Whose Image do I Bear?

May 26, 2026

Photograph taken by author, Joel Thomas.

By Joel Thomas, a Data Science and Finance Senior at Drexel University and Malayalee Christian of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.

The summer before everything changed, I drove across thirteen states in one week. Most of it was through rural America — the kind that doesn’t make it onto tourist reels or LinkedIn posts. Nevada surprised me most. Not Las Vegas, which I expected. But the drive through it — I-15, coming in from Arizona, roads carved directly through the mountains. On all four sides, breathtaking formations, each one intricately and uniquely shaped. I remember marveling that this was just a commute for the people who lived there. Back home in Philly, I-95 is asphalt and traffic and skyline glimpses. That’s what we know. That’s what we build.

Man seeks solace in his own handiwork rather than in the hands that created him.

I didn’t fully understand what I was driving toward that summer. But looking back, I think God was showing me something I wasn’t ready to receive yet — that the grandest things in life are rarely the ones we construct. I would spend the next year learning that lesson the hard way.

I went into the finance industry chasing something I couldn’t fully name at the time. It wasn’t just the money. It was the pull — the confidence, the charisma, the way people in that industry seemed to move through the world like they owned it. So when I landed a role at a private equity firm as a twenty-year-old, I was overjoyed. I remember parking in the garage my first day and just standing there — on one side, a gorgeous view of the Schuylkill River, and on the other, the entire city spread out in front of me. I walked into the lobby and was speechless. Floating lights. Mahogany tables. Floor-to-ceiling windows. It felt like I had “made it” in life.

My manager had already prepared a 30/60/90-day plan for me. Going through it, I felt something I hadn’t expected: that he could see a version of me that I couldn’t see yet. By the end of three months, he expected me to be doing things most first-year analysts couldn’t do in six. Sure, it was daunting. But every time I looked at that blurry image of who I’d be at the end of those six months, I felt alive with possibility.

In rooms and around tables where I was clearly the youngest, there was a voice in my head telling me I didn’t belong. But I’d heard enough to know that success was never a comfortable path — it was one filled with doubt and with doing things you aren’t qualified for in the present moment. I leaned into it.

What drew me in even more than the firm was my manager. We clicked immediately — we both believed communication was the most important human skill, we appreciated dressing well, we shared a love of coffee. In my interview, I watched him speak with a command and range I knew I didn’t have yet, and I thought: if this man becomes my mentor, I’ll be on the right track. Two weeks in, I asked. He agreed. And in my eagerness, I told him I was willing to do whatever he asked.

That sentence cost me more than I understood at the time.

What I wanted from him wasn’t really the corner office. It was his confidence. I had this quiet fear of being the stupidest person in the room — of being seen as unqualified, too young, too green. But, when I watched him speak, it felt like there was nothing in the world he couldn’t achieve. I believed that if I could get that kind of confidence, I could do whatever I wanted in both my personal and professional life. I wasn’t just looking for a mentor. I was looking for a mold to pour myself into.

He had built his career on a single, unapologetic decision: early on, he chose career over family–over everything. He cut out whoever and whatever didn’t serve that pursuit, and, by his early thirties, he was a director, respected, accomplished, and visibly successful. He admitted his sacrifices sometimes made him sad. But then he’d think about where he was, and the feeling would pass.

I didn’t hear the sadness in that. I heard the blueprint.

What I was really witnessing wasn’t just ambition. It was a man who had made a complete theological choice, whether he named it that way or not. He had chosen what his life would be for. He had selected his altar and laid everything else on it — relationships, family, the softer parts of himself — as offerings. And it had worked, by every metric the world gives you to measure with. The tragedy wasn’t that he would later betray me. The tragedy was that I heard his story and said: I want that.

Father Thomas Hopko wrote that our ambitions can lead us to frustration when we fail, or to arrogance when we succeed — but that when we allow Christ to lead us each day, we learn how to hold joy regardless of outcome. My manager had succeeded. And what I saw underneath the success, if I’m honest, was a particular kind of arrogance — not cruel, but sealed. A man who had stopped being surprised by anything because everything had been made to serve a plan.

