after we'd left the DC area, after we relocated to Roanoke, after I'd invested the money that was supposed to be a down payment on a Northern Virginia house that we never bought, and my own unemployment benefits were about to run out — I finally did the same exercise for myself.

Our original plan had been to buy in the DC suburbs, where even a starter home ran around $750,000. We'd saved aggressively toward a 20% down payment, which in that market is a lot of money. When we moved to Roanoke instead, where I could work remotely and housing prices are a fraction of what they are in Northern Virginia, we had enough for a down payment with a significant amount left over. After we closed, I put my remainder into VTI — a Vanguard total market ETF that pays a modest but consistent dividend and doesn't require me to worry every day about what happens. I did not immediately recalculate what my life now cost.

That was my oversight. I was still running my financial anxiety based on Northern Virginia settings.

So I exported two years of expenses and sorted them by month. I took the average across all 24 months. The number came back lower than I expected — consistently, month after month, well within what my investments could cover. I looked at it and assumed I'd done something wrong. My raw data was thorough, so I went back through it. The number held.

What I was trying to figure out was whether my savings could last four years. That was the bridge I needed: four years until I could tap my IRA and 401(k) without penalty. I'd been calculating my financial anxiety based on what it cost to live somewhere I no longer lived. When I finally ran the numbers for where I actually was, the answer wasn't the big scary thing I'd been bracing for. It was almost anticlimactic. A slow "ohhhh shit" settling in.

I wasn't trapped. I hadn't been trapped for a while. I just hadn't looked.

That moment — sitting with a spreadsheet that refused to be as scary as I expected — is the emotional climax of my memoir. Not a confrontation, not a dramatic exit, not a speech I finally got to give. A quiet recalculation, in a house in Virginia with a big yard that cost less than I'd been planning to spend, with investment income covering a gap I'd been afraid of. The darkness my editor sensed in the manuscript was real, but it was incomplete. The light at the end wasn't a new job or a professional redemption arc. It was math. Specifically, it was the math of having moved somewhere affordable and not yet noticed.

I write about the worst days of my career because they happened, and because the people who read this newsletter have their own worst days they're carrying around, often without language for them. But I also write about them because I followed them far enough to find out where they went. The spreadsheet was always going to be part of this story. I just had to stop assuming it, like many other things in my working life, would tell me something bad.

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