The column that launched my career was also erasing me

My mom recently mailed me a stack of magazines from my first job as a columnist. As I was flipping through them I saw something I hadn’t realized at the time: the magazine was rewriting who I was.

You can see it happening on the pages. My bio changes. The illustrations change. The column itself changes. At one point, after I had the baby, the managing editor told me I should start writing for women’s magazines. In another issue my bio calls me a “former” executive, as if my career were already over.

At the time I didn’t notice any of it. Now I can’t unsee it. So I’ve laid out the pages along with what I see now when I read them.

I was so traumatized when I wrote this piece that it’s not even in my writing about 9/11. I didn’t remember it until I saw it just now, in 2026.

There were almost no journalists on Wall Street that day. Just finance people — and me, writing a column from inside a financial services startup.

I had no idea I was the magazine’s most popular writer. I’d been focused on my actual job at the startup. I had no idea what was coming.

After 9/11 I didn’t go back to a regular job, so the columns shifted to other parts of my life. This one is about being unemployed. At the time, unemployment was supposed to mean failure. To me it felt like a break after 80-hour weeks at a startup.

I loved seeing the illustration of me swing dancing. That was exactly how I saw myself. I had been taking so many dance lessons that I’d started teaching at clubs on 42nd Street.

Two of my companies were acquired. I had enough money to live in New York City for a while and take three dance lessons a day. People often asked me to explain stock options and why I had money if I wasn’t working. I never saw it as not working. I saw it as run, rest, run — the same rhythm I’d always had.

My family had always been good at ignoring things that didn’t fit the story we wanted to tell. My great-grandfather was Al Capone’s lawyer. My grandfather ran a bra factory with a parade of topless models. Compared to that, quitting jobs or trying something new barely registered.

Reading this column now makes me sad, though, because it’s one of the places where I had control and didn’t use it. I knew my dad wasn’t getting job interviews because he had a police record for child abuse.

But our family had pushed that reality so far aside that he could tell himself a pivot to teaching made sense. Then I could tell myself the rejection letters were about age discrimination, and an entire column praising his courage.

I didn’t tell the truth about what happened until twenty-five years later. Last month.

I had a column. I had a platform. And I had spent my whole life practicing the skill of not saying the true thing. So when the magazine started writing its own version of who I was, I already knew how to go along with it.

I had been arguing with my editors about the bio. They kept calling me a “dot-com executive,” and I kept telling them no one used that phrase anymore. What I should have been more alarmed about was the word “former.”

The first day I didn’t return to work after 9/11, my bio announced that my career was over. There were men all over the finance sector who had been at the World Trade Center and weren’t working either. Nobody called them former finance executives. Of course a man would go back to work eventually.

I was writing five columns a month — more than most full-time journalists at the magazine — and my own bio described me as unemployed. And I thought, if the bio says it, it must be true.

I knew no other women were writing about having kids and a career from the inside. I knew it was important. What I didn’t know was that prior to 2001 there had been fewer than fifteen female startup founders in the US, which is why I had the column in the first place.

But the magazine had already decided my value to them was over the moment I got pregnant. You can see it in the illustration. At that point no women were showing their pregnant bellies in magazines. I wrote about trying to hold things together, but the illustration makes it look like I gave up.

Reading this now, I notice that I wrote that my company “went under.” That’s how it felt to me at the time. In each case the company was acquired by one of my cofounders and his friends. I got the companies off the ground. They made the money scaling them.

By this point I had a bigger book deal than anyone else at the magazine. I was taking speaking lessons with a group of senior Fortune 500 men to prepare for my book tour. So the magazine published a picture of me sprawled across a piano.

The illustrator, Zohar Lazar, was well-known. He illustrated columns for writers like David Sedaris and never made them look ridiculous. The direction clearly came from my magazine.

And look at my bio. There’s a note in it announcing another columnist’s work. I have never seen that before or since in a print magazine. They knew everyone was trying to figure out who I was — my column was that widely read — so they used my bio as real estate to promote a man.

This is where it happened fast. They told me I had to reveal my identity. They had picked my pen name, portrayed my pregnant body however they wanted, and now they were taking away my anonymity on their schedule, not mine. I just went with it every time.

They also converted me from a first-person columnist into an advice columnist, which sounds like a small editorial decision but wasn’t. It turned me from someone living a life worth writing about into someone watching from the sidelines while other people lived theirs. The bio changed to “marketing executive” because that fit their narrative better. The illustrations stopped featuring a woman entirely. Men had the important careers. I was there to answer their questions.

Then they told me I needed a photo for a redesign. I told them I didn’t have one and I was eight months pregnant. They booked a four-hour shoot in a Manhattan loft anyway. The baby came late, so the session ended up being four days after I gave birth. They said there were too many people involved to reschedule. So I went. I can’t believe I went.

Look at the other writers’ bios from that issue. Every one of them has a casual snapshot — a guy in a T-shirt, a guy in a coffee shop. I have a glamour shot. Four days after delivering a baby.

Every one of those men had a less impressive career than I did at that point. But they were writing opinions and trends and I was answering their questions about interpersonal problems.

My immediate editor was a woman and she never pushed back for me. I don’t blame her. By then I had learned not to expect women to stick their necks out for each other at work. But the photographer did.

She was a little older than me and she had kids. My husband was there holding the baby between shots because I was breastfeeding. After the shoot she pulled me aside and said, “Do you know how much this photo session cost? You’re important to this magazine. They need you more than you need them.”

I was shocked.

She told me I needed to start getting something in exchange for everything I was giving them. Then she stayed an extra hour — and made everyone else stay too — and shot a whole roll of film of the three of us.