The Way Home, Part 1: The Floor

How I spent fifteen years training myself to work in the loudest room imaginable, and what it cost me before I noticed.

The floor. No walls, no windows, and screens as far as you can see.

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For fifteen years I worked on a major bank’s trading floor. If you’ve never seen a trading floor, picture this: No walls. Just row after row of desks shoved together into one long table that never ends, and every person has four to six monitors that literally touch the monitors of the person on their left and the person on their right. Behind your screens you back up to more screens, more people. Behind them an aisle, then another row of people. TVs bolted everywhere, most of them turned up. Phones ringing. You get your own little volume knob at your seat, which would be a lovely idea if anyone actually used theirs. Most of the floor has no windows. I sat in that, all day, for a decade and a half.

How I ended up there

Wanna hear something funny? When I took the job, fresh out of college, I didn’t even know it was on a trading floor 😂. I was interviewing all over finance - traditional investment banking, a couple other corners, and “Structured Products” was just one of the roles. Nobody spelled out where I’d actually be sitting or even doing for that matter. In college, I was the one who found an empty nook deep in the stacks of the microfilm room of the library, shut the door to the room, and worked in total silence. That was how my brain worked.

So my first day, when they walked me out onto the floor, it was like someone turned the volume of the entire world up to a hundred and handed me a spreadsheet.

At the very beginning I couldn’t do a single piece of real work during the day. I did the surface stuff, the triage, the learning-from-everyone-around-me stuff, but anything that took actual focus I had to save for later. We were a hybrid banking and trading team back then and most of the junior people stayed until 10 or 11 at night, so I just did my deep work from five to ten, after the floor emptied out and I could finally hear myself think.

And then, somewhere in the next couple of years (honestly, probably only months), my brain rewired itself. I could write an email, track what was happening on the TV, follow the conversation of the two people behind me, and be on my own phone call, all at the same time. Constant scanning. Constant multitasking. And I was PROUD of it. I genuinely thought it was a flex. Look what I trained myself to do. Twentysomething me thought she was invincible.

In my last role on the floor I was the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the quants, the people who build the financial models the traders use. My days were back to back meetings, implementing new systems, and keeping everyone on track so nothing would fall through the cracks with constantly changing rules and requirements. In essence I spent my days “herding cats”. The fifteen years before that covered a lot of seats though: structuring & trading, risk management, and finally business management. And in every one of those years, I ate lunch at my desk. That’s just what you do there. Bring it from home, heat it in the floor kitchen, carry it back to your windowless seat, work straight through. Forgot it? Run downstairs, five minute walk for a salad, back at your desk in twenty. Early on a friend and I would walk for a “real lunch” once or twice a year – and eat our salad on a table outside and be back in 30 instead of 20. Lol.

Then I became a mother

Once I got married (my now husband also worked on the trading floor in case you thought I had time away from the desk for meeting people and dating lol) and had kids, the slog of it all got heavier.

We’d been commuting together since we started dating in 2012, which I loved. But add two babies to the front end of that commute and the mornings turned into a sport. Up early, nurse the baby, feed the toddler, get everyone dressed, get myself showered and presentable, all before seven, because that’s when our nanny walked in. Seven fifteen we were out the door. Seven thirty at the desk. (We’d moved from Lake Norman to near Uptown by then, so at least the commute was ten minutes. Small mercies.)

Out the door by 7:15. Coffee filter on my head hehe, baby on my hip, car seat waiting on the floor.

