The night my brother turned my life into a punchline, the TV in my mother’s living room was showing a highlight reel of the Seattle Seahawks, and every man laughing at me had my company’s badge clipped to his belt.
“Still jobless,” Ethan said, raising his beer like a toast. “Must be nice having nothing to do all day.”
He said it loud enough to roll over the sound of Monday Night Football, loud enough for the row of his co-workers crammed on the couch to hear, loud enough for my mother in the kitchen to pause as she pulled a tray of frozen appetizers from the oven.
They burst out laughing. One guy wiped his eyes. Another clinked his bottle against Ethan’s.
“Hey, don’t bully her,” one of them added, the way some people toss sugar on top of battery acid. “Being fun-employed is a full-time job.”
I stood by the window with a plastic cup in my hand, watching my own reflection in the glass instead of their faces. Out on the street, Christmas lights were wrapped around the maple tree in front of the Dawson house, the same one I used to climb as a kid in these same suburbs just outside Seattle, Washington. A pickup drove by with a faded American flag decal across the back window.
They thought I had no career.
They thought I had no ambition.
They thought I had no power.
What they didn’t know was that every single one of them worked for me.
Not metaphorically. Not in some empowerment-coach kind of way.
Literally.
Ethan had no idea that the “scrappy Seattle startup” he bragged about, the one he claimed he practically carried on his back, existed because I built it. Brick by brick, feature by feature, 2 a.m. bug by 2 a.m. bug. Years before any of them ever walked through its doors in downtown Seattle.
I took a slow sip of flat soda, pretending their words rolled off me, pretending that every joke wasn’t cutting a little deeper. I’d kept my identity quiet for reasons none of them would ever understand.
Reasons I’m going to tell you.
But as their laughter echoed off my mother’s beige walls, something in me shifted. It wasn’t a dramatic shatter. It was cleaner, sharper—the click of something finally sliding into place.
Because while they were busy tearing me down for sport, I was holding information that would end their entire world by morning.
I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t argue. I didn’t defend myself.
I just smiled, set my cup on the side table, and walked out, knowing exactly what I would do next.
Before I tell you what happened the second that front door closed—and how everything in that house flipped upside down—do something for me. Tell me where you are and what time it is as you’re reading this. I want to see how far this story travels away from that little American living room where it started.
Because for most of my life, my world felt like it began and ended there.
In our house, the scoreboard was invisible, but very real.
My older brother, Ethan Dawson, racked up points without even trying. I stood off to the side, keeping my own private tally of the game I was never invited to play.
Our mom, Karen, never said she had a favorite. She’d tell people, “I love them both the same,” while refilling coffee at the kitchen table. But the way her face lit up for Ethan’s smallest achievements said more than her words ever did.
When Ethan made the JV basketball team, there were photos stuck to the fridge under a magnet shaped like the American flag. When he hit a three-pointer in a game, she posted it on Facebook with a caption longer than my college application essay.
When I won a regional coding competition in high school—a trophy, a scholarship, a trip to a tech conference in San Francisco—she smiled, said, “I’m proud of you, honey,” and went back to folding towels on the couch.
He was the golden child, the one everyone expected to succeed in the “real world.”
I was the smart one.
In our family, that sounded less like a compliment and more like a consolation prize.
“Brains don’t teach you how to talk to people,” my dad would say. “You need to be more like Ethan. He knows how to work a room.”
Maybe he was right about one thing—I did learn to work a room. Just not in the way he imagined.
By my early twenties, I understood that waiting for validation at home was about as productive as refreshing a frozen screen. I finished my degree at the University of Washington, took a job at a small software firm in downtown Seattle, and spent my nights sketching out an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.
It started as a frustration: half the companies I worked with were still drowning in spreadsheets for everything. Project tracking, client management, internal reporting—rows and rows and rows of chaos.
I wanted to build something better. A platform that could actually help teams see, track, and manage their work in real time without needing three separate tools and a sacrificial intern.
Seattle made sense. The city had enough tech to attract talent without swallowing a new name the way Silicon Valley might. The skyline was full of glass towers, cranes, and logos of companies that had started in garages and ended up ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
I wanted my version of that story.
