Life Gets Easier When You Stop Fighting It. The Rain Will Fall Whether You Complain Or Not. Traffic Will

Corporate says we're family!!

 She didn’t quit the job. She just slowly stopped showing up in her own body.

Muted Square in the Zoom

They didn’t say my name in the meeting. Not once. I was there and had written half the report.

The credit went around the table like a bottle passed hand to hand. I watched it skip over me.

At lunch, I sat with them. One of them asked me, “Are you new?”

I’ve been here fourteen months.

After a while, you stop correcting people. You stop reminding them that you’re part of it. You become good at inhabiting the background. Or a muted square in the Zoom.

But I’m still here. Still opening the spreadsheet. Still writing the copy. Still dressing up and disappearing.

They didn’t see me. But I saw everything.

ᴇᴅɪᴇ sᴇᴅɢᴡɪᴄᴋ, ᴀɴᴅʏ ᴡᴀʀʜᴏʟ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄʜᴜᴄᴋ ᴡᴇɪɴ NYC, 1965, by Burt Glinn.

Career change (nervous breakdown optional)

Feels like a Friday post. But you can on Saturday too if you want.

Either way, you want to chase the hat.

NGL leaving my job after was terrifying.

No backup plan and no health benefits. Just me, a spiked nervous system, a trashcan LinkedIn bio I abandoned circa 2017 with honours.

I spent the first two weeks crying, I did that. Then reorganizing my fridge, using a lot of Windex around the house, checking my email like a raccoon checking dumpster locks. Nothing came. And sigh.

No word from HR. But the world didn’t end. My old boss didn’t send an apology or even a passive-aggressive emoji. Just hot red radish silencio ad absurdum. For a while.

And then something weird happened.

I started sleeping again. My shoulders unclenched for the first time in six years. One day I laughed. Can you / I believe it? Like really laughed. And it was not a coping mechanism sliding into an entropic spat of sob sobs.

It turns out walking away from a place that gaslights you into thinking you were the problem can be the best career move you have ever made.

I’m still broke and scared and still always figuring it out. But at least now when I cry, it’s not because I’m being slowly turned into spirals of flesh-coloured chaff in the old pencil grinder gig 'conomy, know what I mean?

Anyways, freedom’s weird. I think I want to hesitatingly and forcefully recommend it.

“So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t.” — Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger

THIS

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