Joyce Turchetti

When You’ve Opened Every Door

There comes a moment when you have knocked on every door available to you.

Family. Career. Friends. Paid professionals. Schoolmates. People from your past.

You knock. You wait. You hope.

Sometimes you beg. And one by one, those doors stay closed, or they open just enough to disappoint you before swinging shut again.

Most of us spend our entire lives seeking what lies behind those doors.

We chase career approval, believing that a title or a paycheck will finally tell us we are enough.

We chase love and affection from people who were never capable of giving us what we actually needed.

We seek validation from friends, from family, from anyone who will look at us long enough to make us feel real.

And when those doors close, and eventually, they all close, we feel like we have failed.

We haven’t.

We were just knocking on the wrong doors.

Here is what nobody tells the young woman standing in that hallway for the first time, heart open, hope intact:

Every single thing you are searching for behind those doors — the love, the approval, the safety, the sense of being enough — it was never there.

It was never going to be there.

Because it doesn’t live behind anyone else’s door.

It lives behind yours.

Your door is the one nobody talks about. It doesn’t have a fancy label.

It doesn’t promise a career or a relationship or a circle of friends.

It just stands there quietly, at the end of the hallway, waiting for you to stop knocking on everything else long enough to notice it.

Behind your door lives the only approval that was ever going to last:

Your own.

Behind your door lives the only love that was ever going to be unconditional:

Your own.

Behind your door lives the only person who has been there for every single moment of your life, who knows every wound and every triumph, who never left even when everyone else did.

You.

I know this hallway. I have stood in it longer than I care to admit.

I knocked on every door available to me.

I chased love that was never mine to have.

I built careers to prove my worth to people who were never watching.

I sought approval from a world that was too busy seeking its own.

And when everything was stripped away — the dreams, the safety, the people — I finally turned around.

And I saw my door.

I won’t tell you I’ve opened it. Not fully.

Self-love is not a destination you arrive at.

It is a door you have to choose to open every single day, especially on the days when you feel least deserving of what’s behind it.

But I can tell you this:

The young woman standing in that hallway right now — the one who has been rejected, dismissed, overlooked, or simply never taught that she was worth loving — she is not broken.

She is just knocking on the wrong doors.

Turn around.

Your door is the one that was always meant for you.

And you are the only one who holds the key.

Self-worth, and the long walk back to yourself.

LEADERSHIP & RESILIENCE

I Didn’t Survive This Industry by Being Tough.

I Survived It by Being Relentless — and Resilient.

By Joyce Turchetti, Founder, Synergy F&B Consulting

I was 23 years old, standing in a New York City bus station with $200 in my pocket and no plan beyond the next few hours. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I didn’t ask for help—I was too proud for that. I just went.

Three years earlier, I had started as a cocktail server in a Fort Lauderdale nightclub. By 23, I was running the place. The owner saw something in me and offered to take me to New York. I didn’t have the money to do it—but I wasn’t about to admit that. So I didn’t. I scraped together $200, got on a bus, and figured I’d work out the rest when I arrived.

I slept in that bus station. By that evening, I had a bartending job. That same night, during training, I met someone subletting an apartment. I told him I’d pay nightly until I could commit to monthly. He agreed. I kept my word. Within two years, I was General Manager of Visage—at the time one of the most iconic nightclubs in New York City, spanning two city blocks, backed by millions in investment, and attracting a clientele that included some of the most recognizable names in the world.

From the outside, that story might look like hustle. And it was. But what it really was—what I didn’t yet have words for—was resilience in its rawest form. Not the polished, conference-ready version of the word. The real kind. The kind that doesn’t pause to assess whether conditions are favorable. The kind that moves because stopping isn’t an option you’re willing to consider.

I kept climbing after Visage. Decades in hospitality leadership—IHG properties, award-winning general management, revenue transformations, operational rebuilds. A career built by being more prepared, more consistent, and more strategic than most people in the room. And I do mean most—including the men who kept getting promoted into roles I had already outgrown. (You’re welcome, gentlemen.)

I should have been a Director by 30. I knew the role. I had the results. In many cases, I was already doing the job—without the title, the compensation, or, apparently, the right chromosomes.

The men who got those positions instead were not more qualified. In some cases, they were impressively—almost admirably—less so. But they had something I refused to trade in: access. The unspoken currency of an industry that rewards proximity and compliance over competence.

I would not sleep my way to the top. So I climbed the hard way—on merit, grit, and a track record that spoke for itself. Loudly.

It took longer. It cost more. And along the way, I developed a sense of humor sharp enough to survive just about anything. Because if you can’t laugh at the absurdity of watching a less-qualified man stumble into the role you’ve been quietly running for two years, you’re going to need a lot of therapy. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

I would make the same choice again without hesitation. The humor, though—that wasn’t optional. That was survival gear.

And still—that wasn’t the whole story.

Because the hardest part of climbing wasn’t the hours, the pressure, or the scale of the properties I managed. It was the constant, exhausting work of being a woman in rooms full of men who couldn’t decide whether to respect you or pursue you.

Colleagues who were supposed to be peers.

Supervisors who were supposed to be professional.

An industry culture that made it clear—both explicitly and implicitly—that your advancement came with conditions.

For most of my career, I managed it the way many women do—carefully, strategically, and largely in silence. Because speaking up had consequences. Because the professional cost of naming what was happening often outweighed the cost of tolerating it. Because I had worked too hard and come too far to risk it all on a complaint that might go nowhere.

In my 50s, I stopped managing it quietly. I reported sexual harassment. I pursued the case. And I won.

I also lost my job.

That’s the part that doesn’t make it into the inspirational version of this story—that doing the right thing, at great personal cost, after decades of professionalism and documented excellence, can still cost you everything professionally—even when you win.

The system can be navigated correctly and still leave you standing in the rubble.

And yet—here I am.

I founded Synergy F&B Consulting. I mentor food and beverage entrepreneurs through SCORE. I am building SafetyShift, an AI-powered workplace safety platform designed specifically for the hospitality industry. Because if I can help protect the next generation of women in this business from even a fraction of what I navigated, that matters more to me than anything on my résumé.

Resilience is not a trait. It is a decision—one you make repeatedly, in circumstances that have no business requiring this much of you.

It’s the $200 in your pocket when you know you need more.

It’s the nightly rent payment when you can’t yet afford monthly.

It’s standing up for yourself after decades of calculated silence, knowing what it might cost—and doing it anyway.

And when it all gets to be too much, you find something to laugh about. Not because it’s funny—but because humor reminds you that you are still bigger than whatever is trying to break you.

I didn’t survive this industry by being tough.

I survived it by refusing—every single time—to let it be the end of my story.

And by laughing, loudly and unapologetically, at every absurd chapter along the way.

About the Author

Joyce Turchetti is a 43-year hospitality industry veteran, award-winning General Manager, and founder of Synergy F&B Consulting. She mentors food and beverage entrepreneurs through SCORE and is the creator of SafetyShift, an AI workplace safety platform for the hospitality industry.