A season of disillusionment

In the summer of 2012, I found myself in a strange, unsettled season of life. I had recently completed an internship at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and I was more disillusioned by that experience than I expected to be. A year earlier, in May 2011, I had finished my first novel, only to feel equally disheartened by the submission process that followed. For years I had carried a set of ambitions that felt clear and urgent. By that summer, those ambitions no longer felt stable. I wasn’t giving them up exactly, but I was taking a break from the version of my life I had imagined.

I was trying to figure out what came next.

It was during that summer that I wrote a manifesto, written after thirteen years at Papa John’s, and I gave it a title that was every bit as intense as my state of mind: Unabashed Hypocrisy: A Dichotomy of Values. The title alone tells you something about where I was emotionally. But the piece itself was more than a complaint. It was part reflection, part reckoning, part release.

At the time, I didn’t know how important that moment would be. Looking back now, I can see it more clearly. The manifesto came out of a season when I was disappointed by several institutions at once, unsure of my direction, and beginning—however imperfectly—to put words to the kind of life and work I wanted to build.

The job I knew too well

I started working at Papa John’s in December 1998 when I was sixteen years old. At first, it was just a job. But like many jobs we assume are temporary, it ended up shaping much more of my life than I expected. I stayed there through high school, college, graduate school, and several transitions into adulthood. Over thirteen years, I worked in different stores, under different managers, in different cities, and in different roles. I made pizzas, answered phones, delivered orders, and managed shifts.

The important thing to say is that I did not simply resent the work. In many ways, I liked it. I liked the pace, the pressure, the teamwork, and the satisfaction of doing hard work well. There is a real fellowship that can form in places like that, especially among people who have to rely on one another in the middle of a demanding shift. I felt that deeply.

What troubled me was not the labor itself. It was the widening gap between the values the company claimed to hold and the habits I saw it reward. Over time, I became increasingly aware of how much the system valued compliance over judgment, routine over trust, and control over human insight. I wanted to do the work well, but I also wanted to understand it, improve it, and be treated as someone whose experience might matter. More and more, I felt that the people closest to the work were rarely trusted to help shape it.

That tension stayed with me because it was about more than one company. It forced me to think about the way institutions speak in the language of values while often operating according to a very different logic. Even then, I think I sensed that I was wrestling with a larger question—about labor, dignity, leadership, and the cost of organizing human life around control.

More than one disappointment at once

Papa John’s was not the only source of disillusionment in my life at that time, and I think that matters. If the manifesto had emerged only from workplace frustration, it would have been one kind of document. But it came at a moment when several disappointments were converging.

I had completed my first novel in May 2011, and like many writers discovering the realities of the industry, I found the submission process discouraging. There is something quietly bruising about finishing a manuscript you care deeply about and then stepping into a process that can make your work feel small, invisible, or contingent on forces you do not control.

Then came my internship at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. That experience, too, left me disillusioned in ways I was still trying to understand. I had invested myself in the work I was doing and in the larger ambitions I carried. By the summer of 2012, I no longer felt certain about the path I had been on. I was not standing at the beginning of something clear. I was standing in a pause.

And that pause mattered.

Because when ambition goes quiet for a while, other questions start to get louder. What kind of work do I want to give my life to? What kind of institutions do I trust? What kind of future am I actually trying to build? In that sense, the manifesto was not just about Papa John’s. It was about a larger crisis of direction.

Spain, distance, and manual labor

That summer I went to Spain, where I did manual labor on a farm. It was a radically different rhythm from the life I had been living. The work was physical and immediate. The days were structured by labor, weather, and fatigue rather than professional ambition. And in that space—away from the systems and expectations I had been carrying for so long—I had room to think.

That distance changed something for me. When you step away from your normal ambitions, even temporarily, you begin to hear yourself differently. You begin to see which frustrations were circumstantial and which ones were tied to something deeper. For me, the time in Spain became both reflective and raw. I was trying to vent, yes, but I was also trying to understand.

That is where the manifesto came from.

It emerged in a season of manual labor, uncertainty, and inward reckoning. It was a way to process what I had experienced, but also a way to name what I could not yet fully articulate. I was trying to understand why certain disappointments had cut so deeply. I was trying to figure out what values I wanted to hold onto and what kind of future I no longer wanted.

The manifesto as a turning point

Looking back, I can see that the manifesto was an important moment in my journey—not because it solved anything, but because it helped me clarify something. It gave shape to my frustration. It let me reflect and vent. It helped me hear, in my own language, the conflict I had been living with for years.

What I did not know then was how close I was to the next stage of my path. Just a few months later, in October 2012, I was offered my first publishing contract. It came from a vanity press, and that experience would set the stage for so much of what I would go on to encounter in publishing. In its own way, it became one more institution through which I would learn difficult but necessary lessons about power, aspiration, disappointment, and self-determination.

So when I think about the manifesto now, I don’t see it only as a document about Papa John’s. I see it as a hinge point. It belongs to that brief but important stretch of time when I was no longer convinced by the paths in front of me, but I had not yet found the one I would claim as my own. It was written in the space between disillusionment and direction.

What that summer still means to me

There are periods in life when it feels like nothing is happening because outward progress has stalled. But sometimes those are the periods when the most important inner work is taking place. The summer of 2012 was like that for me. I was not building a career in any obvious way. I was not accumulating credentials or moving cleanly toward a defined goal. I was doing manual labor on a farm in Spain, carrying disappointment, and trying to understand what kind of life I wanted.

And yet that season mattered.

It mattered because it forced me to sit with my disillusionment instead of immediately outrunning it. It mattered because it gave me the distance to reflect honestly. It mattered because the manifesto I wrote then became part of the foundation for what came next. Not because it was polished or wise or even especially measured, but because it was true to the moment. It recorded a threshold.

I think that is one reason old documents can be so important. They do not just preserve what we thought. They preserve who we were when our direction was still uncertain. They show us the questions that were already pressing on us before we knew what answers we would eventually pursue.

What I take from it now

When I revisit Unabashed Hypocrisy: A Dichotomy of Values today, I no longer read it as an isolated outburst. I read it as evidence of a turning point. I see a younger version of myself trying to work through a season of disappointment and trying to decide what kind of future was still worth pursuing.

That is what makes the document meaningful to me now. It captures a moment when I was not yet on the path I would eventually follow, but I was beginning to understand what had to change. I was learning, in frustration and in labor, what kind of work I wanted to move toward and what kind of systems I no longer wanted to trust without question.

Maybe that is the value of old writing. Sometimes it is not important because it is good. Sometimes it is important because it marks the moment before clarity—the moment when a person is still in the middle of becoming.

If this essay resonates with you, I hope you’ll stay awhile, read another post, and reflect on the seasons of confusion, disappointment, or manual labor that quietly prepared you for the life you eventually built.

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