Last week, on Thursday, March 12, I put in my notice.
I’m sure I’m about to get a lot of questions about it. Mostly one:
Why?
Why would someone who has been climbing the career ladder quickly suddenly jump off?
Why walk away from a flexible job and a good salary?
The simple answer is: because I can. And because I want to.
At some point, the money matters less. My family and I reached that point. I’ll write more about the financial side in future posts, but the short version is that continuing to climb the career ladder no longer aligned with the life I actually wanted.
The shift started while I was on maternity leave.
I got a call telling me my boss had been promoted and I’d be getting a new manager. Fine, I thought. Returning from maternity leave is already a big transition, but I could handle learning a new manager too.
Except the position never got filled.
At first I was discouraged from applying for it.
“Spend time focusing on your baby,” I was told.
So I didn’t apply.
But I slowly absorbed more and more of the responsibilities anyway.
Six months passed. Still no replacement. I found myself drowning in multiple roles — trying to be both a detailed reviewer and a high-level strategic reviewer at the same time. I was juggling hundreds of compliance deadlines while also working on large department initiatives.
And through all of it, I was trying to protect my staff from burnout while quietly burning out myself.
Eventually, after my daughter turned one, I knew something had to change.
My nervous system was fried. I couldn’t shut my brain off. Most nights I woke up around 3 a.m. running through work tasks in my head. I wasn’t even working outrageous hours, but every minute of the workday felt packed and relentless.
When I returned from maternity leave, I had imagined something very different.
I had these grand plans to work from home a few days a week and snuggle my baby between meetings. I figured I’d pay for full-time daycare anyway but enjoy those slow days together whenever I could.
That never happened.
Her first year passed in a blur, and those slow snuggle days never materialized.
So now I’m reclaiming them.
I want the slow mornings and the boring afternoons.
When someone asks what I did all day, I want to be able to answer honestly:
“We played.”
And I’ll admit it — I’m greedy. I don’t want just a few months of that life.
I want years.
So that’s why I’m stepping off the career treadmill mid-sprint: to focus on my family, to slow down, and to feel like myself again.