What I was really witnessing wasn’t just ambition. It was a man who had made a complete theological choice, whether he named it that way or not. He had chosen what his life would be for.

I was twenty years old, and I wanted to be him.

So I followed the blueprint. I started pulling away from my family. I dropped friends. I let my health slide. I became the last one in the office, coming home at eight or nine and going straight to my room to log back in. My days flattened into a loop: 4am gym, eat, shower, drive, work, home, sleep, repeat.

To twenty-year-old Joel, success meant living differently than everyone else. It meant a big city, a fancy building, long hours, a packed calendar. It meant only spending time with people who gave you a positive ROI (return on investment) — which meant canceling on random hangouts, skipping family nights that didn’t have an agenda, tuning out anything that felt soft or unproductive. I was building something. Or so I told myself.

This is what the displacement of wonder looks like from the inside. It isn’t dramatic. There’s no single moment where you feel yourself changing. It’s more that you stop noticing things. You stop being moved. The world narrows to a set of inputs and outputs — what did I produce today, did my manager approve, am I ahead or behind? You’re not marveling anymore. You’re evaluating. And the distance between the postures of wonder and production is the distance between being alive and being efficient.

One afternoon I was getting coffee in the kitchen and someone from another team stopped and asked if I was okay. I told him I was busy and that today hadn’t been a good day. He just listened. Smiled. Didn’t try to fix anything. I don’t know why that moment stuck with me the way it did — maybe because it was the first time in weeks someone had looked at me like a human being and not a resource.

But even in the worst of that season, there were cracks.

I loved the afternoons when my tasks were planned out and the office emptied after 4pm — the noise would slowly tune out, and I could just invest myself in building something for a stakeholder without the fear of being watched, without having to perform productivity. And I genuinely loved helping people. Someone would come to me with a business problem, and I’d sit with them and really try to understand what they were struggling with, and then figure out how I could address it. Watching different teams use what I’d built — hearing how much it had impacted their work — that felt real in a way the rest of it didn’t.

But when I experienced those moments, it made me realize how small those pockets were. Yet, I powered through, telling myself this was all for the best. Telling myself those insufficient pockets were enough time to dwell with my feelings. Then on my birthday that year, I visited a Greek Orthodox monastery for the first time. And sitting there in the quiet, something cracked open. I realized how much I had changed. I had essentially removed God from my life and filled the space with material things — titles, approval, the idea of becoming someone. A verse came to me in the silence: Cast your burdens onto Him — Psalm 55:22. It didn’t solve anything. But it put me in a different headspace. This season was a season of learning. Even the hard obedience — doing a job faithfully, working with discipline even under a difficult manager — could be a way of glorifying God. I started praying in the car before walking in. I started going to my car at lunch for ten minutes just to breathe and reflect. At the end of each day I’d thank God for getting me through one more. Sometimes it is in the moments of real hardship where we are most able to feel God’s nearness.

Three months in, my manager called me into a one-on-one and told me — bluntly, without apology — that he had decided not to keep me on part-time after my co-op as he promised. That he didn’t have the bandwidth to mentor me. That keeping co-ops wasn’t good ROI. He told me not to talk to anyone about it, to stop networking within the firm, and not to bother him with new projects for the remainder of my time there.

Just like that, the version of reality I had built collapsed.

That co-op was not a long time. I was an intern, not a full-time employee. By any measure, it was a small chapter. But it permanently shifted the lens through which I see the corporate world — how relationships within it are rarely what they appear, how almost everything operates on an underlying transaction, how the warmth that draws you in can evaporate the moment it stops being useful. I’ve lost some innocence that I’ll never recover. I notice the transactional angle in people now — especially when meeting someone for the first time. I’ve had to grieve the belief that following the straight path and being honest will always lead to success. I’ve seen enough to know that the most persistent, the most strategic storyteller, often wins — regardless of who’s more honest.

