Once there was a woman named Sarah Schreck, and she was—annoyingly, tragically—very good.

Her brain sparkled. Ideas arrived fully formed, like well-trained cats leaping onto shelves. She could imagine experiences that made people stop mid-sentence, smile, and say, “Wait… who made this?” She was meant to be an experiential designer. Not “someday.” Not “if things calm down.” Meant to be.

But Sarah had a job. A solid one. Respectable. Dependable. Beige in the way office carpets are beige: aggressively neutral. And Sarah was excellent at it. She showed up early, stayed late, fixed problems that weren’t hers, and became the person everyone relied on when things went sideways. She told herself this was temporary. Just until things slowed down. Just until she caught up.

Things never slowed down.

Every night, the real work waited patiently in the corner of her mind. The projects she and her partner talked about in excited bursts—installations, interactive moments, strange delightful experiments that would never exist unless someone made them. They’d sketch ideas on napkins. They’d say, “We should totally do this.” Then Sarah would glance at her calendar, sigh, and say, “After this week.” The week would reproduce like rabbits.

She was always catching up on normal life. Emails. Chores. Exhaustion. The endless administrative tax of being a human. Collaboration required energy, and energy was something Sarah planned to have later, once she’d earned it by doing a good job at the boring job.

Years passed quietly, which is how years like this prefer to pass.

Her portfolio remained… theoretical. Full of descriptions instead of artifacts. Potential instead of proof. Anyone looking closely could see the talent, but hiring managers are busy people. They don’t hire on vibes. They hire on evidence. On things that exist in the world and say, “I was brave enough to make this.”

Then one day, a job appeared. The kind of job that makes your stomach drop a little. Experimental. Weird. Perfect. The kind of role that could bend a whole career onto a new axis.

Sarah applied.

She didn’t get it.

The feedback was kind, which somehow made it worse. “Clearly talented,” they said. “We just went with someone who had more realized work in this space.” Someone who had taken the leap earlier. Someone who had collaborated messily, imperfectly, publicly. Someone who had shipped.

That night, Sarah understood the quiet trap she’d been living in. She hadn’t failed. She’d succeeded very efficiently at the wrong thing. She had traded her sharpest hours for safety, and safety, it turned out, does not build portfolios. It maintains them at zero.

This is the cautionary part of the tale:
Talent unused does not rot loudly. It just waits. Patient. Heavy. Watching doors close without slamming.

The moral isn’t “quit your job immediately and live on creative fumes.” That’s a different story, usually a short one. The moral is subtler and more dangerous: if you never prioritize the work that changes you, you will always be too busy being reliable to become yourself.

The world does not reward potential for long. It wants receipts.

And somewhere out there, the coolest job in the room is always looking for the person who made the thing instead of the person who meant to.