Mary Helen’s Story:
Life looked so promising in my right-out-of-college days as I prepared to start my first job at a Big Four Public Accounting Firm, planning to climb the ranks with ease. On my first day of work at that firm, my career story pivoted quickly when I was assaulted by a stranger on the way to my car at the end of the day. Determined to move forward, I told no one other than the police and my parents and tried to move on stubbornly through my first busy season at the firm. I was subsequently assigned to the largest audit client my firm had ever taken on, and I thought my career climb to the top was imminent.
But my body fought back. My attempts to bury the effects of that assault backfired, and I struggled with illness and inability to cope. In the middle of the first busy season of my dream job, I was forced to step away due to my health. Although I knew deep down my outward struggles were caused by the trauma of my assault, the voices I believed blamed my anxiety and exit from the firm on a lack of capability as a CPA. A lie of failure lodged deeply in my heart as I tried to carry on with my career.
Leaving a Big Four accounting firm in the middle of your first busy season is about as bad a career move as a hopeful CPA can make. My feelings of failure festered like an infected wound. I was only 24 years old and already had the accounting version of a scarlet letter on my resume. By God’s grace, I was hired as a bottom level accountant at a hospital, though told not to hope for much in the way of promotions or opportunities.
For a season, I needed a basic-level accounting job, focusing my time on building a church community and giving myself rest both mentally and physically. Although my body began to get the rest it desperately needed, I still did not talk about my assault openly, nor did I attribute anything in my career to trauma. As before, I sojourned on, trying to think about the assault as little as possible.
In time, a good kind of ambition began growing inside me again. I knew I could do more. I applied for a promotion to senior accountant at the hospital and was passed over by my boss, who told me multiple times I was on the CPA slow track due to my lack of Big 4 tenure. According to my boss, I should accept my slow track or get out of the accounting profession altogether. Counsel from other CPAs outside of my organization echoed my boss’s sentiments. Lies of failure were now threatening to engulf the entire story of my career.
Believe it or not, the discouragement from those CPAs proved a gift, setting me free from the accounting profession and causing me to search for other career avenues. Eventually that search led me to financial planning and my current job and company. My boss and his team were the first people since leaving the accounting firm to ever take my career potential seriously.
Because my self-confidence had taken a hard hit, I spent most of the first year at my new company trying to convince my employers I couldn’t offer what the job required. But thankfully I had met my match in stubbornness, and my boss and his team would not let me continue that mindset. They sought to help me change the lie lodged deep inside me.
For the next four years, my coworkers, friends, and family tried to convince me I was not a failure in my career. Daily they urged me to walk in the freedom of who I am in Christ and all the good works He created me to do. The problem was I never let anyone into the assault chapter of my story. I also never really stepped back to process how being assaulted on my first day of work in my first job out of school left a gaping wound in my life that had not been addressed.
After those four years, and almost seven years after my assault, I found myself sharing a stage at a church women’s luncheon with a partner from the Big 4 Public Accounting firm I had left years ago. In the week leading up to that event, my body began to fight back as memories of my assault flooded my mind. But this time, instead of burying the assault story, I began to reach out to friends and mentors and open up the darkest corners of my story.
For so long I was afraid that if I shared my story, others would think it was foolish to connect my assault to my performance during that first busy season at the Big 4 Firm. Not only was I very wrong about others’ responses, but each person I shared my story with helped me dig up more of the infectious lie that I had failed as a CPA.
As I walked onto the stage at the women’s event to sit next to that partner from my past accounting firm, the entire world seemed to slow to a complete stop as the events of the last seven years flashed through my mind. As I looked out across the room at the faces of women, I was reminded of Genesis 3. From the moment the story of man and God fell apart because of sin, God immediately set a plan in motion to put it all back together.
God had also been on the move in my life over the past seven years, all the way to that pivotal moment onstage with a woman whose career highlighted my loss. He had used loving friends and family members to help me dig out, expose and heal from that infectious lie. I could walk in freedom as God’s beloved daughter, as well as a capable and talented CPA. That day was the beginning of a new era for me, as I embraced my mission according to Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
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