The Retreat

The spinach lay limp on my paper plate, a forest-green testament to everything my life had become. Seven years at Mercer & Stone, and I was still eating alone at the mandatory team-building retreat, watching colleagues younger than me navigate conversations about startups and side hustles with terrifying ease.

'You good?' Marcus asked, dropping into the plastic chair across from me. He was twenty-four, wore hats indoors, and had already secured funding for his app-based dry cleaning service.

'Just thinking,' I said, pushing the spinach around with a plastic fork.

He cracked open a boutique water imported from Iceland. 'About what?'

About how I'd stayed late every night for six months while the orange team got the promotion I'd been promised. About how Sarah from accounting had left me six weeks ago because I was 'emotionally unavailable.' About how I'd woken up yesterday and couldn't remember if I was happy or just accustomed to things.

'Just about the hike later,' I lied.

Marcus nodded solemnly. 'The facilitation guide says we're supposed to face our fears. Like the bear.

'The bear?'

'The metaphorical bear in the room. Our collective workplace trauma.' He gestured toward the retreat center's lobby, where a massive taxidermied grizzly stood frozen mid-roar, wearing the company's baseball hat for some reason. 'Management really committed to the theme.'

I stared at the dead bear wearing corporate merchandise and felt something fracture inside. This was it. This was my life—artificial resilience manufactured to prop up failing systems, natural beauty reduced to props, real emotion replaced by facilitation guides and icebreakers. I'd been carrying around my own dead bear for years, dressing it up in promotions I didn't want and stability I didn't feel.

'I'm not going on the hike,' I said, standing up.

Marcus looked genuinely confused. 'But it's about building trust—'

'I'm done building trust with people who see me as a resource to be optimized.' I walked toward the exit, toward my car, toward whatever came next. The spinach stayed on the plate. The bear kept roaring at no one. And somewhere behind me, Marcus probably already had another talking point ready, something about growth mindsets or core values, words that had lost all meaning years ago.