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I'm Sara McElroy, former CMO and The Wall Street Journal's poster woman for pandemic career burnout.

After making a bold leap from corporate and landing a book deal, I was certain I had successfully reinvented my career and was finally building a life that felt like me.

But something in me wouldn't let me write the book.

As my book deal collapsed, everything else seemed to follow.

Health.
Finances.
Relationships.
Home.

A complete unraveling of what I thought made for a "perfect on paper" life.

And I finally had to reckon with a truth I'd long been avoiding: somewhere between the life I was living and the story I was telling about it, entire parts of me had gone missing.

I've come to believe that the truth of being human always exceeds the story we can, or feel safe enough, to tell about ourselves.

Because the person is greater than the resume.
The life is greater than the obituary.
And the human is always greater than the paper.

Perfect Off Paper is a serial podcast about borrowed stories, unexpected unravelings, and what happened when I stopped forcing my life to fit the paper.