I rented a tiny desk in a co-working space near South Lake Union, the kind with exposed brick and kombucha taps and too many people in Patagonia vests. I learned how to pitch without sounding terrified. I watched small contracts turn into steady work.
Eventually, I hired my first engineer to help carry the load. Then a second. Then an operations lead. We outgrew the co-working space and signed a lease for half of a floor in a glass office building with a view of Elliott Bay. The day we moved in, I stood by the conference room window and watched Washington State Ferries glide across the water, feeling like I’d hacked my way into someone else’s life.
From the beginning, I kept my name off the front of everything.
The company was filed under a holding entity in Delaware. Public records showed attorneys and a registered agent instead of me. On paper, the founder was a generic shell company. Inside the walls, only three people knew the full truth: our COO, Lauren, our lawyer, and our lead investor.
I’d seen what happened the moment something looked promising in families like mine. People who never called suddenly “just wanted to check in.” People who doubted you would ask how they could “support” you with a tone that sounded suspiciously like “profit from you.”
I wanted the freedom to build without my relatives suddenly remembering my phone number.
Meanwhile, Ethan bounced between sales jobs that never seemed to stick. Sometimes he’d call on his commute, complaining about bad managers or impossible quotas. A few months later, there would be a layoff, a “restructure,” a performance review that somehow always landed on him.
Mom worried about him like it was her full-time job. “He just needs the right opportunity,” she’d tell me over the phone, stirring something on the stove. “He has so much potential.”
When she found out—by accident—that my “little company in Seattle” was doing well, her first reaction wasn’t pride.
It was a question.
“Could you get something for Ethan?” she asked. “A position, an interview, a foot in the door. Anything. You know how these things work. They don’t give chances to guys like him unless someone opens the door first.”
She framed it as a favor. The way she said it made it sound like an obligation that came pre-installed with my last name.
Mixing family and business was exactly what I’d sworn I would never do.
But I also remembered Ethan driving me to 6 a.m. exams when my car died, tossing me his jacket when I froze at bus stops, standing beside me when a group of boys at school decided the quiet girl in AP Computer Science was an easy target. He’d been mean, careless, and oblivious plenty of times. But he’d also shown up when it mattered.
I wrestled with it longer than I’ll admit.
In the end, I didn’t fast-track him. I didn’t hand him a title.
I did something else.
I asked my operations lead to reach out to a recruiter we trusted.
“There’s an opening in our sales org,” I told her. “I know a candidate who might be a fit. Treat him like any other applicant. No special notes in his file. No pressure either way.”
“Is he a friend of yours?” she asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
I wanted to see what Ethan would do on a level field.
He interviewed well. Of course he did. He knew how to turn on charm when it counted. The feedback came back positive: high energy, good presence, needs structure, but coachable. He accepted the offer in hours.
At first, it almost felt good hearing him talk about “this startup I just joined in Seattle” without having any idea he was describing my life’s work.
“We’re gonna blow up,” he told me on the phone, pacing outside our mom’s house. “The founders are low-key geniuses. You should see the platform, Rye. It’s insane. I’m basically at the ground floor.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
Inside the company, I stayed in the background. My title on internal documents was Founder & CEO. My presence in the day-to-day was something else entirely.
Nearly everyone interacted more with Lauren, our COO, and the senior staff than with me. I spent my time in strategy meetings, investor calls, early partner demos. Ethan became just another name on an org chart, working for a director who didn’t know we shared a childhood bathroom.
I watched from a distance as he learned the product, got comfortable with the team, hit his first targets. I heard him in the hallway sometimes, voice rising above others, carrying that laugh I knew too well.
The first warning signs were small.
A comment in his performance review about his tendency to talk over quieter colleagues. A note from HR about a complaint that “did not escalate to a formal investigation at the employee’s request.” A passing remark from one of my managers that Ethan brought “a lot of energy, not all of it helpful.”
I read each of those lines carefully, feeling a familiar pattern trying to stitch itself back into my life.
By the end of the first quarter, I sensed a shift in the air around Ethan’s team. The kind of subtle pressure that never shows up in dashboards, but leaks into the edges of people’s voices.
I heard it in the way one analyst said, “It’s fine, he’s just like that,” while her eyes told me it wasn’t fine at all. I heard it in the awkward pause when a new engineer realized I was standing nearby while they whispered about “the sales guys” turning the break room into their personal stage.
