November 2025, I interviewed for Harvard Business School. I knew how the next part of my life would go, and the interview was just a checkbox. I drove back home the next day on the Merritt Parkway, jubilant.

I had spent too much on an MBA coach, who, in response to my post-interview reflection, sent:

“This is just great—perfect tone, great specificity. Really well done, man. This is one of the only reflections I’ve read where I thought, ‘wow, this could actually help your candidacy.’”

In hindsight, I guess I kind of paid him to tell me that.

I got to my parents’ house in New Jersey expecting the fanfare and celebration befitting how well I had told them I thought I’d done.

My dad was waiting for me on the other side of the breakfast bar when I walked in from the garage. He looked older than when I had seen him a few months before. Over the summer, we had gone to Ireland, both of my parents’ first time in Europe. A landmark for my typically homebody mom.

He stood like he had been waiting for a while. Like he hadn’t just met me there on the spur of the moment. Kirby, our shaggy, aging goldendoodle, hadn’t come jumping to greet me.

A routine colonoscopy had found a large mass on my mom’s colon, one that, judging by its size, had been there for some time.

She was at the hospital, recovering from surgery. They had known for a couple of weeks that things were bad. Bad to a degree that they decided not to tell me before my interview, so as not to throw me off. They delayed surgery, only by a few days, just so that she could, for certain, support me. The day after my interview, she had the surgery.

My dad told me we had to go to the hospital to be with her. She was alone, awake, recovering from surgery. They didn’t want to break the news over the phone. I, having just finished driving five hours, got back into the car, driving separately, selfishly, so I could go home alone in case I got too overwhelmed.

My mom, a pharmacist, hadn’t seen a doctor of any sort, to the best of my knowledge, since my sister was born. She didn’t need someone to tell her the ways in which she lived her life inadequately. This annoyed me to no end. She’s my best friend; why would she play oblivious to the fact that she was getting older? I wore on her. I made her appointments with older female GPs who she felt would be less judgmental. She would always cancel them.

Earlier, in September, I finally got her to get a physical. Nothing came up beyond the platitudes she knew a doctor would share. She was also told to get bloodwork and a colonoscopy. I thought inertia would keep her taking her health seriously, but getting her to make those appointments took numerous calls from me and pressure from my dad.

At the hospital, she also looked older, but much frailer. It wasn’t just the one tumor. They didn’t actually know how many there were. They had removed the largest one on the colon, but there was at least one more large mass on the liver and multiple small ones in the lining of her abdomen.

It was the kind of prognosis they tell you not to Google.

Most of this was explained to me by my dad. My mom sat in a chair next to her hospital bed, visibly sad. When my dad hit a lull in his spiel, she apologized.

Apologized tearfully to me for not taking her own health more seriously. For blowing me off when I told her to see doctors. She blamed herself, but worse, she thought that I’d blame her.

I broke down. I didn’t know who to blame. Happenstance is unsatisfying, and blaming her, aside from being fucked up—no, it’s mostly just fucked up. I cried, then felt like I was being unsupportive by crying, which made me cry more, and thinking about the sudden divergence from the future I had planned made me cry more. I don’t remember much more of that day, almost as if the scene faded to black because watching me cry in the room, and in the car, and at home was too indulgent.

She stayed in the hospital for a couple of days after that. I had planned to go back to San Francisco between my interview and Thanksgiving, but that felt like too much time I wasn’t sure I would continue to have. When she got home, things were weirdly normal. She wasn’t an especially extroverted person to begin with, so the two of us at home watching the early seasons of The West Wing, which I had already watched, felt familiar.

By the first week of December, I felt comfortable leaving my parents, who were more like the ones I knew before, for a couple of weeks. Things were still touch and go, but it was the kind of thing better not spoken of, so we just didn’t.

Amid all of this, I had known I wanted to leave Wefunder for some time. I had hit my ceiling of learning, and they weren’t paying me enough to not be learning, so I could feel my interest waning. Either I would get into business school and that would become the catalyst to leave, maybe take a risk in the interim eight months, or I wouldn’t get in, reality would hit, and I would have nothing waiting for me on the other end. Harvard would have made leaving feel like progress. I hadn’t really figured out how to leave without being able to call it that.

So as not to bury the lede any further, I was not invited to the Harvard Business School class of 2028.

It still stings. In hindsight, I can debate whether thinking the conversation was going so well disarmed me, made me careless.

I felt guilty for caring about it at all, given what was happening. But I did care. I had spent too much money and a considerable amount of hope on a future I could, and unfortunately did, describe to people.

I had a desire to leave, but no net under me. My direct manager at Wefunder knew all of this and, to his credit, was extraordinarily supportive.

With the holidays came more tests, more meetings with oncologists, and more information they continued to tell you not to Google. But sitting in isolation, with so little control over what’s going to happen, it’s near impossible not to try to regain some agency and do the research yourself. I can’t blame my mom for that. But it was hard to hear her crying, thinking I wasn’t listening, over her fear that this was the last Christmas she was going to spend with the family. Thinking that things needed to be perfect for our last Christmas with two parents.

