Taking Her Shot

Natalie Vance was the smartest person in every room she'd ever been in, and she was tired of it. At thirty-two, she was Director of Regional Operations for Harmon Direct Logistics - a fancy title because the company had run out of ways to make middle management feel important. She had the corner office, the salary, the spreadsheets nobody knew she'd seen. And then she got passed over for the promotion she'd earned, and Natalie decided to burn everything down. She sold the condo.
She gave away the clothes. She locked away her savings so she couldn't cheat her plan for three years. She even changed her hair color to blonde, changed her voice and her vocabulary and her name, and she walked onto a college campus, and she did it so completely that she became the person she was pretending to be. The performance was supposed to be the plan. The performance was the plan. But performances have a way of becoming habits, and habits have a way of becoming character, and by the time Natalie realized she'd lost the ability to think the way she used to think, the loss was so deep and so total that she couldn't find her way back.
She'd atrophied her own mind on purpose, and the mind didn't come back just because she wanted it to. She failed the class that mattered. She fell into a gap she couldn't close. She sold her blood and prayed to a leprechaun. She stood on a sidewalk in front of a strip club and threw up and decided she would rather be homeless than walk through the door. She went home to a flooded townhouse and a broken water heater and a bank account with four hundred dollars in it and a future that was locked in a CD eight months away. "Taking Her Shot" is the story of a woman who dismantled herself and had to put herself back together.
It's about the cost of choosing to become someone else and the harder cost of choosing to become yourself again. It's about logic puzzles and casseroles and the slow, grinding, unglamorous work of rebuilding what you've destroyed. It's about a rug that falls on you and makes you laugh and pain and struggles over years and a friendship that starts with a lie and becomes so much more. It's about shooting yourself in the foot and coming out the other side - not the same, not whole, but who you were meant to be.