After twenty-two years, I am no longer the hum of pressure gauges,
no longer the one they call when systems go rogue
or bolts seize in winter wind.
I’ve been dismissed by silence.
I was a field-cat—fierce, functional, sun-scarred—
built for rooftops and trenches,
for pipe rooms soaked in ammonia, steam, and resolve.
Now the mission’s done.
I walk out past decontaminated gates
and the sun feels like a stranger on my skin.
The offer hasn’t come yet.
I circle the edges of myself,
drag one paw across a department store mirror
where soft things hang like questions.
I shop—not for style,
but for camouflage, for courage,
for garments that might coax me forward
through the fog of beginning again.
At sixty-two, your skin no longer snaps back.
But it remembers:
hard hats, steel-toed boots,
safety briefings at minus seven degrees.
It remembers building systems that kept acid from the earth,
standing in trailers, back straight, voice precise.
But now, the uniform must change.
It must soften.
It must learn the language
of conference rooms and corner desks.
I shop for cardigans as if they are lifeboats.
I test the weight of navy fabric.
Will this make me look capable—
or like I’m trying too hard?
I shop for blazers that might bandage the ache,
wrap my fear in neutral tones.
A silk blouse that whispers instead of declares.
A pencil skirt that won’t expect to kneel.
Shoes made for carpet, not concrete.
I joke—“I’m becoming a house-cat”—
but even that laugh is brittle,
like a cracked flange,
like loneliness beneath fluorescent light.
You’re not wrong to grieve, I tell myself.
The cocoon between what was
and what could be is tight.
Suffocating.
Necessary.
You built systems to protect others.
It makes sense
that losing yours
would leave you unmoored.
A new place calls with its title,
with its silent subtext:
reinvent, adapt, begin again.
So I reach for house-cat clothes.
I want to be ready.
I want to be liked.
I want not to fail.
Behind the humor is ache—
a longing to walk into a room
and not feel like the oldest one there.
To be respected
not just for my résumé,
but for the voice honed
in steam and silence.
I fear I won’t belong.
I fear forgetting names,
systems,
where the coffee is.
Let me say this gently:
This war inside the mind—
between the sharp-clawed survivor
and the card-carrying colleague—
doesn’t mean I am broken.
It means transformation.
The field-cat inside still watches,
wary beneath the desk of imagined future.
It does not trust chair wheels
or breakroom banter.
It misses blueprints
smudged by cold hands.
But there is something else:
a pulse beneath the fear.
A kind of molten readiness,
wound tight through the core.
I think of the math students I taught—
the ones who came after graveyard shifts,
still hungry to solve.
That part of me breathes still.
Still wants to teach,
to mentor,
to light sparks
engineering never snuffed out.
Something new is stretching beneath my ribs—
not weakness,
not surrender.
Curiosity.
And a quieter kind of courage.
There’s fear, yes—
of acronyms I don’t yet know,
of lunches taken alone,
of bringing too much of the past
into rooms that never knew my name.
Let the grief speak.
Let the rage against softening breathe.
But don’t let it drive.
The field-cat was your origin,
not your cage.
There is dignity in this house-cat life, too—
in mentoring,
in troubleshooting with words
instead of torque wrenches,
in saying, “I’ve seen this before.”
I used to buy boots by ASTM rating.
Now I’m hunting for cardigans
that suggest competence
without intimidation.
Shoes that speak in boardroom dialects,
not the clipped cadence of fieldwork.
It is sacred—this shopping.
This ritual of readiness.
Try them on not to erase yourself,
but to honor the version
still growing teeth in the mirror.
Let the house-cat skins drape gently
until the room feels like a system you’ve balanced before.
I press the sleeve seams flat,
pull back the curtain, and try it on—this next self—
a woman who’s been through the crucible
and come out not diminished,
but re-formed.
You are not the role the mirror tells me.
You are the one who makes roles matter.
And whether you crouch in boiler rooms
or conference calls,
you are still the same woman
who carried pressure and flame
with grace, with fury,
with purpose.
What if the job becomes real?
What if the office door has my name?
What if the drawers rattle open
not with bolts and torque specs
but fine pens and annotated process maps?
Still, fear lives in the seams.
What if I am too slow,
too “former” for the pace?
Afraid of a new town too—
of the moving truck’s hollow echo,
of no floorboard creaking in welcome,
of morning coffee without the hum
of the plant behind it.
This isn’t just a job change.
It’s a shedding of skin.
And some skins we wear so long
they feel like bone.
What if they don’t see
what twenty-two years of doing the impossible
has made of me?
But deeper than fear is something else:
a thrum.
A system warming up.
Not combustion.
Not turbine.
But reinvention.
I know how to build
what doesn’t yet exist.
I know how to walk into cold,
cavernous spaces
and coax them toward breath.
I know how to teach.
For ten years, I taught math
to dreamers in denim and hoodies,
made them love eigenvalues,
showed them the curve of a wing in calculus.
That part of me is alive.
Still eager to mentor.
To steady a hand.
To leave behind more than deliverables.
Even in those long years at the plant,
I was evolving.
So buy the pants.
Buy the soft shoes.
Fold the tags
like prayer slips
into your purse.
And let the house-cat rise—
not instead of the field-cat,
but beside her.
Together.
Complete.