I could have looked away.
I didn’t.
I started spending more time on the floor where his team sat, quietly observing from doorways or joining Zoom calls with my camera off, my name set to something generic. Listening without announcing myself.
It wasn’t the content of the meetings that bothered me. Most of them hit their agendas. Pipeline updates, client calls, product questions. It was the tone.
Whenever Ethan took control, he dominated every discussion. He cut people off mid-thought. He punctuated his own ideas with the kind of confidence that left no room for disagreement.
When someone pushed back, even gently, he turned it into a joke at their expense. Jokes about how “some people aren’t built for pressure,” or “not everyone’s cut out for this level.” The kind of humor that leaves the room laughing and the target wishing they hadn’t spoken.
It was familiar. I’d watched him do it to me at our mother’s table for years.
But here, he wasn’t just aiming it at a sibling. He was aiming it at people who had trusted my company with their careers.
The moment everything truly changed started with a calendar notification from someone who no longer even worked for us.
Mia Collins. Former account specialist. One of our early hires.
Her exit months earlier had been quiet—an email from HR about her “pursuing new opportunities,” a Slack thread of polite goodbyes, the usual digital trail of departure. I’d barely registered it at the time. Startups turn over. People move on.
Now she was on my screen, politely asking if we could talk “for a few minutes” in person.
We met at a small café two blocks from the office, the kind with Edison bulbs and too many laptops glowing under the sign that said SUPPORT LOCAL ROASTERS. She wore a plain sweater, no makeup, her hair pulled back in a way that looked less like style and more like lack of energy.
She didn’t start with pleasantries. She started with, “I wasn’t sure if I should say anything. But I keep thinking about the people still there.”
She talked.
At first, the words came out halting, like she had to pump each one up from somewhere heavy. But once they started, they didn’t stop.
She told me how things shifted after Ethan joined.
How team meetings turned into arenas for his jokes. How small mistakes became ammunition. How certain people—quiet analysts, new hires, women, anyone who didn’t laugh loud enough—became easy targets shrugging through “just kidding” comments that landed like tiny cuts.
She told me about a meeting where she mispronounced a potential client’s name and Ethan spent ten minutes calling her “Miss Mispronounce” every time she tried to contribute. How everyone laughed. How she laughed, too, because not laughing would have made it worse.
She told me she’d gone to HR. How she’d stopped short of filing a formal complaint because she didn’t want that label—sensitive—floating next to her name in an industry where reputations travel faster than résumés.
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t dramatic. She laid out each detail like she was laying down cards. Comment after comment. Pattern after pattern. Humiliation dressed up as team bonding. A workplace slowly tilting away from safety.
Listening to her, I felt something cold settle under my ribs.
Not the hot flash of anger I’d felt all my life when Ethan put me down and everyone laughed. This was slower. Heavier. The kind of anger that sharpens instead of burning out.
When she apologized at the end—as if sharing the truth was somehow an inconvenience—I nearly laughed.
“It’s not an inconvenience,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
I didn’t tell her who I was. She thought she was talking to “Lauren’s colleague from leadership.” She had no idea she was speaking to the founder, to the person who had invited her into this place in the first place.
The conversation wasn’t about my title. It was about responsibility.
After she left, I sat there with my untouched coffee growing colder, missing two meetings I didn’t bother to reschedule.
Because once you hear something like that, it doesn’t feel optional.
It feels like a line has been drawn on the floor, and you either step over it or you don’t.
The next morning, I requested every HR document linked to Ethan’s team. I read each line with the clinical focus of someone debugging a system they once believed was solid.
Small entries. Soft phrasing.
“Concerns about tone.”
“Perceived dismissiveness.”
“Employee declined to pursue formal action at this time.”
Not enough to trigger headlines. More than enough to build a picture if you looked long enough.
I pulled meeting recordings. Chat logs. Feedback surveys. I didn’t want a scapegoat. I wanted clarity.
Once I had enough, I called Lauren into my office.
She was the only person who knew the full truth about me. The only one who could look me in the eye and say, “You’re not overreacting,” and have it carry the weight of both a COO and a friend.
I laid out what I’d seen. The subtle patterns, the complaint that never went official, Mia’s story (leaving out her name), the interview recordings.
