I work at a big fancy advertising agency. It is essentially the mothership of advertising. It very nearly invented the advertising industry as it’s now known. Its name was bandied about as sort of a brass ring in nearly every season of Mad Men. It’s known to this day for its groundbreaking, award-winning creative work. So, you’d think that my career would benefit from such a storied environment, honed by the industry’s highest standards, my professional mettle tested by the brightest colleagues and the biggest clients.

While all that is true, there’s a catch: I work for one of the world’s best and biggest agencies, but I work for the health, wellness, and pharmaceutical arm of it. I work in pharma because I’m not good enough to hack it in a creative agency—or so goes the conventional wisdom.

Pharma advertising does not enjoy the esteem regular advertising does within the industry, and to be sure, in some cases, rightly so. A lot of pharmaceutical advertising sucks, so the assumption is that those who create it are bad at their jobs. This is why I and my pharma creative compatriots are given short shrift not just by our comrades at regular agencies (and by their staffing recruiters) but often by the consumer divisions of the very agencies we work for. We’re not invited to the agency parties. None of our work is featured on the agency site; none of our leaders are celebrated in the same way as their counterparts who oversee work for hotels, sneakers and retail outlets. You’ll rarely see pharma work discussed in anything besides the most sarcastic terms in the industry press. The awards we win don’t mean anything to anyone else. As if a Lion at Cannes for work for a lifesaving drug is a lesser achievement than a Lion at Cannes for work for a second-tier tech brand.

When I moved to New York and started looking for a job, I had one criteria: No pharma. This was because for the entirety of my advertising career, I’d heard that pharma is where creative careers go to die. Pharma is where you work if you want to gather up all of your professional ambitions and stab them in their hopeful little faces. Pharma is where hacks while away their worthless days writing the world’s most unintelligible copy and designing the world’s ugliest brochures. Pharma is stuck in the last century—uncomprehending and suspicious of the expediencies of the digital universe. Pharma is where dusty professionals of yesteryear kill time until they retire or croak, whatever happens first. So, no, pharma was absolutely off the table. No way was I going to meander into that cul de sac.

That was a conviction that clearly had an expiration date on it. I’ll not bore you with stack of circumstances that kicked my job search into a slightly more desperate gear, but suffice to say, when an offer came, it came not from a great little indie shop, an up-and-coming boutique agency, or a creative powerhouse, but from the pharmaceutical division of the aforementioned advertising mothership. I told myself paychecks are paychecks, and gosh, did I sure need to start getting some. I thought I’d spend 2-3 months in the job and keep looking. I’d find something else, and never even put this tragic little career hiccup on my resume.

Over two years later, it’s clear that’s not how it worked out. And this is why: the things I’d heard about fusty old pharma aren’t true. Well, okay, some of it is true. But what wasn’t was crucial. My coworkers are a wildly and diversely talented group. I have clients whose most frequent directive is make it not look like pharma. The strategic thinking is tops. The energy on projects is dynamic and magnetic. The people I work with throw themselves at some very, very tough problems with incredible enthusiasm, intelligence, and creativity. And I’ve learned about things I never thought I’d need to know in advertising. Like molecules. Like mechanisms of action. How to articulate high science in plain English, while understanding and adhering to the array of laws and guidelines imposed not just by the FDA but also by each client’s regulatory group.

It’s often a frustrating job. Our work has to navigate a labyrinthine process of approvals before it goes out the door, making everything move with painful sluggishness, while still being all the more urgent in the eyes of the clients. Each approval is another hill to die on, another occasion to fight, cajole and beg for the creative soul of a project in the face of regulators who are insisting on covering your 45-second web video so completely in legal disclaimers, you won’t recognize it if you don’t figure out a workaround. None of this is actually that different from regular advertising—it’s just there are more layers of approvals, more non-negotiable feedback, a greater intensity of scrutiny and penalties that can reach into the billions of dollars if we collectively fuck it up.

It’s these strictures and consequences that all too often result in the dull safety of commercials for medicines that feature a couple walking their dog on a beach while a VO speed-reads an endless list of side effects. But with the right team and the right client, these rules can become creative drivers rather than obstacles, forcing you to maneuver your thinking in new weird ways that can build a creative foundation that will withstand all the slings and arrows awaiting your project. Working in pharma has made me better at my job, has taught me defend creativity in the face of a storm of intense, unbreakable rules and the keepers of them.

A simple fact that is glossed over in advertising (among lots of other things) is the fact that we are all at the mercy of our professional environment. You could have the most creatively facile mind that is sizzling with incredible ideas, but if you don’t have the right client, the right agency or the right team to back you up, all those hot ideas are for shit. Similarly, there are plenty of people with very pedestrian ways of thinking, but whose agencies possess the resources and the client roster to polish their creative turds to glowing, vapid perfection. Insert commentary about white maleness, privilege and all that stuff here, but including such things and more, advertising workers—especially creatives—are products of the forces within their professional environment.

And pharma is a harsh environment for a creative, it’s true. The clash of the average creative sensibility with the science-y, Vulcan-esque mind of your average pharma marketer or regulator makes for some gritted teeth, bitten tongues and stiff upper lips. But once you’ve done it a few times, you learn to anticipate the fights and throw your ideas further and further afield to confound the conservatism of your adversaries, delighting in ruffling the feathers of so many mother hens. Every creative worth their salt fights for their work, but the fights in pharma are longer and harder than any I experienced working in consumer agencies.

As I move through my career, I, and other pharma creatives like me, will be shunned by non-pharma agencies. We won’t get even get an informational interview, because it’s assumed we don’t have the chops, or that every pitch we make will start with, “Okay, so there’s a couple walking on a beach and they have a golden retriever…” But talented creatives work in pharma, too, as much as they work in regular ad agencies. I think maybe we should all be able to diversify our experience more easily, see what our respective talents bring to each others’ areas of expertise. That maybe taking the shackles off a pharma creative and turning them loose on something like sneakers or deodorant would result in some pretty great work. Likewise, maybe a consumer creative would learn some new rigorous, acrobatic ways of thinking if he or she was working on pharma, bringing a different voice and sensibility to projects.

Also, let’s acknowledge for a moment that the rules and regulations around the marketing of drugs are forces for good; that the public shouldn’t be sold snakeoil, especially when it comes to their health; that drug companies must be held to tighter and higher standards than your average marketer of paper towels. (Exhibit A of doing it wrong: Purdue pharma, oxycontin, the opioid crisis.) But I swear, on behalf of myself and all the creatives I work with, we work hard to make those communications as interesting, as empathetic and as human as they can possibly be, while also being transparent and honest about the products.

I’ve come a long way from poo-pooing pharma along with everyone else. Though I certainly acknowledge there is plenty of pharma advertising that persists in being terrible. All I can speak for is my agency, my team, and our efforts. But there is more and more hunger among companies and clients to make pharma ads not look “pharma.” The health categories at award shows are getting more and more competitive. The attitude is changing, slowly, haltingly, but changing nonetheless. I don’t want to work in pharma forever, but that said, I’m not sure I’d have the confidence or the creative facility I have now if I hadn’t taken this job. So, for that alone, I’m grateful for the experience as much as I am grateful for the fact that I’ve been able to pay my rent and support my life in New York thanks to what I thought was going to be a lame-ass, deadend pharma job.