It's Not Our Magic (They Fail To See)

Author’s Note: The Pivot Diaries was a series of personal essays about reinvention: leaving, burnout, faith, migration, healing, ambition, womanhood, and becoming.

These essays were also the beginning of questions that continue to shape my work: about gender, power, capitalism, spirituality, identity, race and place. The personal was never just personal — it was a way of thinking through larger systems, stories, and structures in real time.

This Substack has since evolved into Thinking About, but I’ve kept a small selection of these essays public because they remain foundational to my thinking and my voice. This archive is not separate from the work that follows — this is where it all began.

^{Where We Belong, 2024. Marcellina Akpojotor. Courtesy of Rele Gallery, Lagos. © Marcellina Akpojotor.}

I left my marriage on a Friday afternoon. No matter the cause, you do not rupture a decade long connection without severe internal damage and bleeding. The hours that followed were single handedly the most painful of my entire life. It was a pain both so grand and granular, I was certain that if I did not lose my mind that night, nothing could ever break me. By Saturday morning, I was packing my bags and splintered emotional parts in preparation for an international work trip. And by Sunday evening, I was on a last-minute conference call putting out a work fire, my bags and insides sitting unpacked in my hotel room.

Certain types of jobs come with a certain type of agreement. On one end of the bargain is the organization’s attractive promises of pay, perks, prestige and even, power. Most of these promises are outlined in a contract. On the other end of the bargain is an understanding the individual should have—the understanding that you will give as many hours of your life as you possibly can to the job; that you will make work problems your personal problems, but never the other way around; and that you will make deep sacrifices when the moment calls for it. The confusion for many individuals can be the fact that none of this is outlined in a contract, but rather, coded in a culture. In fact, policies outlined in a contract like “unlimited PTO” can compound the confusion.

I learned this lesson earlier in this job the hard way, when I had a scheduled surgery a week before a big event my team hosted every year. The timing wasn’t my preference, but I had postponed the surgery for months due to work conflicts, until my doctor advised not to do so further. I scheduled the surgery on a Thursday morning and planned to be back at work by Monday morning. In preparation, I met with a then-trusted direct report, confidentially told her why I was taking sick leave, and asked her to keep the trains running in my absence. On Thursday, just before being wheeled into the operation room, I got a text from her in a thread with my manager—it was the kind of thing I knew she could handle, so I switched off my phone. By Saturday afternoon, I got a call from my manager: he was “just checking in” because the same direct report had reached out to him, concerned that I didn’t “seem present.” I reminded him I was on sick leave — it was on his calendar— and asked if anything had gone wrong. No, not really, he replied, but the team felt my absence. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t make this type of mistake again.

The invisible contract was why, when an active shooting broke out in a neighborhood where my manager and I were having an external meeting, I didn’t ask questions when he suggested that rather than shelter in place, we figure out a way to get to our next meeting. Ubers wouldn’t come to our location as the shooter hadn’t been apprehended and police cars and helicopters had surrounded the area— but we found a way (an Uber a couple of blocks away)— and made our next meeting only a few minutes late.

The invisible contract was why, a month after my separation, when I was sick in bed with COVID complicated by asthma, I sent a note to my manager and direct reports letting them know I was ill but would hold off taking sick leave until we got through an important submission to our principals. I flagged, however, that I would have a nebulizer mask on and would not be able to speak or come on camera during meetings. I would compensate by being fully present via TEAMs chat. During a meeting the same day, a meeting in which I had left comments in the TEAMs chat as promised, my manager mentioned: “Blessing, I know you are sick, but feel free to chime in.” I let it go. I pushed through.

Pushing through wasn’t just a thing in the corporate code— it’s a thing in my genetic code. I come from a line of women who have always pushed through; who have always put responsibility above all else. But this time, pushing through felt different…harder. I had already been swimming in the pool of career related burnout and navigating high functioning depression attached to my personal life for a while. Adding a divorce to the dynamic was pushing me to limits my ego didn’t know I had.

I had started to sense my assignment in this job—the purpose that had led me to it—was nearing its conclusion. But leaving a job right after leaving a marriage felt foolish, or at least, foolhardy. I desperately needed a semblance of stability in my life. Also, living in New York City is not for the faint of heart or the unemployed. It made sense to stick it out for as long as I could.

So, I cut a deal with my manager: I would push through and take little to no time off until our big event in the fall, but I would need some real time off afterwards. I asked for grace in the interim— I was pushed even harder instead.

It was in that season, that another invisible dynamic began to crystallize for me. As a Black woman in organizational America, I had invested blood, sweat and tears in going over and above— even though my targets felt like constantly moving goal posts; even when the personal costs were steep. For all that I had navigated on and off the job, I was one of the top performers in my division. Even during the worst year of my life, I delivered one of the best years of my portfolio. As one of the great philosophers of our time, Jay-Z, once said: men lie, women lie, numbers don’t.

All the time I had invested trying to prove #BlackExcellence and #BlackGirlMagic to the organization, I had neglected a simple phenomenon: it is not our magic the corporate gaze fails to see— it is our humanity. (Or at least, the parts of our humanity that don’t translate to KPIs.)

From childbirth to careers, how Black women’s pain is treated in America is noteworthy. It is a now well-known, data-supported fact, that Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in America. Many of these Black women die because their doctors do not believe them when they say they are in pain. New studies are showing Black women are leaving nonprofit and philanthropy leadership roles at alarming rates. Many of these women are leaving because their pain is being ignored—the studies cite hostility toward their leadership, strain on their health and well-being, and unfair job expectations amongst other factors. I am them.

It is now corporate legend that Shonda Rhimes reached her breaking point with ABC— a network she had made millions of dollars for through her shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal— over a $154 Disneyland ticket.

My breaking point was a relatively small thing too— a text exchange. It was a text exchange I saw while I was watching a Netflix documentary that highlighted the number of years stress can deduct from a lifespan. It was a text exchange that finally made me realize: no job is worth my life.