The Dawson's Creek theme song played in my head the day I handed in my notice. Completely uninvited. I hadn't thought about that show in fifteen years and suddenly there it was, on loop, on a Tuesday morning in a corporate building.
I don't wanna wait for our lives to be over.
I have had a good job. Genuinely good. Stable, well-paid, respected. The kind people mean when they say "you should be grateful," and they're not wrong.
I was grateful. But somewhere between the 200th meeting and the 300th meeting-about-a-meeting (I am making things up), gratitude had quietly turned into complacency.
And then complacency had quietly become my personality.
That's the part that scared me.
The math of the middle years
I have spent a good amount of time wondering about the next steps. My next move.
Here's the thing about your thirties nobody warns you about: you spend your twenties figuring out what you want, and then suddenly you're supposed to be doing it. If you're not, if you're still waiting, you start convincing yourself: soon.
I ran the numbers. Not financial ones. Psychological ones. How many more years of waiting before the "until" never actually comes? Waiting until I'm senior enough. Waiting until I've saved enough. Waiting until the moment is right.
Meanwhile, my parents are getting older, and that is somehow scary, too.
The right moment. That's the biggest lie I told myself. It is always, structurally, the wrong moment. There is always a reason to wait. And I have a very large brain that is extremely talented at finding them.
What I actually did
I didn't dramatically quit and move to Bali. I still had rent and a coffee habit that's genuinely out of control.
I spent about six months building the off-ramp properly. Documenting everything. Having the honest conversations. Figuring out what I actually wanted next, not just what I wanted to escape from. That part matters. "I want to leave this" and "I know where I'm going" are two very different things and you really need both.
But I did leave. And the version of me that stayed would have been fine. Comfortable. Slowly, quietly fine.
That's kind of the saddest version of the story, isn't it.
This version gets to find out what happens next. Stay tuned.