Lauren listened, leaning back in her chair, dark hair pulled into a clipped bun, expression tightening in all the familiar ways.
“How much of this touches Ethan?” she asked finally.
“At least some,” I said. “But it’s bigger than him. His behavior spread because someone let it. This isn’t a single person problem. It’s a culture problem. And that’s on us.”
She didn’t rush to suggest solutions. Instead, she asked the question I’d been avoiding.
“What are you afraid this company becomes if you do nothing?”
“A place that looks like my mother’s living room,” I said without thinking.
She blinked. “Explain.”
“A place where one loud person defines the mood,” I said. “Where people learn that staying quiet protects them more than speaking up. Where the targets leave, and the problem stays.”
She nodded slowly.
“Then we don’t let that happen,” she said.
That brings me back to the living room.
The night my “jobless” status became the joke of my brother’s beer-fueled comedy set. The same brother whose name sat on internal documents in a folder labeled PERFORMANCE RISK.
I watched him laugh at me, surrounded by men who logged into my system every morning, who attended All Hands meetings I led with my camera off, who got direct deposits from accounts I approved.
He passed a bowl of chips to one of them, saying, “If my sister ever decides she wants to stop being allergic to effort, I’ll get her a referral. We’re always hiring.”
The guy next to him snorted. “Nepotism hire. I’d pay to see that.”
My mother glanced at me from the kitchen, something like apology flickering across her face before she turned back to her oven timer.
I set my empty cup on the table.
“Gotta head out,” I said.
“So early?” Ethan called. “Your couch not comfy enough here?”
“I’ve got work tomorrow,” I replied.
“Doing what?” he shot back. “Scrolling?”
More laughter.
I smiled.
“Something like that,” I said.
Then I left.
The second the front door clicked shut behind me and the cold December air hit my face, everything in me aligned.
I wasn’t going to take revenge on my brother.
I was going to protect my company from people like him.
If that protection felt like revenge to everyone in that living room later, that wasn’t my problem.
The next morning, I walked into our Seattle office before most of the teams had finished their first cup of coffee.
The American flag outside the building flapped sharply in the wind, the glass lobby catching the gray Pacific Northwest sky. Upstairs, the hallway smelled like espresso and whiteboard markers.
I went straight to HR and asked for something unusual.
“I want to sit in on a candidate interview,” I told our recruiting coordinator. “Unannounced. Full panel. Sales side.”
She blinked. “Today?”
“Today,” I said. “I’ll be the candidate.”
Her brows lifted.
“You want to… pretend to be the applicant?”
“Yes,” I said simply. “Don’t tell them. Put it on the calendar as an internal audit if you need a label. Use my middle name. I’ll sign in as a contractor from another office.”
She stared at me for a second. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “If this is about what I think it’s about… I’m glad you’re doing it.”
Two hours later, I was sitting alone in a medium-sized conference room with a glass wall, neutral blazer, hair pulled back, résumé printed under a name they didn’t recognize: E. Riley.
Through the glass, I saw them before they saw me—four men from the sales org, badges swinging, coffees in hand, laughing at something on one of their phones.
Two of them had been in Ethan’s social media photos. One worked directly under him. Another was on the interviewing panel list.
They didn’t bother lowering their voices as they walked in.
“Did you see the last guy?” one of them said. “Couldn’t even answer a basic objection handling question.”
“Yeah, he froze,” another replied. “You should’ve seen his face. I almost felt bad. Almost.”
They laughed.
Then they turned to me.
The switch was instant. Faces smoothed. Smiles turned professional.
The questions came quick. Rapid-fire, clipped, designed to knock someone off balance. They interrupted my answers, talked over each other, shared little smirks whenever I paused to think.
This wasn’t an evaluation. It was a performance—on their side, not mine.
Halfway through, one of them got a text and checked his phone under the table. He angled the screen toward the guy next to him. Another snicker. I watched the barely suppressed laughter ripple, the way discomfort travelled like a quiet current.
Not a single question about how I approached long-term client relationships. Barely anything about our actual product. Most of it was pressure, attitude checks, a live-action test of whether they’d “break” me.
When they finally wrapped up, one of them closed his laptop and said, “We’ll let you know.”
No thank you for your time. No offer of questions from my side. Just dismissal.
