The Cost of Independence

What happens if you follow the path to the letter, accomplish the goals, get the degrees, find a high paying job, and check all the boxes just to realize the subtle, growing cost this life came with?

That's what I face these days. A growing confusion, a gentle questioning, and a realization that all these things cost me everything I valued in life. I started to look around at what my world was truly made of.

A clock that didn't stop. Sleep that never seemed to feel like rest. Mornings spent calculating how alert I could get myself to feel before a 9 a.m. meeting. A gradual and growing dependence on the kind of stability that lives in direct deposits and corporate titles. Friendships I let drift because the week already felt too full. A slow disconnection from anything I might have actually wanted, in service of surviving a routine I almost certainly didn't want.

And then a brilliant stop to it all. Seven years into my job, where I had never taken more than a few weeks of PTO to try desperately to feel a bit refreshed, and one morning I woke up locked out of all my work accounts. The to-do list suddenly vanished. The long term projects I was working towards, the stakeholders I was building relationships with, none of it mattered anymore.

Three months later, I reconnected with former coworkers and found them all still inside the same routine- the meetings, the messages, the urgency that always seemed to be about something else once you got there. That was when I realized how far from the outside world I had drifted.

The first day I realized I no longer had a job, I felt shock, a short burst of ecstatic happiness, and growing realization of what it meant in my life. The next days were of a sudden and exhausted wave of relief that there was no more inbox or projects or stakeholders to follow up with. Then came the after. The next few weeks after were not relief. They were stranger than that.

I couldn't sit still. I woke up in the mornings, had a coffee, sat on my computer, sometimes doing things important, and sometimes I sat realizing I was finished with my tasks, something not quite known to me. My inner confidence, the part of me that used to know what she thought before someone asked her, was quieter than it had been the last time I'd checked, which felt like years earlier. I was tired in a way sleep did not fix. I had no patience for anyone's demands. And I had, alongside all of that, the most disorienting feeling I had known in almost a decade: nothing actually had to be done, and I really didn't want to do anything at all.

A silent little crashout and weeks of nothing until I could curate the beautiful sense of boredom that came with a space that needed to be filled.

In the spaciousness of it, a question I had been outrunning began to surface.

Where did the last seven years actually go? The holidays that felt rushed. The PTO that never quite landed. The inability to detach. A decade of urgency, and what did I have to show for it that I could hold in my hand? A resume. A title. A letter of socially-acceptable arrival. Very little of my work could be seen outside the company, the connections didn't do much for me. What had I sacrificed my inner life for?

The salary, when I looked at it honestly, never really existed in my account. A high-cost-of-living city has a way of eating the money before it can become a life. What sense, then, did it make to trade the art of living for money that never quite materialized into a life I could feel?

Underneath all of it, I found what I think I had been avoiding: a sense of grief.

Grief for the woman I had been before productivity became a personality. Grief for the relationships I had given myself to that never gave back. Grief for the small, quiet, almost-free luxuries I had traded for a kind of career growth I am no longer sure was worth what I gave it.

I did not lose those years unknowingly. I felt every choice I made because I "should." Every natural instinct that I overrode. I felt every to-do list I forced myself through. I knew what I was doing every time I reached for the thing that would carry me one more inch toward a finish line I had stopped being able to see. The intrusive thoughts into escaping into the mountains, and signing off wasn't subtle. None of it was subtle. And at some point, I had grown so committed to 'making it through', that I forgot what the objective actually was, or if, in fact, it could ever really be achieved or if truly, at the end of the day, I was trading my life energy for it all that I could not reclaim.

We do not lose ourselves all at once. We override quietly, deliberately, on a Tuesday. We 'get through things' and justify it with yearly vacations, our small chance to escape, or purchasing what we want as a way to show status for all we are giving up along the way.

What I find now, on the other side of that pace, is a quieter and stranger thing.

I still operate from habit. The body still wants to optimize a morning. My mind still scans for the next thing to be productive towards. But underneath the habit, something else is gradually re-appearing. There is a world beneath the noise. There is still a self underneath the role.

And alongside her, the questions I had not let myself ask. What was all of that for? What did I actually achieve? Why did I trade something so deeply mine for a goal that, when I look at it now, was never really mine to begin with?

If the path had ended in a bank account that could buy me back my own time, maybe I could have called it even. If it had ended in a role with enough leverage to shape the direction of something, maybe. But I was still inside the day-to-day after seven years, paying the same steep price for what was beginning to look like very little of my own life.

I had done it correctly, I thought. The degrees, the corporate tenure, the climb. And the part of me that had pushed it all forward could not understand why doing it correctly had cost me so much of what made me human.

I look around my life now, and I have more than I started with all those years ago.

A small brown cat who carries herself like a queen of some northern forest she has yet to explore. A fluffy husky that children and adults regularly mistake for a stuffed animal. An apartment of pretty, functional things, some of which I will keep, most I am realizing I want less of. Mostly, what I want now is less. Fewer things, better made. A smaller life with more room in it. And finally I realized that the stress comes often from having too much rather than not enough. How odd that is.

The things I most want now are the ones I cannot purchase. A garden for the two of them. A place quieter than this city. Conversations that drift into the night about anything but the week and team gossip. The capacity to create something, which has a way of fading in the company of constant productivity. And, more than anything, the freedom to live a life that is actually my own, with the slow understanding that giving it up again will come at a price I am no longer willing to pay.

I will name one more thing.

I think we are beginning to understand, as a culture, that much of the world we are operating inside was designed without women's bodies in mind. The pace, the structures, the assumptions about how a day is supposed to go. Women have entered the workforce in extraordinary numbers, and many of us have done it by quietly overriding our own nature to survive the system we are brought into. Working through cycles. Returning from maternity in a body still in recovery. Carrying the care work and the career and the home, often invisibly, and being asked to perform top level through it all.

I do not have a solution for it nor do I pretend to, but somehow I have the gentlest nudge that accepting the system somehow perpetuates it for the future generations, and hides our needs along the way. We have come a long way, but somehow, if there is a way to show up as ourselves throughout it all and demand to be accepted as that, perhaps we can hold more ground and equality to this system.

At the end of the day, work is meant to provide us the means to live isn't it? Not the other way around.

What I am now directing my energy towards is to understand how a woman reclaims herself in a world focused on constant productivity. What truly makes a life worth the effort we give to it?

I do not know yet. I am beginning here, in writing, because I suspect the answer is closer to a practice than a plan.

This is a first letter. A reflection on what brought me here, and what I am now exploring.

Take your time.

Christine