just a little further / #27
on writing the same story and calling it strength
Every night, I journal.
I’ve done this for almost five years now, which means the app I use — Day One — surfaces what I wrote on this day in years past.
Most nights it’s mundane: stream of consciousness stuff, things I’d done through the day and what I thought of it.
This month, the app has been showing me entries from the worst of it.
“I really don’t think work is sustainable. I just wanna have more time to do anything else instead 😭😭 but now I gotta do work and it’s 10:43pm.”
I laugh. Then I feel a little sick.
I go for a run to clear my head. Something I’ve been learning to do this year, this whole running thing.
The entries keep coming. Every night, another one from a year ago.
“worked longer than I liked again”
“this corporate job really isn’t serving me”
“I hate that I hate every working minute”
They all say the same thing in slightly different words. Like I was trying to convince myself through repetition.
Like if I journaled about it enough times, something would change.
I scroll back through the week’s worth of entries.
That’s when I see it: I’d been writing this exact same complaint for months.
How did I not see the pattern?
“I didn’t climb this many years to still be churning out wireframes and getting threatened by the client. Why am I feeling like I fucked up?”
I remember that night. I’d worked until 11pm (again), and stayed late because the client needed revisions (again) after a thinly-veiled threat about dropping our entire team because she doesn’t feel like she’s getting what she wanted out of us.
The job — and my years of experience — was supposed to mean something: that I’d earned my way past being hands on, and that all the climbing had been worth it.
But there I was, blue light attacking my eyes from my monitor, rage-making five different options of designs and doing the same work I’d done ten years ago, just with more meetings and responsibilities.
There’s this thing that happens when you’re running too fast: your body knows before your brain does.
Your heart rate spikes uncontrollably. Your breathing gets shallow. Your calves start to feel the burn.
And your brain keeps insisting you’re fine. Just a little further. You can push through this.
But your body’s already made the decision.
Around this time, things kept almost getting better.
I pulled all the strings I could find, for so many coffee chats with so many different people in the company.
A director brings up the possibility of a role opening up.
A potential transfer to a different team in another location.
An in-house project that might actually be interesting.
Then that director got laid off.
Then another round of cuts hit my team.
Then another.
Every “maybe this will improve” turned into watching someone pack up their (virtual) desk while I stayed, somehow grateful and guilty in equal measure.
And still I stayed.
Because: what if the next opportunity actually worked out? What if I left right before things got better? What if I could get a severance package, and stop worrying about money for at least a year?
What if?
(The financial anxiety doesn’t show up explicitly in the entries, but it was there, humming underneath everything.
I had enough; my spreadsheet said so. But knowing you have enough and believing you have enough are two different things.
Every time I thought about leaving, my brain would immediately calculate: what if the market crashes? What if there’s a recession? What if I need more?
The entries from mid-November (with that election result) just say things like “but the market could turn volatile” and “maybe I’ll wait until I get my potential bonus next year”, but here’s what I didn’t write:
I was terrified that if I left, I’d somehow end up with nothing.
Or, at least, that the last few years of working towards being FIRE would be for nought, and I would’ve failed at that, too.)
“I’m so fucking tired”
“I’m so fucking tired doing [this specific client’s] stuff”
“so tired though”
“I know I’m unhappy but damn, I’m unhappy. And I know logically the steps to get myself out of it. But emotionally just… I can’t tear myself away from the status quo. Stuck in this place.”
It felt like I wasn’t even bargaining anymore — just resigned to the fact that stuckness was just what working felt like now.
Stuck felt like:
Opening my laptop every morning with a pit in my stomach, awaiting the ridiculous demands of the client that’d come through overnight
Sitting through meetings where I’d stopped contributing ideas because what was the point, when all we were doing was appeasing the client?
Falling sick every other day, my chest feeling tight and my back protesting the entire way
Watching the clock tick toward midnight, and feeling nothing but relief that I could finally close the laptop, but having to do it all over again the next day
Stuck felt like knowing exactly what I needed to do, and being completely unable to do it.
Like standing at the edge of something and being too afraid to jump, but also too tired to step back.
So I just stood there, every day, and journaling about it.
“I’ve committed to quitting on Friday, so let’s see how that goes.
When Friday came, after three separate conversations with combinations of my manager, HR, and the project lead, I… found myself with something softer: unpaid leave, until the end of the year; a sabbatical to bring myself through.
Somehow, I couldn’t “quit” yet. A leave felt safer, reversible. Like I was just testing something instead of burning it all down.
Three months later, I made it permanent.
Reading these entries now, a year later, I can see what I couldn’t see then:
I wasn’t stuck because I didn’t know what to do. I was stuck because my brain and my body were having two different conversations.
My brain: Just a little longer. Make it to January. Wait for the right time. What if you need more money? What if things get better?
My body: We’re done. We’ve been done for months.
Last week I ran for an hour (and fifteen minutes!). My lungs burned and my legs shook, and still my watch informed me I have the aerobic capacity of someone significantly older than I am.
But here’s the thing: when I needed to stop, I stopped.
A year ago, my brain didn’t know how to do that.
Every night this month, I’ve opened my journal and been confronted with another entry from that version of me who kept documenting her own exhaustion, but couldn’t find a way out.
Some nights I’m fascinated by how long I endured, how many times I wrote the exact same entry without seeing the pattern.
Some nights I’m just sad for her, for how tired she was, and for how stuck she felt.
Tonight, I’ll journal again. Tonight, the app will show me what I wrote on this day last year.
I don’t know what that entry says, yet, but if I had to guess, it’s probably something about being tired. I mean, they all said that, so no spoilers.
But I know: I’m not living that anymore.
I’m learning what it feels like to stop when my body says stop, and to run at a pace I can actually sustain.
That feels like enough.
Other things
Finally watched Kpop Demon Hunters after months of resisting, and now I need to ask why I even tried (the resisting, not the watching): I grew up in fandom and it seems like that’s always going to be a part of my life 🫶
My very first podcast appearance! I haven’t watched it from start to finish, but it was awesome being able to yap about these things that excite me — it’s also kicked off me wanting to use video in better ways for my own content, which has led to some expensive procrastination by way of gear accumulation 😅
Speaking of exciting, I can’t wait to have
’s hard cover of The Pathless Path in my hands; gorgeous, gorgeous art (the print designer in me that paused 20 years ago is so happy), and a book that helped my senses tune to “anything but corporate” right when I needed to hear it.
Until next time,
Jalyn
Inspiring, and hopeful entry! Glad to see you've found a way out of the grind.