Written on July 3rd.
I left my job yesterday. I’m officially out this week. I couldn’t do it anymore. There was no dramatic confrontation or a final email drafted in tears. My boss said he wanted to talk to me on Monday. I knew exactly what he meant by that. After breakfast, he asked if I had a positive or negative mind about that day. I said negative. He listened to my reading of a note I wrote a couple of hours prior, I was shivering and weeping in my bed writing that. I was stressed and hopeless then, not sad.
It’s funny how I don’t show any emotion during stressful events, ever. I could be crying, shivering, shitting my pants minutes prior. Yet I am almost too apathetic during them. Albeit a presentation in front of a class, an uncomfortable confrontation, or my father’s funeral. I am almost too apathetic during them. My nervous system lights up as if my life was at stake yet I am almost too apathetic during them.
Despite its unusual nature, this was my first job. Of course I was feeling a little bit of grief. I showed up, I learned, I adapted and I survived. Meetings, feedbacks and phone calls blurred into one another. I survived and I put forward the fact that I was learning, always.
From the outside, I bet my decision to leave came as a surprise. It came as a surprise to me. Trying to breathe through fabric, my heart rate couldn’t get any lower. Something snapped in me and I managed to gasp for air.
I despise the fact that I ignore my insides until I physically can’t anymore. I don’t express emotion unless I’ve run out of every other option. I hate how my subconscious hides my own feelings and thoughts from me until I hit an absolute limit and eventually my stress manifests physically. There’s a layer of my brain I don’t have access to. Everything stingy and hard to process is stored there like it’s waiting for a data limit warning. Once it’s too full, it leaks into my life without warning.
My boss once told me that my apathy was frightening. If 16-year old me heard that, she would be on cloud nine. She thought evoking fright in people was something that held water. My apathy scares me too. I wasn’t trying to look dramatic when I said I didn’t feel anything after achieving things I had truly worked for. In therapy, I noticed that my own consciousness is a place I fear. It fails me often. In day-to-day life, it leaves me hanging. Of course I managed to ignore all of this while trying to grow and learn from the edge of my desk, pushing myself to make the most of every hour, therefore burning the fuck out of myself.
Being the first hire of someone extremely detail-oriented, who’s built everything themselves from the ground up, inevitably came with a lot of micromanagement. I joined the job with zero experience but a 100% courage, and we couldn’t fully align. The nature of the work made my schedule unpredictable, the startup culture blurred the line between sincereness and professionalism. The space I had to navigate in shrunk, each day.
Every morning, I laid another piece of myself down. Quietly. Efficiently. Then one day, I just didn’t. I realized I had to leave or wait for harsher sentences from my body. The eye twitches, nosebleeds, eczema flare-ups, heart palpitations, cervical spine issues, insomnia, dissociation episodes, hallucinations, chest tightness and shortness of breath from chain-smoking were piling up. There were moments I caught myself thinking: maybe one day my heart will stop, and all of this will finally be over.
In relation to this topic, I also wrote Finding Peace Inside the MRI Machine. You might like it.
