No frankness or juicy details.

It has been about 6 months since I left: “Miserable Energy and Gaslighting.”

As happy as I am with my new career - my last job, I am sad to say, haunts me sometimes. I have enabled this haunting. I have argued with its pesky ghosts (sour memories). I have allowed my anger to fester. I mourn the years, energy, and caring that was sucked out of me - although maybe not for nothing as I did help some people there. Let me not forget that, as I will artfully sum up with “that career was healthcare adjacent, duh.”

It is easier to throw devil eye beams at an outside entity than to look at myself clear eyed and say: “Look what you allowed for yourself. Look how you assigned value to productivity, people-pleasing, and compromised your health. Look at your track record of sublimation. Look at how you put yourself last - again, again, and again.” I “woke up” too late - allowed far too much damage to myself to occur - but yes, I ultimately did The Brave Thing by leaving.

(I’m not going to go into frank juicy details about what happened there. And honestly, the job wasn’t all bad the entire time and I worked with many wonderful people - who were not the job.)

I am not angry at myself for once, nor am I ashamed. I see myself for the benevolent and abundantly caring and talented woman that I am. I have integrity. It has remained tethered to my bone marrow despite all attempts to chisel it out of me. And it didn’t begin with “the job’s” attempts, not even close - I mean the sort of chiseling that comes with a strange life of extremes.

That era is all gone. When I get angry at it, I am propping up a corpse. The rest of my life is happening now. I am alive and on fire.