By now, word has spread around the city that you have been chosen as the successor of Ellison & Rowe, the world’s single dominating business in the finance corporation.

When you first receive the phone call from Mr. Whitmore, the legal counsel of E&R and a well-known gentleman who was involved with the corporation for so long that he has become somewhat of a public figure, you rub your eyes and check your phone again before answering, hands trembling.

Congratulations, Mr. Wycliffe. You are named successor in Mr. Rowe’s will, effective this Sunday. Please, if possible, come to the main office tomorrow. The Board of Directors would be very honored to meet you.

It takes a full minute for the words to land. Your hands won’t stop shaking, caught between shock, excitement, fear, and emotions you don’t yet have names for. You stare at the unblemished wall of your living room, composed of barely anything besides a framed photograph of Laguna Beach taken by a professional in 2010.

Out of everyone, Mr. Rowe has chosen you.

Yes, you.

Not some experienced finance prodigy who went to Wharton and began working on Wall Street as a teenager. Not a decorated entrepreneur whose name already carries weight as he has achieved nothing but awards. And definitely not a relative of Mr. Ellison or Mr. Rowe, someone meant to preserve the lineage.

Why me? The question loops in your frontal lobe like warped tape. You, the often neglected student since fifth grade. You, the invisible one in a herd; the one left out of birthday invitations despite always sitting at the lunch table. The one who went to a state university after barely graduating high school and still lives with his mother.

You come from a big family. Big enough that noise was constant, but attention was scarce, so scarce that once during Christmas break your family went on a road trip across three states and somewhere between a gas station bathroom stop and a rushed headcount, they forgot you. Forgot, with a capital F. You stood outside in the cold for nearly an hour before a neighbor noticed and called your parents. They cried. They apologized. They swore it would never happen again because they love you. But it already had. So when you whisper yes into the phone, it doesn’t feel like you have just won the lottery or that it’s about time God awards you with something. It feels like a clerical error. 

You spend the night staring at the ceiling, watching the shadow of yourself stretch across it like a cat, rehearsing ways to say no. You imagine staying at your junior-level journalist position at the local paper, staying late, fact-checking small articles no one reads, writing headlines that get buried beneath ads and the crossword. You imagine working until midnight, riding the subway home, eating cold leftovers in the dark because there isn’t enough money for electricity after rent is paid. You know that it isn’t glamorous. But it’s fully yours.

By morning, exhaustion blurs your hesitation into numbness. You show up. The building is taller than anything you have ever willingly walked into. The floors shine in a way that makes you afraid to step too hard. People say your name like you’ve always mattered.

Mr. Wycliffe.

Sir.

Welcome.

They shake your hand. Their forced smile is too wide. They look at you like they already know who you are. You know they don’t.

The first few months feel unreal. News articles appear. Interviews. A professional headshot replaces your blurry profile picture. Your name becomes a headline instead of a byline. Even more, strangers recognize you. At coffee shops. In elevators. On sidewalks. They congratulate you. They tell you how inspiring your story is. They say they’re proud of you. No one, in thirty two years of your life, has ever said that before. Not really.

People open doors for you now. People laugh at your jokes even when they aren’t funny. People remember your name. It all feels warm, the kind of feeling you have been seeking for since childhood. To be recognized, accepted, and most of all, admired. At the same time, it feels intoxicating, like you are finally being invited to a party you didn’t know how to attend. For a while, you love it. You love being seen. You love being acknowledged, You love that you are no longer forgettable, like an extra creamy French crepe on a snow day. But novelty decays faster than you would ever expect. The meetings blend together. The conversations repeat, so do the compliments, except they sound more rehearsed. Your days are filled with numbers that feel meaningless and decisions that never feel accomplished. You wear expensive suits that all look the same. You speak in a voice that doesn’t sound like yours, because it isn’t. By accepting this job, you learn that everything in life is prepared for you, from your suit-of-the-day to the script your assistant has written for you the night before. Your face appears on TV screens so often that it begins to feel like public property. Naturally, you begin to resent what you see in the mirror, because it is always smiling, and you don’t remember telling it to.

You start to miss being anonymous in ways that feel almost embarrassing to admit, like confessing you miss your old Toyota Corolla when you are driving a Porsche, or a broken tooth when you have just the perfect teeth. You begin to miss standing in line unnoticed, miss the freedom of existing without a narrative attached to your body, without a backstory strangers feel entitled to know. You miss your old job, the cramped newsroom with flickering fluorescent lights and perpetually burnt coffee, the chipped desks and humming printers and half-functioning computers that froze at least once a day. You miss chasing stories no one else wanted, stories too small to ever go viral on tiktok, too quiet to make the headlines, stories about library budget cuts and local fundraisers that raised exactly three hundred twelve dollars and thirty cents.

You miss writing for people who would never know your name. You miss being average. You miss walking into Sally’s Pizza after a long day, ordering their signature Clam Pie and a soda, and sitting alone by the window without anyone turning their head, without anyone lifting a phone, without waving to anyone who whispers your name from afar. You miss eating with both hands instead of one poised defensively near your face, miss chewing without wondering if a photo will circulate tomorrow morning with a caption you never consented to. Now, every bite feels watched.

Your face, in particular, no longer feels like yours. It belongs to magazine covers and press releases and corporate websites and inspirational LinkedIn posts written by people who have never spoken to you for more than thirty seconds. Your smile becomes a public asset, something people expect you to provide the way they expect quarterly growth or steady profits. So you give it to them, over and over again, stretching it across your face even on days when your jaw aches, even when you can feel the muscles trembling from overuse. You start thinking of yourself the way an actor might think of a role that has gone for too many seasons. Not a person. A performance. A costume you wake up and put on.

You work later now than you ever did as an assistant editor, which feels almost funny in a bitter way. Back then, staying until midnight meant chasing a deadline, rewriting a lead for the tenth time, arguing with an editor about whether a quote really needed trimming. Now, staying until midnight means sitting in glass conference rooms discussing figures so large they stop feeling real, making decisions that might alter thousands of lives while barely managing your own. The exhaustion is heavier now. Not because the work is harder, but because none of it feels like yours. You are living what people call “success.” They say you’ve made it. They tell you how lucky you are, how unbelievable your story is, how they wish they could trade places with you. You want to ask them if they know what it feels like to be applauded for becoming someone you don’t recognize. You begin to despise your job first, then slowly and quietly, your own face. You hate how much it associates with the words aspiration, achievement, and success. You despite how easy people think your life must be, how clean and simple they imagine your happiness to be, as if wealth automatically translates into peace.

Then, somewhere between board meetings and press conferences and carefully staged photo opportunities, a cruel thought gently hits you: You’ve spent your entire life trying not to be invisible. And now invisibility feels like the greatest luxury imaginable. You finally understand the specific, fragile joy of being ordinary, of being one unremarkable person among many, of blending so completely into a crowd that nothing about you needs to be explained. You start wondering what your life would look like if you had never answered that damn phone call. If you had stayed at your small and cramped desk in the news office, eyes burning from staring at a screen too long, fingertips indented from tirelessly tapping on the keyboard.

Because at least back then, when you were unknown, unnoticed, unremarked upon, you still felt like a person. You still woke up as yourself, and you never had to wonder why.