The Bottom Is Solid
What the blog post didn't have room for - the harder timeline, the Depression, and the thing that finally moved me.
I published something on the blog this week that I’ve been sitting with for a long time. Years, actually. It began as a draft that never went anywhere, and then it started asking to be finished, and I think I finally understood why.
What I didn’t say in that post - what the blog format didn’t quite have room for - is that the timeline was harder than it looks on the page.
Kathy, my bio-mother, died almost a year before the job situation reached its worst point. So I had the awakening - that cracking open, that sudden clarity about time being finite and my own life being half-lived - and then I went back into a life that hadn’t changed yet. The clarity was real. The circumstances were the same. And Depression was there for all of it.
I want to say that word carefully, because I mean it carefully. Not the word people use when they’re having a bad week. Not a low mood or a rough patch. Clinical Depression - the kind that doesn’t just make things hard but makes the future genuinely unimaginable. The kind where someone can tell you “just quit, nothing is worth your health” and you hear the words and cannot find a single pathway in your mind where that advice applies to your actual life. Not because you’re weak or dramatic or not trying hard enough. Because Depression closes doors that other people can’t see are closed.
I could see how someone else might get out. I genuinely could not see how I would.
So I stayed. I managed seven technicians across several states. I ruined clothes with stress sweat and white-knuckled my way through migraines and kept pushing through, which I now understand is one of the most expensive habits a person can have. 💯
I think I’m stubborn in a particular way - the kind where things have to reach the very bottom before I can get my legs under me. I don’t love that about myself, but I’ve made a kind of peace with it. The bottom, at least, is solid. You can push off from it.
My push-off was not graceful. It was not spiritual.
I found out that a new hire - someone brought in off the street, managing no one, in a position below mine on the org chart - was making more than I was. After seven years of busting my butt. After giving more than most would, over and over.
And something in me just said no.
Not a gentle no. Not a considered no. A no that had been waiting a long time to be said and had finally found something solid enough to stand on.
I didn’t know yet how I was going to leave. I didn’t have a plan or a clear next step. I just knew, with a certainty I hadn’t felt in longer than I could remember, that I was done. And that I would find a way out, no matter what it took.
That was the beginning. Not the death that cracked me open - that came first and planted something. But this, almost a year later, was when the seed finally had enough to push through.
I’m telling you this because if you read the blog post and recognized yourself in it, I want you to know that the awakening and the actual changing are not always the same moment. Sometimes there’s a long, hard stretch in between. Sometimes the crack in the mask happens years before the mask comes off.
And sometimes what finally moves you isn’t beautiful. Sometimes it’s a number on a paycheck. Sometimes it’s something that feels - in some ways - almost too small or too petty to be the thing.
It still counts. It’s still the thing.
The bottom is solid. You can push off from it.