i developed an allergy to work

Back in 2024, when I was still employed, I had a very specific morning routine.

1. Wake up.

2. Shower.

3. Teeth, hair, makeup.

4. Brew a cup of coffee.

5. Drink the cup of coffee.

6. Throw up the cup of coffee.

7. Go to my 9-5.

Work-life balance!

This went on for months. Wake up, throw up. Wake up, throw up. A ritual I never asked for, performed with religious consistency.

Eventually, my parents grew concerned—which, weird? I was finally going to be skinny! However, while I was making jokes about my slight case of bulimia, they were secretly researching gastroenterologists, looking for someone who could explain why their daughter had started rejecting her own life every morning before 8am.

Both my brother and my dad have EOE, a type of food allergy. They’ve spent years mapping their triggers1, so when my body started rejecting food every morning, they assumed I’d joined the family business.

So off I went to a gastroenterologist, where they knocked me out, shoved tubes and cameras down my throat, tested my white blood cell count, and determined that yes, I did have an allergy. My white blood cell count was actually higher than my brother’s, higher than my dad’s—competitive even in illness >:)

Now we just had to figure out what was trying to kill me.

We started with milk, since that’s a common one in the EOE world. When that didn’t work, we moved on to eggs. When that didn’t work, we tried cutting coffee itself. None of it mattered. My body had made up its mind about something, and I was the last to know what.

Meanwhile, I was miserable. My parents and I went to Disney World2 and I couldn’t even have the beer cheese soup at the Biergarten because dairy was our best guess as to what the allergy could be. What is the point of living! You’re telling me I’m at the Food and Wine Festival and I can’t have half the food?! Kill me now.

And then, right after I got back from Disney, my boss called me into a meeting where I was promptly let go…or fired…I don’t quite recall...

When it happened, I felt both dread and relief, which is a strange combination to hold in your body at the same time. Dread because the job market is brutal and I knew finding a new one would be its own kind of violence. Relief because I was thrilled to never see any of those people ever again.

It was around Thanksgiving when I got let go, so I flew down to Arkansas to be with my family for the holidays. While I was there, my parents dragged me to an allergist to get a prick test done because they needed to know if they could use butter and cheese for Thanksgiving dinner. I tried very hard not to go3, but they made me anyway.

Nothing ballooned up. My arm stayed normal. I was allergic to... nothing?

Absolutely nothing.

What do you mean? What do you MEAN?

I went through all of that—the tubes, the elimination diets, the cheese-free Disney trip—for NOTHING!?!?

Not only that, but my symptoms stopped entirely. I didn’t throw up again until the next Christmas when I took one too many tequila shots, which doesn’t count. My morning routine felt strange without the daily purge. Emptier. Almost boring.

At that point, my parents and I put it together: I had developed an “allergy” to work.

Which sounds fake, but is apparently very real. My body had become so stressed by the environment I was in that it physically rejected the place, the people, the whole premise of my life there. My stomach had been staging a protest for months, and I’d been too busy trying to make it to my 9-5 to listen.

Looking back, I should have seen it, but I genuinely didn’t know this was something bodies could do. I thought stress meant headaches, maybe trouble sleeping—not your entire digestive system hosting a daily revolt. And even if I had known, I’m not sure I would have listened. I was too committed to the person I was trying to become.

When I was younger, if you asked me for three words to describe myself, “creative” was always one of them. I wanted to be a pop star, then a musical theatre actress. I wrote songs with my ukulele and piano. I wrote romance stories and fanfiction4. I was the girl with the big ideas, and I liked her.

Then I took a computer science course in high school, fell in love with it, and decided it was the better career path. The smarter one. The one that would actually pay. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, without really noticing, I stopped calling myself creative entirely. I traded the word in for something that felt more serious. More like the person I thought I was supposed to be.

I became the “smart girl” with the “smart career.” I think that was the identity I was protecting through the vomiting, through the misery. I had five years of school, a degree, a job at a reputable fintech company, a paycheck. What kind of person walks away from all of that? Not a “smart” one.

So I kept pushing. I have this “push through” mentality about almost everything in my life: when I’m driving and it’s too hot, I just get annoyed and keep going without realizing I can turn up the AC. When I’m sick, I don’t see doctors because it’ll go away eventually. Push through works, until it doesn’t. Until your body is literally rejecting your life and you’re still sitting there, coffee in hand, thinking “this is fine.”

Losing the job didn’t magically fix everything. The allergy went away, yes, but I still felt like a failure for months. The rejections kept coming, I moved back in with my parents, and I spent a long time wondering if I’d ruined my life by not being good enough at the thing I’d sacrificed everything to become.

It wasn’t until I stopped trying to claw my way back onto the path I’d lost and started building something I actually cared about that I realized the truth: the identity I was killing myself to protect was so much smaller than the person I actually get to be.

Now I’m building a startup with my dad—an app that combines gaming, art, coding, magic. All of my favorite things in one place. And I still get to code. I’ve fallen back in love with it, actually.

It’s not the life 12-year-old me posted about on her Pinterest boards5. I gave up my apartment in Chicago, my proximity to friends and cute boys6, the whole life I thought I was supposed to be living by now. Now I’m back in small-town Arkansas with my parents, watching my friends post their cozy city apartments and their weekend plans while I grind on something that might not work. Sometimes the grief of the life I walked away from hits me out of nowhere.

Still, my body isn’t screaming at me anymore. My brain isn’t fighting itself every morning. For the first time in years, I actually like what I’m doing. I’m even writing songs on my keyboard again. “Creative” is back in my vocabulary, right where it belongs.

So if your body is screaming at you, listen. It might be the only part of you honest enough to say what your mouth can’t.

<3 brooklyn