I walked out of the room with my heart beating low and steady. The way it does when you’ve seen exactly what you expected—and still wish you were wrong.
By the time I reached the elevator, my decision wasn’t forming.
It was formed.
One hour later, the executive leadership team sat around the long table in our thirteenth-floor conference room. Outside, the rain had shifted to that light Seattle drizzle that coated everything in a reflective sheen.
Lauren sat at my right. Heads of engineering, product, operations, customer success, finance, and sales sat around the rest of the table. Tom, the VP of Sales—the man directly responsible for Ethan’s org—took his seat opposite me.
Most of them had no idea what was coming.
“I want to talk about interviews,” I began.
A few people shifted, confused. Tom smiled, confident. “We’ve been ramping volume,” he said. “Our brand is strong right now. Talent is lining up at the door.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why this matters.”
I went around the table first, asking each leader to describe, in their own words, how they believed their teams treated candidates. The answers were the usual statements: “We respect people’s time,” “We’re transparent,” “We push for excellence, but we’re fair.”
Tom spoke with the ease of someone giving a keynote.
“We keep the bar high,” he said. “We put people under a little pressure to see how they perform. This industry isn’t for everyone.”
When he finished, I opened the folder in front of me.
“Over the past few weeks,” I said, “I’ve been reviewing candidate feedback, HR notes, and interview recordings. This morning, I sat in on a panel as a candidate.”
The room went still.
“I was asked almost nothing about my skills,” I continued. “I was interrupted. Dismissed. Treated like entertainment. The panelists mocked a previous applicant before they even sat down. They shared private texts during the interview.”
I didn’t say, It was your people, Tom.
I didn’t have to. The shift in his jaw told me he knew.
I laid out the patterns. Higher dropout rates when certain panels were involved. Anonymized notes from candidates who described the process as “hostile,” “condescending,” “needlessly aggressive.” The quiet correlation between those panels and Ethan’s part of the org.
“This isn’t a one-off,” I said. “This is a pattern. And patterns are my job.”
No one spoke.
“If we treat people like this before they even join,” I went on, “we cannot pretend our culture is what we say it is in all-hands presentations and press releases.”
My voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.
“We’re making changes,” I said. “Effective immediately.”
I outlined them. All interviews recorded and spot-checked by a rotating oversight committee. Anonymous candidate surveys routed directly to my office. Mandatory retraining for any team flagged twice in a quarter. Random audits—some of which would be me.
Then came the part I knew would land hardest.
“We will also be addressing specific patterns of behavior at a leadership level,” I added. “Some people will not be returning after today.”
No one looked at Tom. But every pair of eyes glanced at him without moving.
The meeting ended with people packing up their laptops in silence. Some looked relieved. Some looked rattled. Tom looked like a man whose control of a story had just slipped out of his hands.
I stayed in my chair until the last person left.
Then I scheduled three private meetings.
One with Marcus, our director of operations, whose job had been to enforce process and who had instead treated it as optional.
One with the members of that interview panel.
And one with my brother.
Marcus came first.
He walked into my office with the practiced calm of someone who believed his seniority made him untouchable. He talked in circles about “scaling pains,” “communication gaps,” “growing too fast.” Everything was big picture. Nothing was his fault.
I listened. Then I laid out the ways his neglect had created space for exactly the behavior we were now dealing with. The escalation paths he’d ignored. The flags he’d brushed aside. The emails he never followed up on.
When I told him we were terminating his employment, effective immediately, his shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly in what looked disturbingly like relief. Like he’d known this was coming and was tired of trying to outrun it.
He left without slamming the door.
The interview panel went next. One by one, I explained the documented policy violations, the calls, the texts, the recordings. Some protested. Some tried to minimize. None denied it.
All of them walked out unemployed.
Which left Ethan.
He stepped into my office with the same swagger he brought into my mother’s living room. He slouched into the chair like he was meeting with a peer, not an executive.
“Got your message,” he said. “What’s up? This about the numbers? I already told Tom the targets this quarter are trash.”
“This isn’t about targets,” I said.
I told him about the complaints. The patterns. The chat logs. The way his “just kidding” jokes had silenced half a team. The way his behavior had contributed to an environment that pushed good people out.
He laughed at first. Actually laughed.
