20 Days

I have given notice at the only job I have ever held for more than two years at a stretch.

That sentence is more complicated than it looks. Let me try to explain.

I am not a corporate person. I have never been a corporate person. I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, worked at a spiritual bookshop for eleven years, guided at-risk teenagers through wilderness programs, grew cannabis on ten acres in southern Oregon, and spent most of my adult life quietly certain that the world of performance reviews and quarterly business reviews and Slack channels and three-screen desk setups was a world that belonged to other people. People who were wired differently than me. People who had gone to traditional colleges and learned how offices worked and didn't flinch when someone said words like high-performing culture and running leaner.

But there was always a question underneath that certainty. A quiet one, the kind you don't say out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and then you have to do something about it.

Could I hang?

Could I — the farm girl, the bookshop girl, the girl who never finished a traditional degree, the one who moved every time things got hard, — could I actually show up to something corporate, perform at a high level, and stay?

My work history, I'll admit, looked a lot like my relationship history before Kelly. The Curiosity Shoppe was eleven years, but not consecutively at one company. The wilderness program was five years, but across organizations. Everything else: a year, maybe eighteen months, and then a clean break and a fresh start somewhere new. I was good at beginnings. I was less sure about middles.

Four years ago I was hired at a nationwide vacation rental property management company in a sales role. I did not know then that this job was going to answer the question I had been carrying my whole life.

I want to be honest about what this company gave me, because I think it deserves that honesty even as I count down the days to leaving it.

The pay was the most I have ever earned. Consistently, over time — not a windfall, not a lucky quarter, but a sustained income that crossed a threshold I had spent years visualizing. Literally visualizing — I had worked through John Assaraf's program specifically focused on earning more, sitting with the number, seeing myself there, believing it was possible for someone like me. The most I had ever made before was half what I made there.

There are no coincidences. I was hired right after I finished that program. I am certain of this in the way I am certain of very few things.

The benefits were great. The PTO was great. And — this is the one that I want to linger on, because it mattered more than any of the numbers — I got to work from home.

Every morning I woke up and walked the dogs before the heat set in. Fed them breakfast. Moved their beds into my office. Showered. Sat down at my desk. And the dogs came to work with me. They came outside with me on breaks. They waited by the office door at the end of the day, and when I logged off we had a whole routine — a little dance, a song I made up and sang every single afternoon as we walked out together.

We did it, we're done with work, we did it, yahooie.

I did not have to commute. I did not have to do complicated things to my hair. On the hard days — the flare days, the days when the fatigue was sitting behind my eyes and my wrists were stiff and I needed ten extra minutes and a second application of arnica cream — I could do that. I could manage it. I was home. The dogs were with me. The grace of that is not something I take lightly, especially now that I understand what was quietly developing in my body during all of those years.

And the work itself — I want to say this because I think it is important and I did not always believe it was going to be true. The work itself taught me things I genuinely needed to learn. I learned data. I learned professional relationship building. I learned how to create templates and run monthly calls and facilitate quarterly business reviews and build PowerPoint presentations and manage a book of business that eventually grew to over two hundred listings. I learned things that I, the girl who always thought she wasn't built for this world, had no idea she was capable of learning.

I proved something to myself here. I need to name that plainly before I say anything else.

I stayed. I performed — 106% of goal for my entire time in that sales role. A high-pressure sales role that required me to have the same conversations about the same product every single day with owners who may or may not have been ready to hear it. I wanted desperately out of that role. I wanted the Account Manager position, building real relationships with real owners over time, and I went after it with everything I had.

I got it. And I loved it. And I was good at it.

But the company was changing.

They called it a new iteration, 3.0 — a new vision, a leaner and meaner operational machine. There were over a thousand employees when I started. There are closer to six hundred now. Two major layoffs. And also quiet reductions on random Fridays where you would discover by lunchtime that half the photography team was simply gone — you'd find out because someone's Slack handle had been deactivated. The entire organization restructured. And then restructured again.

I survived both layoffs. I am grateful for that in the way you are grateful for surviving something — which is to say, with some relief and some guilt and a persistent low hum of when is the next one that never entirely went away. It felt like the pandemic layoffs all over again. That particular kind of institutional PTSD that sets in when you understand that your continued employment is never quite as secure as it looks.

Then last August came.

A colleague went on emergency leave and I stepped in without hesitation — I was glad to help, genuinely. What I did not anticipate was what a month of carrying two full books of business in peak summer season would actually cost me. I worked overtime every day. I worked some weekends. I was always behind, always one request away from falling further back. When my colleague returned it took another full month before I was current on just my own accounts.

And then I was burned out. Really burned out. The kind that doesn't lift after a long weekend or even a good vacation. The kind that settles into the bones and sits there.

The RA came full blast through all of this. My body was keeping score, the way bodies do, and the score was not in my favor.

I gave what I could after that. But I'll be honest: I had given up a little. Piece by piece, quietly, in the way that people give up when they feel unsupported and overextended and are counting down to something they cannot yet say out loud.

I have twenty days left.

So far, some of them feel like pure liberation. I am walking away from the pressure. From the constant pull on my time and attention. From the particular exhaustion of performing at a high level inside a system that kept raising the ceiling and never quite acknowledged the cost.

Some of them feel like fear.

I have looked at the remote-work-from-anywhere job sites. The ones designed for people who want to work online from anywhere in the world. I have read through the listings, and I want to tell you what I feel when I read them.

I feel heavy.

So many of them sound exactly like where I've been. High-performing culture. Fast-paced environment. Results-driven team. And something in me — the part that just spent four years proving she could do it — closes like a fist around the word no.

I do not want to go back. I do not want to sit at a desk for eight to ten hours staring at three screens ever again. I do not want the pressure to perform, the quarterly reviews, the book of business, the endless requests, the Monday morning Slack check that tells me who is gone now.

I want freedom. I want autonomy. I want to go outside.

What I am walking toward instead — the blog, Field & Frequency, Kelly's bookkeeping, the online store — none of it is earning yet. That is the honest truth and I am not going to hide it. The uncertainty is real. The fear is real. We are building the plane while flying it, and the ground is further down than it used to feel.

But here is what I know.

I proved the thing I needed to prove. I showed up to the corporate world — the one I was certain was built for other people — and I stayed, and I performed, and I learned things I did not believe I was capable of learning, and I earned more than I had ever earned, and I grew up in ways I did not expect to grow up. I did not always handle every difficult moment with grace. But I got better. Steadily, imperfectly, for four years, I got better.

July 6th would have been my four-year anniversary.

I will be gone by then.

Not because I failed. Not because something ended the way things always used to end. But because I finished what I came to do, and because something more important is waiting, and because I finally — finally — know the difference between running away from something and walking toward it.

We did it. We're done with work.

20 days.