I knew I had to be home more. I had told the CEO about the situation, and I planned to keep handling my responsibilities remotely. But working on Pacific Time from the East Coast, sitting on my laptop parallel-playing while my mom watched TV, I knew I had no more interest in giving that time to Wefunder.

By the beginning of February, I had left my full-time role. The CEO, understanding this wasn’t how I had planned to leave and valuing the time it would give me, was generous on my way out.

Despite leaving, I found a middle ground in the opportunity to keep working with Chai, Wefunder’s Entrepreneur in Residence. At the end of the prior year, I had started helping him produce a podcast for Wefunder’s target founder audience. We called it Warm Intro.

It gave me work I could keep doing from home without holding all of my prior responsibilities. I liked being useful, and I liked that people thought I was useful. I could take a baby step out of Wefunder without having to figure out where I was stepping.

Being home was being home. I cooked for my parents like I did in high school. I made meals in bulk and froze them so that, when I was away, they knew they had something I had prepared. In the little ways I could help, it felt like I was doing something.

I could make dinner. I could give emotional support to my dad, who went fully remote to become my mom’s near-full-time caretaker. But I could see my mom getting physically weaker, and I had to live with the tension of knowing she wanted the support but didn’t want to be seen.

I also still had a life in San Francisco, where I spent about half my time. Far from my banking days, I was now a maybe aspiring podcaster? Not something I expected of myself.

I also found myself “searching for meaning” in the most platitude-rich version of the phrase. I made bread. I did volunteer policy work for a political campaign. I helped friends with their startups when they needed it. I did Meals on Wheels. I focused a lot more on my health. I went on a bunch of dates. I started a food brand with Olivia, my friend and roommate.

To expand on that last one: I had worked on a lot of consumer food businesses at Wefunder, and for a while I thought food might be the thing for me. Olivia wanted to make herself frozen meals at an industrial scale. We found a co-packer, made a recipe, formed a business. We made a real product. Even still, I never quite thought of it as my thing. I could do the operational stuff, be helpful, and derive joy from being helpful. The things I loved weren’t parts of the business. I liked cooking and baking for people, having something I could give them. I had assumed that liking those things would mean I wanted to run a food company.

At our friend’s birthday, I was talking to a guy. One I thought was interesting and cool. The type who had this ability to define himself: his projects, his ideas, all these really interesting things. He asked me what I was up to: was working with Olivia “my thing”?

I said no, that it was mostly just for fun, to which he fairly retorted: what was I up to?

I didn’t want to define myself by the business. I didn’t want to define myself by the podcast. I didn’t want to define myself by leaving Wefunder, being unemployed, or having a sick mom. There was plenty I could have told him; I just didn’t like what I thought it all added up to.

There’s this idea, I think mostly in San Francisco, of being “fun”-employed vs. unemployed.

How do you not say funemployed when those are the options?

San Francisco puts some value, even prestige, on being unemployed and figuring it out. Being the highly technical youth choosing not to work, to do their own thing. But that’s not what I was going through. I was just sad.

I wanted something I enjoyed, something that mattered, something that sounded impressive when someone asked. I had stopped wanting my old job, but at least I had worked my way to a role I didn’t hate to say.

I interviewed at a company around then, another startup, and despite it objectively being a good opportunity, the idea of working there made me feel defeated.

I could imagine being relieved to have a job to tell people about. I had a much harder time imagining wanting to do it. I didn’t really know how much of that was about the job and how much was about me.

I became precious over the idea that this period could be a catalyst, that I could be the funemployed one, just waiting to figure something out. I wanted to believe that I was doing more than just waiting out an illness. To have something to show for it. For something I felt like I deserved to fall into my lap.

I think I had replaced getting into Harvard with figuring out my life. Wanting something impressive waiting on the other end, something that would make the months in between look like they’d been leading somewhere.

People asked me a lot about what I wanted to do next, what kind of job I was looking for. And truthfully, for a long time, the answer was none, because I wasn’t really looking.

I always love saying I can see myself running one of those shops that lose $10,000 a month. Maybe we sell bread and candles. It’s in jest, obviously… mostly, but I do think it speaks to me liking dumb challenges, making space, and community.

It also, unfortunately, doesn’t sound that impressive to that guy at that birthday.

Or, more accurately, I’m embarrassed by how much I want it to sound impressive to him. The question he actually asked me was pretty reasonable. I was the one who had made my own answer sound like a joke.

My mom is doing a lot better now. She had another surgery, and they were able to ablate many of the tumors. I could be home in Jersey, to hang out with her, to cook for her before her surgery, to be there with her in the hospital when she got out. She’s not fully out of the woods, but her prognosis is a lot better.

I get to think about another Christmas with her.

I don’t have a neat way to move from that sentence back to my career. Having more time with her is what I wanted. I have to figure out what to do with mine now.

Also, the number going down in my bank account really sucks.

I would like to say I no longer care about titles, or Harvard, or what someone at a party thinks of my answer. But he was cute, and I’m probably going to care what my next title is.

I don’t know if I have a good answer to “what are you up to?” For now, I want to bake more, and see what happens.

There was food in the freezer when I left.