And more than that, it made me look in the mirror. Work had become my entire personality. I had chosen a man, idolized him, and begun reconstructing myself in his image — without ever stopping to ask whether that image was one God had intended for me. Many times we are so quick to become mini creators — redefining ourselves, reinventing ourselves — without pausing to understand who our Creator made us to be.

The corporate world doesn’t ask you to sacrifice everything all at once. It’s more gradual than that — a slow negotiation where you trade pieces of yourself in exchange for what feels like progress. Somewhere in the middle of executing the plan, life quietly transitions from vivid to grayscale.

…it permanently shifted the lens through which I see the corporate world — how relationships within it are rarely what they appear, how almost everything operates on an underlying transaction, how the warmth that draws you in can evaporate the moment it stops being useful.

My last co-op was at BlackRock, and something was different there.

I connected with someone who was Chief of Staff to the head of the Americas Client Business — one of the most coveted early-career roles at the firm. He had five work trips that month alone, a cross-country flight that same evening, and still rearranged his schedule to spend thirty minutes with me over coffee. When we sat down, he wasn’t performing mentorship. He asked questions, listened, and turned his focus back to me every time someone he knew walked by — and in that building, there were a lot of them. I had spent a co-op being treated as a resource, my worth calculated in real time. And here was one of the most connected people at the firm treating me like someone worth slowing down for.

BlackRock wasn’t a perfect world, but it showed me what it could look like when people had not lost themselves — when power and humanity weren’t in opposition. My manager at the private equity firm wasn’t an anomaly. He was an endpoint — what the blueprint produces when followed to completion. That sadness he described just wears different masks at different ages: the sixty-year-old quietly regretting the family they let drift, the twenty-three-year-old who locked in for four years only to look up and wonder what it was all for.

I’ve been thinking about how early we push kids into linear paths — STEM, Kumon, SAT prep — and how rarely we pause to ask when the child gets to discern their own calling. The artistic child gets quietly diminished because the STEM side is more marketable. Kids get welcomed into spaces only when their involvement looks good on an application. We don’t make room for the one who asks too many questions, or plays in the dirt because something about it feels alive. And then we become adults with no idea why we feel so empty — because we never developed the part of ourselves that knows how to be moved. As life gets busier, we lose touch with that inner child. The curiosity disappears. We accept monotony, let relationships go cold, and forget what it means to be human before anything else.

And yet. Even after a genuinely good experience at BlackRock, I find myself in a kind of career break — somewhere between what I’ve done and what comes next — asking something harder to say out loud than I expected:

Do I even want to go back?

There is so much this world holds, and yet we spend forty or fifty years climbing ladders manufactured by other men, living inside a matrix of performance and titles and compensation bands — and by the time we surface, our time is nearly gone. The question that hangs in the air, quiet and devastating: did I live a life that was pleasing to God?

That’s a different question than was I successful? It requires a different kind of accounting. Not what did I accumulate, but what did I become? Which mold did I allow myself to be poured into? Not what did I build, but whose image do I bear?

Maybe the Nevada mountains were just a commute for the people who lived there. They had stopped seeing them. And I think about that often now — the possibility of living inside something magnificent and losing the capacity to receive it. The corporate world is very good at that. It gives you a window with a view of the Schuylkill River and the whole city spread out in front of you, and then it quietly teaches you to stop looking.

I don’t know exactly what comes next for me. But I know what I want to protect. The part of me that still feels something when a stranger takes the time to listen. The part that finds genuine satisfaction in solving a real problem for someone who needs help. The part that walked through Nevada and couldn’t stop marveling. The inner child who doesn’t calculate return on investment before sitting with someone he loves.

In a world that measures worth by accumulation, I keep returning to a different kind of wealth. Not the kind you hold in your hands. The kind that quietly expands your soul. I’ve traveled enough, and seen enough, to know that the grandest things in life are rarely the ones we construct. The question isn’t whether I’ll re-enter the corporate world. The question is whether I can do it without losing the wonder I just spent two years getting back.

“For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” — Mark 8:36

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