Build It Level
My name is Tamara Collins, I’m thirty-three years old, and for most of my life the people who were supposed to know me best had me confused with someone else entirely.
The someone else was a failure. She was a woman who rented instead of owned, who drove a dirty truck instead of a nice car, who was divorced instead of settled, who did something vague and unserious on a computer while the real workers of the world got their hands dirty. That woman was the daughter my parents thought they had, and they’d been talking about her, correcting her, motivating her, and quietly grieving her for so many years that when the real me tried to speak, they couldn’t hear her over the noise of the disappointment they’d invented.
I own a structural engineering firm in Ohio. I say that plainly now, though for years I said it in rooms where it landed like a stone dropped down a well, no echo, no splash, nothing. I design the bones of things. Bridges, plazas, the load-bearing skeletons of buildings that thousands of people walk across and through every day without ever thinking about the engineer whose calculations are the only reason the whole thing doesn’t come down. It’s invisible work, in a way. When I do my job perfectly, nobody notices anything at all. The bridge simply holds. That invisibility, I’ve come to think, is part of why my family could never quite believe in it. There was nothing to point at. Nothing to hold up at a dinner party. Just structures standing exactly as they were supposed to, silently, all over the county, with my seal on the drawings that made them possible.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
