I used to think I left my job. But that’s not really what happened. What I left was who I had to be to keep it. And that is a completely different thing.
There’s a moment in my work life that I think about a lot.
I was an OR and PACU nurse for many decades, and in my memory I’m standing outside a patient’s curtain, something true burning in my throat; something that needed to be said. And I swallowed it. Like I’d done a thousand times before.
Mr. Abernathy (not a real patient name) was on a ventilator I had never operated. Never even seen up close. He was unconscious, completely dependent on that machine to keep him breathing, and dependent on me to know what I was doing. When I told the charge nurse I hadn’t been trained on it, she told me my RN license would cover it. The eye roll said the rest. The message was clear: say it again and your job is at risk.
So I walked to Mr. Abernathy with the truth burning in my throat, googled the make and model of his ventilator, and kept the rapid response code ready. They’d cut the respiratory therapist’s hours. I didn’t know if one was even in the building.
Mr. Abernathy survived my shift. He died two days later.
Swallowing the truth was a near-daily occurrence for me. Not always about life and death, sometimes it was just staying silent about a bullying coworker, or what happened in the operating room when certain surgeons were on. The specifics changed. The silence didn’t.
I watched other nurses, some brittle and bitter, some seeming to love the work like I once had. Was I the only one bursting to tell the truth in this corporate maze where we were told what to say, how to act, and when to smile?
The work itself was hard enough, long shifts with not enough people, required to go faster and faster with less resources. My body and mind were exhausted at that point, but that didn’t bother me half as much as the required lying I did everyday. Ok, I wasn’t actually lying in most cases but you know what I mean.
When you know what’s right and you are not allowed to do it, or even say it, it takes a toll on you. Year after year of suppressing the truth.
But that silence didn’t start at work. It started when I was nineteen, alone with a newborn, making a promise in the dark: that I would never be irresponsible again. That I would be solid. Dependable. And safe for him. I went through nursing school when my son was a toddler. I showed up and kept going. I kept the promise.
For decades.
Until keeping it was killing me.
I didn’t know it then, but what I had built to survive had become a cage. And the most painful part was that I had built it myself, bar by bar, with my own two hands.
What made all this unfixable was that, in my case, a lot of it was unconscious. I wouldn’t let myself quit the work because everyone needed a job and I had bills to pay. But, it wasn’t really the mortgage. It wasn’t really the health insurance. It wasn’t even the fear of the unknown.
It was that the responsible nurse, the dependable one, the woman who showed up no matter what, she was the only version of me I trusted. The only version I believed was worth anything. To anyone. Including myself.
Leaving her felt like offing myself. Like if I walked away from that identity, there would be nothing underneath worth keeping. And I’d be ashamed and worthless.
So I stayed. Not because I couldn’t see the cage. But because I couldn’t yet imagine that there was a self worth meeting on the other side of it.
Finally, when I was laid off and looking for a new soul sucking job, I finally got clear about what I was doing. Why I was living in this miserable dark hole of silence after all those years. I don’t know why I was finally able to face it. Maybe because I was so near the end of my rope that I had nothing to lose.
Maybe you know what I mean. Not the nursing specifically, but the vow and the cage. The one you made when life scared you badly enough and you had to survive. To be successful. The one that made sense back then. The one you’re still keeping long after it stopped working for you.
When I made the video a month or so ago, Leaving a Life That No Longer Fits, I heard from so many of you who were or are in the same boat. From many different professions.
Maybe you’re not a nurse. Maybe you’ve never set foot in a hospital. But maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Maybe you built a version of yourself a long time ago: responsible, reliable, the one who holds it all together, and that version served you. It got you through and kept the lights on and the people you loved safe. From the outside it can look like a very successful life.
But somewhere along the way, without even noticing, that version stopped being something you did and became something you were. The only thing you were.
And now the thought of walking away from it, from the job, the role, the identity, whatever it is, it doesn’t just feel scary. It feels like impossible. Like if you’re not that person anymore, who are you? What are you worth? Is there anything else? I know I wouldn’t even let myself consider it for many many years. Years of unhappiness.
So you stay. And you keep swallowing. And every year it costs you more. Until maybe there’s a day you want to just end it all, like I did.
If that’s where you are, I want you to know something.
That feeling of having no where to go, no options but what you’ve been doing, of being in a bad place but feeling helpless to change because you’d lose the only self you’re proud of and trust, is not a character flaw. And it’s certainly not a weakness.
It happens when the success you’ve made of yourself comes from that place of survival, when you did what you needed to do to survive in life, and that success finally becomes a cage, because it’s become your whole identity. And you’re miserable but you can’t leave it.
But that can change. I know because it changed for me.
There is another you beneath all that responsibility and proving and enduring. You’re there. You never left, you just got buried under all those years of doing what you needed to do.
I didn’t figure this out all at once. I got laid off at 57, sat at my kitchen table with my two dogs, and for the first time in decades I let myself want something different. It took time. It took some sitting with discomfort. But I found out there was someone on the other side of that identity worth meeting. She’d been waiting a long time.
That the cage was real, that I built it, and that walking out of it wouldn’t kill me.
I make videos about this because I wished someone had told me sooner. I wish someone had found me in that hospital hallway and told me that the cage was real. That I built it. And that I could walk out of it without dying.
If any of this sounds familiar, stay close. That’s what this channel is about.
If you’re in that place right now where you’re considering a big change, I made something that might help. It’s a workbook that walks you through whether relocating could be part of your next chapter. Not a fantasy planning guide or a ‘best places to live’. A real decision-making tool. The link is below.
