Me, My Life & Why Part 6

Part 6

Here’s the thing no one tells you about quitting everything:

Nothing happens.

Not-a-thing.

No one shows up with pitchforks.

No alarms go off.

No productivity fairy bursts through the wall yelling, “You’re behind!”

The world just… keeps spinning.

And you?

You’re still in your pj bottoms and a hoodie at 2pm, realising you’ve built your entire identity on calendar reminders and cortisol.

The first morning after I resigned, I woke up at 11:17am.

No alarm. No panic. No meeting to fake energy through.

Just my own body, stretching like it forgot what it was allowed to do.

I wandered to the kitchen. Made toast. With actual butter. Didn’t even burn it, for once.

Ate it slowly. Standing. No phone, no multitasking, no to-do list.

Just me and a plate of bread that didn’t ask me to be impressive, or on time.

It felt illegal.

Deliciously so.

Then I took a nap.

Not a power nap.

A feral, two-hour, blanket-hogging, drool-on-the-pillow kind of nap.

I woke up disoriented and hungry, like I’d just time-travelled through my own nervous system.

I didn’t try to fix it.

I just made more toast.

Day two: same vibe.

Slept late. Napped again. Ate whatever was closest.

I stopped asking myself what I should be doing and started asking what I needed.

Sometimes the answer was “stretch.”

Sometimes “crisps.”

Once it was “re-watch an entire season of a show I’ve seen three times because it’s comforting and has good lighting.” I even watched it while I was in the bath, in the spirit of free will.

And for a moment, a few rare, quiet moments, I felt good.

Not performative-good. Not Instagram-good. Internally good.

Just… like my body and brain weren’t at war with each other.

Which, naturally, made me suspicious.

Because feeling okay when you’ve done nothing “productive” for three days is emotionally illegal under late-stage capitalism.

So the guilt came.

Softly at first.

A whisper in my spine: You should probably be doing something.

Then louder: What are you even contributing?

Then full spiral: This isn’t rest. This is failure in sweatpants.

I paced the flat.

Opened a drawer, closed it.

Thought about updating my CV, then remembered I don’t even know what I want to apply for.

Ate half a cucumber straight from the fridge like it was proof I had my life together.

The guilt didn’t stick, though.

Because as much as my brain tried to pull me back into the grind, my body knew better.

It was tired.

Tired in a way eight hours of sleep never fixed.

Tired from masking, and stretching, and performing okay-ness like it was a job.

So I gave in.

Not to the spiral, to the stillness.

I let the dishes sit.

Let the phone ring.

Let the emails pile up in that little red bubble I no longer have the emotional energy to fear.

And in that letting go, something cracked open.

Not a breakdown.

A breakthrough.

Not the explosive kind.

The slow, quiet unraveling of a life I built entirely around other people’s expectations.

It turns out, underneath all the urgency and noise, I am a person who needs naps.

And long showers. And time alone.

With scented candles.

And unstructured hours filled with nothing more than tea and buttery toast and staring out the window thinking about absolutely nothing.

This wasn’t falling apart.

It was falling back into myself.

No schedules.

No spreadsheets.

Just sleep, snacks, and space to hear my own thoughts without them being filtered through guilt.

Breathing space.

I didn’t quit life.

I just finally stopped micromanaging it.