<p>Between 2019 and 2022, I quit my job three times.</p><p>I know what that sounds like. Unstable. Uncommitted. Maybe even reckless. But each time I walked away, I did it deliberately, with intention, and with a growing understanding of what it truly means to fight for your own life. Not your career - your <em>life</em>.</p><p>If you are sitting somewhere right now, dreading Monday, feeling the walls close in, wondering if you are dramatic for wanting out - this is for you. Not to tell you what to do, but to tell you what I did, what it cost me, and what it gave back.</p><h2 id="68a40d00-0694-462a-acd1-9a1782cb4d37" data-toc-id="68a40d00-0694-462a-acd1-9a1782cb4d37" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Three Times I Quit</h2><p>The first time I left, I had been sitting on a resignation letter for weeks. I was battling suicidal ideation - quiet, relentless, exhausting - and I kept holding on, convincing myself that if the project I had been pushing uphill finally landed, I would feel better. It didn't land. It was cancelled. And the day after, I submitted the letter I had already written.</p><p>The second time was different. I had found new employment and thought a fresh environment would fix things. It didn't - because the problem was not the environment. I began to recognise that there was a deeper misery living inside me, a self-loathing that no external circumstance could resolve. I needed to quit not just the job but the pace, the noise, the demand - everything - so I could relearn how to love myself. So I could stop competing between keeping myself alive and keeping myself employed.</p><p>The third time I quit, I was in a better place emotionally, but I had a deep and clear yearning to figure out what I actually wanted my life to look like long-term. I also felt strongly that I was being guided - by God, by something larger than my own ambition - toward a different path. I needed space to pursue further learning, to remove myself from a particular environment entirely, and to finally commit to a long-term vision for my life without the constant noise of urgent deliverables drowning it out.</p><p>Three different reasons. Three different seasons. All of them mine. All times necessary.</p><h2 id="5d6db2e1-9999-4583-b3a1-d59ff6a83ae7" data-toc-id="5d6db2e1-9999-4583-b3a1-d59ff6a83ae7" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">Before You Quit: What You Need to Sort Out First</h2><h3 id="bc744eb7-7e1f-4d54-805f-496ddbbc0400" data-toc-id="bc744eb7-7e1f-4d54-805f-496ddbbc0400" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">1. Get brutally honest about your reason</h3><p>The single most important thing you can do before you hand in that letter is name your reason - clearly, honestly, and without dressing it up for anyone else's comfort.</p><p>Your reason does not need to be palatable. It does not need to make sense to your family, your colleagues, or even your closest friends. Every time I quit, the reason was uniquely mine. No amount of justifying or explaining it away was going to change what I knew to be true: I could not continue going forward exactly the way things were.</p><p>Quit for your own clean, clear, selfish reasons that are truly yours. Give yourself permission to be selfish here. I am deeply glad I did. When your emotional bandwidth is already at its limit, when you are choosing between surviving and performing, that is not the time to be noble about other people's expectations. That is the time to be ruthless about your own survival.</p><p>And when you make that decision - be ready to walk away fully, even if you never go back. I was fortunate that the door stayed open for me in certain cases, but I never quit <em>expecting</em> to return. I quit because I needed things I could not access from where I stood.</p><h3 id="f4b3f20d-b265-43c8-a46b-37e44c65160e" data-toc-id="f4b3f20d-b265-43c8-a46b-37e44c65160e" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">2. Audit your finances - seriously</h3><p>I am grateful to my 26, 27, and 28-year-old self every single day. That version of me saved systematically, built up capital, and invested in a home I could live in. Because of those decisions, when I needed to quit, I had reserves. I was rent-free. I had something to live on while I figured things out.</p><p>You need to know exactly where you stand financially before you make any move. If you can quit fully, plan for how long your savings can carry you. If you cannot quit immediately - as I couldn't the second time, because my contract required three months' notice or three months' salary paid in lieu, and I was not prepared to pay that - then find a middle path.</p><p>What I did was scale down. I reduced my days of availability. I stopped taking on new work. On the days I was not available, I turned off my phone. I gave my nervous system a chance to breathe. I kept income coming in at a reduced level while protecting enough mental space to begin healing.</p><p>If you can scale down, do it. Formalise it. Put it in writing. Make it real and official so the boundary holds.</p><h3 id="78b32755-13f6-4510-9be2-b7afd321d20d" data-toc-id="78b32755-13f6-4510-9be2-b7afd321d20d" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">3. Tell the people who depend on your work</h3><p>You do not need to explain your soul to anyone at work. You do not need to share that what you are navigating is a mental health crisis, burnout, or a spiritual reckoning. But the people who depend on your output - your team, your manager, your subordinates - do need to know that things are changing.</p><p>Give them enough time to adjust. Tell them your availability is shifting. If you are scaling down, ring-fence those boundaries fiercely. When you say you are unavailable, <em>be</em> unavailable. Do not answer emails. Do not open your laptop. Do not let the boundary flex because someone sends an urgent message. Protect the days you have claimed back.</p><p>On the days you are available, show up properly - cover what you committed to cover. The reliability is not gone; the hours have just changed. People can work with that if you communicate it clearly.</p><h3 id="1f7b1561-dccd-466b-900f-8a98ab5895d6" data-toc-id="1f7b1561-dccd-466b-900f-8a98ab5895d6" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">4. Choose carefully who else gets to know</h3><p>Not everyone deserves access to the story of your decision.</p><p>I had to tell my parents. They had supported me through the first resignation, and I knew they would worry. They did. But here is the thing I had to hold onto: informing them was not the same as consulting them or asking for their permission. Their worry is theirs to carry. You cannot resolve it for them, and you cannot allow it to become the reason you abandon yourself.