Dive into your creative stream
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.
She learned to carry her softness like armor. Not as weakness, but as proof she made it through.
Georg Wilson (British, 1998) - Spring Usher (2025)
Maybe you still talk about it like it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe you laugh when you tell the story. Maybe you change the details each time, depending on who’s listening. Maybe you say “it was weird” instead of “it was wrong.”
Sometimes, survival looks like contradiction. Like forgetting on purpose. Like trying on different words until one of them feels safe enough to hold.
You don’t owe anyone a neat version of what happened. It was messy. You’re still here. That’s the truth.
If you're considering going public read this.