I wish I knew then what I know now about what I was doing to my body. I’d spent over ten years training my nervous system to run at trading-floor volume, and I truly thought I’d found the ceiling of what a person could absorb. Then I became a mother. Motherhood adds a kind of stimulation you don’t even know exists until you’re standing in it. The physical part especially. Someone is always touching you, on you, needing you, and if you’re nursing your body isn’t even fully your own anymore. It’s one more channel of input running all day long, on top of every other channel. Add postpartum hormones on top of that and, looking back, that’s the exact moment the thing I’d been so proud of started to crack.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I was also quietly running a second business through all of it. Early on, when I basically moved in with my husband immediately after we started dating, my own house sat empty. I’m a planner (and a worrier, and fiercely independent) and I couldn’t stomach just letting it go, so instead of selling we decided to rent it out in 2013. That went well enough that by 2016 we decided to look into buying more places in the same neighborhood and renovating them. On paper we had a project manager through the construction company. In reality I was the one making every single decision, every finish, every design call, every this-or-that along the way, in the evenings (after the bank job all day) and on the weekends, while pregnant or with one to two toddlers underfoot. Two renovations basically back to back. So the “after work” part of my day was just another job. Looking back, it was a LOT, but at the time it was just my normal. Keep plugging and chugging like I have done my whole life.

For a long time I loved all of it. Truly. Early in my career, work was where all my friends were. It was fast and competitive and I was good at it, and good felt amazing. It was a great place to show everyone around me how capable I was. How much I could achieve. How I could keep all the balls in the air and be praised for it. I rarely had a complaint about work until I became a mom.

The knot

But those last couple of years, getting to that desk got harder and harder. My first and second didn’t sleep through the night until they turned one, and they’re two years apart. I also did extended breastfeeding so I was pregnant or nursing (or pumping at work) for essentially five years straight. Sleep wasn’t the priority. It just wasn’t a possibility. And while I was running on no sleep, the floor was quietly changing around me. Friends got married, had kids, moved cities, moved roles. The people I used to walk to lunch with, the ones who made a snack break feel like a bright spot, they were gone. My husband was on the same floor but our jobs were so different that we barely crossed paths all day. Work was just work. Nothing to look forward to when I got there.

And then came the thing that scared me most, because I’d never felt it before. Brain fog. Real, thick brain fog. I couldn’t do the work I’d done without much thought for twelve, thirteen years, and I couldn’t figure out why. It made me feel like something was fundamentally wrong with me. That is a terrifying feeling when your entire identity is built on being the one who has it handled.

That was the real knot building inside me. I was not a quitter. I could not fail. Leaving would mean I’d failed, full stop. But I also knew, way down deep, that becoming a full-time stay-at-home mom wasn’t my answer either, that that particular brand of nonstop would spiral me straight into anxiety and depression. So I was stuck between two doors I didn’t want to walk through. And underneath all of it sat the question I couldn’t shake: if I wasn’t the corporate badass who could juggle every single thing, then who even was I? Mother didn’t feel like enough. Worse, it didn’t feel like ME. Not the me I’d known for thirty-five years.

I carried the whole thing alone. Saying it out loud to anyone felt like admitting the exact failure I was terrified of. I’d complain to my husband, sure, but only ever “ugh, this is so annoying, I don’t want to go in,” never “I think I need to leave.” I never told him about the brain fog. And since I’ve never been a morning person anyway, me dragging my feet out the door didn’t register as anything unusual. From the outside, I still had it all together.

First day of preschool drop-off on the way to the desk. From the outside, I still had it all together.

From the inside, I was quietly coming apart.

I didn’t have a plan yet. I didn’t even know I was looking for one. But the thing that would eventually crack all of this wide open was already on its way, and it started in the least likely place I can imagine. A nanny falling through. A wellness expo I almost skipped. A friend who wasn’t even there when I showed up. And thirty minutes in a room with a total stranger that changed the entire trajectory of my life.

If you’d told trading-floor me that, I’d have laughed you right off the desk.

But more on that in part 2...

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Before you go

Part 2 is where it all starts to unravel, and then, strangely, starts to heal. If any part of this story felt familiar, the too-muchness, the fog, the who-am-I-if-I’m-not-this, hit reply and tell me. I want to read about the fact that I’m not alone in those feelings.

Talk soon,

Kristen ❤️