Photo Description: flowers on the path at Calvin, in a photo taken Spring, 2020 when everything so abruptly ended.
It has been a long-running joke in my friend group that my emails are more direct than anyone else we know. Notoriously, I would help friends write difficult emails in college, and they would cringe at my first drafts—not because they were wrong or rude but mostly because I refused to say things like “just wondering” or “if it’s not too inconvenient.” Honestly, I stand by it. But my friends find humor in my email style and enjoy satirizing what I might say. A now-infamous mockery once gave me the signature “Top of the morning, Lillie.” At the time, I laughed and replied, “That’s a fake goodbye, you only start emails with ‘top of the morning,’ not end them!”
I could ramble on for hours about the double standard for women being penalized for the communication style men are lauded for (check out my previous essay “Imposter” for the tip of the iceberg), but today my focus is different. I’ve recently (this week, actually) received a promotion and moved to a different team at my company, leaving the rotational program I’ve been part of for the last year and a half for a permanent position. The decision and the process was… fraught. I’ll leave it at that. But I am so, so happy for the transition.
Six months ago, I thought I knew where I was going to end up after my rotations. I found a team that I loved doing interesting work and was ready to stick around long term. Then I accidentally got myself poached to a team where they wanted twenty-three-year-old, one-year-of-experience Lillie to be the Subject Matter Expert. Whoops.
I left the team that I loved but still worked in the office with them since none of my new team members were even located in New York State. They threw me a goodbye lunch, and I promised to return. Fortunately for me, that was a fake goodbye lunch, since I still called them with questions, chatted about vacation plans, and went to the team Christmas party.
Three months ago, another team (that didn’t yet exist—it’s a whole deal, don’t ask) tried to poach me again which, while flattering, opened a whole can of worms and forced me to choose between two jobs that came with a lot of power and responsibility but not a lot of work or people that I actually liked. Again, whoops.
But my fake goodbye gave me a secret weapon: on a particularly stressful morning when people were pressing me for a decision, I called my old boss: “Mike, what are the chances you’d take me back?” His response was basically, “When can you start?” So I got to choose the secret third option no one knew existed and come back to the team that I had never really left.
This week, I’ve officially made the transition to my new-old role, with a little bit of a promotion and a permanent position instead of a six-month rotation. But since I’m the SME for not just the team I’m leaving but the whole company, I can’t fully say goodbye to them either, much as I might like to.
My last boss and I are opposite people in most ways. He’s motivated by title and prestige, is terrible about delegating work, and often just expects you to know what he’s been planning but never told you about. Last week, he commented on how my emails had changed—instead of immediately answering questions, I had started to say things like, “Thank you for your note, please expect my teammate to follow up with you this week.” He has no work-life balance and stinks at setting boundaries and, I have come to realize, basically expected that I would be doing two full-time jobs after my move. Darling, I will absolutely not be doing that.
Though I like my boss and we mostly work well together, the list of microaggressions over the last six months grows longer even after I’ve left the team, and I am admittedly very glad to not work for him any more. I will, however, desperately miss my other teammate and friend, a man who I’ve video called every day for the last six months but met in person only once. It’s funny to me to wonder at which goodbyes are permanent and which are temporary, and which I would prefer. Which emails and conversations am I signing off “top of the morning” and which are a definitive “see ya never, loser.”
I suppose that for my work it’s too early to tell yet. And that’s true for most things: my college friends? Mentors? Places that I’ve loved? My parents are moving out of my childhood home next year, and I’m not sure I’ll ever see it again. Will it be the little things, like Frosty Boy and Meijer? The flowers on the path I used to walk every day? I returned to Grand Rapids last month for my brother’s graduation from Calvin, and now don’t know if I’ll ever be back to campus, a place that shaped me so strongly.
I don’t tend to be a person who lives with many regrets, but sometimes I wonder: if I could see the fake goodbye handwriting on the wall, would I do things differently? Would I have hugged my grandmother tighter at Christmas, would I have left that party earlier knowing it wasn’t truly the end? Our lives are full of these little endings, but I sometimes wonder if it’s the little endings that ultimately carry more weight than the big ones.
Lillie grew up on a forty-acre hay farm in Central Oregon, making the trek to Michigan to study mechanical engineering and sustainability. After graduating in 2020, she moved to Rochester, NY, where her day job as an engineer for the local gas utility funds her outdoor adventures, love of books, various craft projects, and investment in her new community.
