Tuesday morning

This morning she stepped off the bus and started walking. Walking to work. The weather was unseasonably mild and windy. She felt the wind flip around her slightly blow-dried but still damp hair, and realized that it would be another bad hair day.

Nonetheless, she kept walking. And then it hit her. She was walking to work. Work. And suddenly she felt the work, the unfinished briefs, research and memos, weigh upon her chest.

I can do this, she thought to herself. I am not dumb. But even as she repeated the Stewart-Smalley-sayings to herself over and over again, she couldn’t help but doubt it all and feel an increasing sense of dread. Dread that whatever she handed to the partner would elicit yet another lecture on how inadequate her brief was. Dread that the work was not doable. Dread that she was, in fact, dumb.

I know I’m smart, I know it, she kept repeating to herself. She walked through the revolving doors and walked to her office’s elevator bank. An elevator light blinked and rang softly and the silver doors opened and invited the employed citizens of its building inside. She walked in, pressed the right floor and retreated to the corner of the elevator as people piled in.

The elevator hummed with each increasing floor and she closed her eyes. It was another morning. She could do it. She knew she could do it.