</p><p>You will feel it when the people you love react with fear or disappointment or confusion. It will sting. Your emotional bandwidth is already depleted - there is no cushion. But consider the alternatives to quitting. Staying and collapsing mid-workday. Staying and watching your health deteriorate past the point of recovery. Staying until the reputation you are trying to protect suffers anyway, because you are too broken to perform. Staying - and losing yourself entirely.</p><p>When you line up those alternatives honestly, quitting stops being the worst option. It becomes the only one that keeps the door to your future open.</p><h2 id="43e9e92c-30ce-4831-8ec4-080eb0351395" data-toc-id="43e9e92c-30ce-4831-8ec4-080eb0351395" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">As You Prepare to Leave</h2><h3 id="9428cbc8-3e1d-4b60-bcd8-7d06492f8620" data-toc-id="9428cbc8-3e1d-4b60-bcd8-7d06492f8620" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">Write a resignation letter that does not burn bridges</h3><p>You are allowed to feel everything you feel. It is valid. But what goes into an official document is a different matter.</p><p>You do not need to lie. I never lied. But I also did not put into writing that I was quitting to save my own life, to step back from a mental abyss I had been standing at for months. What I said was that I needed to attend to important personal matters. That was the truth - the most important personal matter being my survival and healing.</p><p>Find the angle of truth that is honest but not destructive. If you are in an industry you may return to, if there are relationships worth preserving, if you care at all about how you leave - find a framing that does not permanently damage what you are walking away from. The vitriol you feel may be completely justified. But official documents live forever, and so do reputations.</p><h3 id="46659a89-9420-4c2c-93d8-5ae8ea54b7a6" data-toc-id="46659a89-9420-4c2c-93d8-5ae8ea54b7a6" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">Organise your work properly before you go</h3><p>This one matters more than people give it credit for.</p><p>When I was leaving project-based work, I went through everything I had done. I itemised deliverables, updated work plans, documented pending items, identified key stakeholders and what they needed to know, organised folders, and wrote handover notes. I did all of this while also navigating significant internal pain.</p><p>What I noticed was that the act of doing it - shifting from the fog of my own distress into the clear-headed task of organising work I was proud of - was itself a small form of healing. It reminded me that my work had value, even if I felt broken. It separated <em>me</em> from my output in a healthy way.</p><p>Do not leave people stranded. Do not transfer your pain to whoever picks up after you. Leave your work in a state you would want to inherit.</p><h3 id="c75f86e1-6c92-4886-ab1b-220968ae6d4f" data-toc-id="c75f86e1-6c92-4886-ab1b-220968ae6d4f" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">Protect the physical space of your recovery</h3><p>This is perhaps the most overlooked part of quitting: leaving work does not mean the recovery automatically begins. If you go from a draining job into a home environment that makes equal demands on you - a household that needs running, a family that depends entirely on your emotional energy, responsibilities that never pause - you have not actually rested. You have just changed the location of your depletion.</p><p>I was fortunate. I was single, I had my own home, and nothing was competing for my time and space when I needed to heal. I could wake up and simply exist. That was the gift I gave myself, and it was essential.</p><p>If your situation is more complicated - and for many people it is - you need to negotiate. Can your partner carry more for a defined period? Can you hire additional help? Can you be honest with the people in your household about what you need? Maybe your young child comes with you wherever you go, but the other adults in your life can become more self-reliant for a season. Maybe you pay to be somewhere quiet for even a month.</p><p>What you are trying to protect is contiguous, uninterrupted time - days where nobody depends on you for anything. Your nervous system needs that reset desperately. Without it, you have quit the job but not actually begun healing.</p><h2 id="c9c4981e-57a4-4083-b671-205b8afbe9de" data-toc-id="c9c4981e-57a4-4083-b671-205b8afbe9de" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Deeper Truth About All of It</h2><p>Here is what I want you to understand, sitting with all of this: quitting is not giving up. The act of stepping back and systematically reclaiming your time, your energy, your money, your environment - that is not weakness. That is the beginning of healing.</p><p>When you audit your finances, when you draw boundaries around your availability, when you decide who gets to know and who does not, when you choose your words in a resignation letter with intention - you are no longer a victim of what is happening to you. You are making something happen. You are resetting, on purpose.</p><p>The healing, in a very real way, has already started before you have even officially left.</p><p>You have been fighting for everyone and everything around you. You have given your presence, your intelligence, your energy, your best hours. It is not weak to decide that for a season, you are going to fight for yourself. It is not selfish in the shameful way the word is sometimes used. It is the kind of selfishness that keeps you alive, keeps you whole, and ultimately allows you to come back to the world - if and when you choose to - with something real left to give.</p><p>Quit when you need to. Quit with a plan. Quit with as much care as you can manage for those you leave behind. But above all - quit for yourself, and do not apologise for it.</p><p>You deserve to still be here. You deserve to figure out what that means.</p>

Quitting to reclaim yourself is a way of reclaiming your agency. You shift from Victimhood to Hope and Hope allows healing to begin.

Quitting to Live: What Three Resignations Taught Me About Choosing Yourself

Before You Quit: What You Need to Sort Out First

3. Tell the people who depend on your work

4. Choose carefully who else gets to know

Write a resignation letter that does not burn bridges

Organise your work properly before you go

Protect the physical space of your recovery

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Quitting to Live: What Three Resignations Taught Me About Choosing Yourself

Quitting to Live: What Three Resignations Taught Me About Choosing Yourself

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