“Come on, Rye,” he said. “Are we really doing this? It’s sales. People need to toughen up. You of all people should know that.”
“I do know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that,” I said. “That’s why I’m not letting it continue here.”
He rolled his eyes. “So what, they made you the culture police now?”
I looked at him for a long second. Years of history sitting between us. Two kids in a Seattle suburb, one always just a little louder, one always just a little smaller.
“I’m more than that,” I said quietly. “I own this company.”
He snorted. “Yeah, sure. And I own the Seahawks.”
“I’m serious, Ethan,” I said. “This is my company. I founded it. I built it. You’ve been working for me this entire time.”
He stared at me.
The joke drained out of his face inch by inch.
He scanned my expression for any hint of a lie. There wasn’t one. His gaze flicked to the framed incorporation document on my wall that he’d never bothered to read. To the small photo of me and Lauren at our first demo day. To the stack of investor reports with my name on them.
“No,” he said. “You’d have told us. Mom would’ve told me.”
“They don’t know the full picture,” I replied. “I kept it that way on purpose.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then leaned forward. “You’re serious.”
“I am.”
Silence sat heavy between us, thicker than it had ever been at any family dinner.
“You humiliated me,” he said finally, voice low.
“I gave you a fair shot,” I said. “You got in on your own merits. You had the same chance as anyone else to be the kind of leader this place deserves.”
He swallowed hard.
“You’re firing me,” he said. Not a question. An accusation.
“Yes,” I said. “Effective today.”
He stared at me like I’d rewritten the ground rules of the universe.
“Our parents are going to lose it,” he said.
“They’re allowed to,” I answered. “What they’re not allowed to do is decide who gets hurt inside these walls. That’s my job. And I will pick my employees over your feelings every single time.”
He stood up slowly.
“You’ll regret this,” he said.
“Maybe,” I replied. “But I’ll regret staying silent more.”
He didn’t slam the door.
He left it half open, like he couldn’t decide whether this was real or just a scene he’d wake up from later.
News of Ethan’s termination reached my parents before I drove home that night.
My mother’s name lit up my phone three times in a row. I let it go to voicemail each time. When I finally listened, her voice shook.
“How could you fire your own brother?” she asked. “Family doesn’t do that.”
The second message was shorter.
“You should have protected him,” she said.
I didn’t save the third.
I love my mother. But she never understood something simple: protecting someone from consequences isn’t love. It’s permission.
I didn’t call back. Not that night.
Instead, I sat in my dark apartment, watching the lights of Seattle climb up the hills, listening to the hum of the city I’d chosen instead of the cul-de-sac where I’d been told my place.
In the days that followed, the company adjusted faster than I expected.
Interviews shifted. New panels treated candidates like actual humans. Feedback forms filled with words like “respectful” and “challenging but fair” instead of “hostile” and “condescending.” People who’d stayed quiet started speaking more.
You could feel the building breathe easier.
My family did not adjust as quickly.
Ethan texted once: You ruined my life.
Then, an hour later: You always thought you were better than everyone.
Neither was true. I hadn’t ruined his life. I’d simply taken my company back. And I had never thought I was better than everyone. I just finally decided I wasn’t less.
Weeks later, my mother sent a shorter message.
Are you okay?
I replied with three words.
I’m doing fine.
Because I was.
Not happy every second. Not at peace with everything. But fine in a way that meant stable. Solid. Whole.
From my office window, I could see the cranes on the Seattle skyline, the ferries cutting across the water, the American flag flapping in front of the courthouse downtown. The world kept spinning, with or without any one person’s approval.
Endings don’t always arrive with slamming doors and screaming matches.
Sometimes they arrive as paperwork and quiet decisions. As keys turned in locks. As a sibling finally realizing you are more than the role you were assigned at a kitchen table.
This story, for me, was never really about revenge.
It was about responsibility—to the people who’d trusted me with their work, to the company that carried my name whether anyone knew it or not, and to the version of myself who had once quietly put down a computer tower because someone called it a waste of time.
So if you’re still here, reading from whatever time zone you’re in, tell me this:
What part of this felt familiar to you? Where did you feel that shift—that moment where you realized you were allowed to stop carrying things that were never yours?
Drop it in the comments. I want to see how far this little Seattle story travels.
