The Verdict by Afiya

The Verdict by Afiya - August 2026 Scholarship Essay

For years I mistook a job for a verdict on my worth.

I started as a legal assistant at a patent and trademark firm in 2019, holding a paralegal certificate and telling myself I’d reenroll to the program I’d already been accepted to once I had more financial footing. The plan was always temporary. But somewhere in the space between “for now” and “later,” the job stopped being a bridge and became the thing I measured myself by.

In the beginning, I was eager. I was always looking for more to do, more responsibility to take on, more ways to prove I could handle it. But there was rarely more work to give me. I tried more than once to move into a paralegal role at the firm and was told each time that I hadn’t demonstrated the capacity for more responsibility. It was confusing feedback to sit with. I had spent years asking for exactly that change, and it got harder to reconcile with. A few years in, I found myself handling longer-term, higher-stakes work. By then, though, more direct feedback had started pointing to something else. A habit of avoiding hard conversations, of letting friction sit unspoken until it became unavoidable instead of naming it early.

Some of that came from the environment itself. It was my first job in a corporate setting, and it never felt safe to be fully open about where I was struggling. I didn’t feel safe enough to be open with my struggles, so I learned to manage everything quietly, on my own, convinced that naming a struggle would only count against me. But some of it went deeper than the office. I had worked hard to get there. Where I came from, a stable professional job wasn’t guaranteed, and I didn’t want to be the reason it slipped away. I held on tightly to something I’d once thought was out of reach, even after it became clear it wasn’t the life I actually wanted.

That’s the harder truth underneath this whole season. I let a job I’d never planned to stay in define my worth. And in doing so, I avoided things I shouldn’t have, conversations, corrections, moments where I should have spoken up sooner. I was avoiding hard conversations at work because some other part of me was avoiding a much bigger one, one about whether I was going to keep postponing the life I actually wanted.

Losing the job forced both conversations at one ce. It was frightening, my financial security went with it, but underneath the fear was something I didn’t expect: relief. For the first time in years, I could breathe. The role I’d built my sense of value around was gone, and what surfaced underneath it was the vision I’d been carrying since 2019, the one I’d quietly let compete with a job that was never supposed to be permanent.

In June of 2025, I applied again to the design program I’d first been accepted to six years earlier. I’m starting this fall, working toward a career at the intersections of fashion, textile preservation, and community development