And I was. I was flexible yet detail-oriented, I’d gone to the “right” school for undergrad, and I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Did I mention the salary started in the upper five figures? And there I was making not even half that as an assistant editor, which was more than I’d made as an editorial assistant. Who knew the order of those two words could be so important? And yet neither amount was enough to live on, not in New York City where a dream apartment comes with a shower in the kitchen. So, no, I didn’t care what my new bosses were going to call me (assistant, butler, lucky bitch) as long as I could pay off my student loans. I was ego-less—another way I was perfect.

More importantly, I was a people pleaser. As I got to know my new colleagues, I realized we all were. We couldn’t sleep at night if we thought we’d hurt someone with a misplaced comma or a task left undone. Our financial straits may have delivered us to the personal staff, but what kept us there was our deep-seated need to be nice, to impress, to get the A. (Who am I kidding? The A+.) But it’s a Sisyphean quest, if you let it be. You’re only ever as good as your last pat on the head, and some of us stayed for far too long trying to chase that feeling of safety and assurance when we should have been moving on to new challenges in life. We were too invested in pleasing people who weren’t our parents, our teachers, or our friends. They were one half of a formula, and we were the other half. We worked; they paid. Was it fair? It had to be, didn’t it?

Here’s the thing about jobs like these, though. They’re everywhere if you look for them, and sometimes if you don’t. Through the whisper network, I heard about other bosses with deep pockets, the awful ones who shouted or threw things, who made their assistants complicit in their own degradation, sending them running to the headhunter’s office or the therapist’s couch. And the rich aren’t the only power-trippers. Who hasn’t had a manager who delighted in demoralizing them or a project that drove them to their personal brink or a coworker who insisted everything was fine, totally fine even as the walls lit on fire? Then the #metoo movement erupted. The horror stories we all held close were now finally being openly acknowledged in every corner of American life, including the professional realm. I’d been lucky at work, but what about the people who weren’t?