The Interview
On Walking Into a Room Ready and Walking Out Shaking
I walked in ready. That’s the part I want to remember first, before everything else, because it’s true, and because it matters. Wanting everything to be perfect, I had arrived two hours ahead of my scheduled time. I found a quiet corner at Starbucks, spread my notes out across the table, and threw myself into studying. I reviewed the company’s history, rehearsed my talking points, and mentally walked through every slide of the presentation I had built about who I am, what I’ve done, and why I believed I belonged in that role. There was a version of that morning where I felt genuinely excited, proud, and confident about the story I was about to tell.
It didn’t stay that way for long.
The CEO interrupted almost from the start. Not the occasional clarifying question that shows someone is engaged, but a steady, sharp cutting-off that never let me finish a thought. When my slides reached my employment history, she landed on a single, weaponized word and would not let it go: “You’re a hopper.”
I tried to meet it honestly. I acknowledged that my stints had been short, and then tried to pivot to what I actually came there to say, that even in brief roles, I had picked up real, transferable skills that sharpened my adaptability. I thought that was a fair answer. She didn’t take it as one. She looped back to that single word again and again, wielding it like an indictment rather than a simple observation. “What can you offer?” she demanded, her voice dripping with skepticism. “What can I even do with you?”
Then came the part that seemed to upset her most. I named four of her company’s products, a respectable recall in any standard conversation, but she treated it as something close to a personal insult, like I’d walked in and disrespected her by not having memorized her entire catalog. “Creating and maintaining client relationships is not enough to sell,” she insisted, brushing aside my core experience. She demanded that I pitch and sell all of her products, every single one, right there on the spot. I understand the instinct behind wanting someone who knows the portfolio cold. But what she was asking for in that room wasn’t a test of preparation. It was a performance of total command that was meant to belittle and corner me.
I felt small. Not challenged, but small. And as I stood there in front of her desk while she remained seated behind her workspace, my body was quietly, violently unravelling underneath the mask of professional calm. A silent, terrifying panic attack took hold. My heart hammered against my ribs, and my chest tightened so fast I could barely draw air. To keep myself from visibly shaking or breaking down under her gaze, I locked my hands behind my back. Hidden behind my body, my thumb found the skin of my other hand. I began picking and digging furiously into the side of my thumb, pressing hard into the skin until the sharp, localized pain was the only thing keeping me anchored. Standing exposed in the middle of that room, I scratched relentlessly, using the sting of my own nails to absorb the overwhelming internal terror, praying she wouldn’t notice the silent self-destruction happening just out of her sightline.
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When she finally abruptly dismissed me, my body was in total physiological shutdown. In a knee-jerk reaction of pure survival, I heard myself apologize to her. I apologized for a failure that was never mine to bear, desperate only to escape the room. I’ve been turning that over since. I don’t think it makes me weak that I said it. I think it makes sense that a person who’s just been cornered for twenty minutes reaches for the fastest way to make the discomfort stop.
The People & Culture Specialist who’d interviewed me earlier that day caught sight of me on the way out. I must have looked as pale as I felt, because he gently asked if I was alright. Holding onto the last thread of my dignity, I lied and told him I was fine, asked him to just let me know the outcome whenever it came, and left.
The elevator down was its own small ordeal, muttering to myself under my breath, trying to talk my own nervous system down a few floors before I hit the lobby, aware that someone from the building might see me and that I needed to hold it together in public.
By the time I reached Shangri-La to meet my girlfriend, my nervous system was completely shattered. Before heading over to meet her, I immediately slipped into the restroom for a brief moment of escape. Leaning over the sink, a few silent, burning tears rushed down my cheeks. But the tears weren’t even the hardest part; the real agony was that I literally could not catch my breath, my throat feeling locked in hyperventilation as I tried to pull myself together. Once I managed to step out, I walked over to the Harlan + Holden coffee shop where she was waiting with her officemate. I forced myself into the haunting motions of basic human decency, smiling on command, making brief polite conversation, and hiding the turmoil screaming beneath the surface. I couldn’t keep it up for long. I typed out a quick, desperate message asking my girlfriend if we could leave, telling her plainly I didn’t have the social battery or breath left to keep performing.
The day wasn’t done with me yet. A Messenger call came in from my brother, who was dealing with his own heavy reality and the agitation of medication side effects after a recent hospitalization. I’d already asked not to talk about the interview, but he didn’t know how much trauma I was silently drowning in, and I didn’t have the capacity to explain it. The conversation quickly turned hostile and escalated into a heated argument until I had no choice but to say goodbye and hang up. That call was one more heavy thing sitting on top of everything else.
By the time we moved to Megamall to run a quick errand at Watsons, I was completely paralyzed. I sat down in a milk tea shop while my girlfriend stepped away and cried silently into my hands, not really about any one thing anymore, just the accumulated, suffocating weight of it all. Later, as we sat at Ippudo waiting for our ramen, the final wall collapsed completely. The quiet tears turned into an outpouring of raw, visceral pain. It was no longer just frustration, but anger at myself for apologizing, and a terrifying wave of self-doubt, a feeling that despite my best intentions and years of hard work, I had somehow failed at something basic.
Looking back at it now, a few days removed, I can hold two things at once.
First, I know that how a person is treated in an interview says a great deal about the person doing the treating, and very little about the actual worth of the candidate across from them. Being reduced to a label, hopper, and then being asked to perform an impossible feat of total recall as if that were the real measure of my competence, was not a fair test. A leader who uses her position to corner and diminish a prospective candidate is not a leader worth following.
Second, none of that softens what the day actually cost me. It cost me a full day of feeling unsteady in my own body, a raw sore on my thumb, a strained call with my brother, a stretch of hours where I couldn’t be present with the people I care about, and a long, painful spiral of doubting myself over something that was, in the end, largely not about me at all.
I don’t know yet what the official outcome will be, but some part of me already knows I wouldn’t want to step back into a culture built on that kind of cruelty. Walking in ready and walking out shaking are not proof of my inadequacy, they are simply proof that the room I was in that day was far more hostile than anyone deserved.
