Title wise of this post, if you recognize this you know a lot about me. If you don’t, I’ll let you know it’s a Toad the Wet Sprocket lyric from one of my favorite songs of theirs. That has no relevance to this post other than to say the title seemed to fit my mood and it’s a lyric that’s often stuck in my head.

So I haven’t posted since April. That seems on track for my record the last two and a half years. I can blame it on a lot of things, but what would be the point of that?

I told Dave the other day that I’m shocked that I haven’t posted sooner than this with the big changes that are happening, have happened, over the last couple of days, but it kind of makes sense. It fits into the part and parcel of my mental health struggles with depression and anxiety getting in the way of a lot of things. It’s not that I don’t necessarily have things to say, it’s that I don’t have the energy to say them. I’m hoping that the changes may make that different.

So these changes I speak of… What’s that all about, right? I feel like most people who read this will already know because the only people that read this are my immediate loved ones. But let’s pretend for a moment that people that don’t know me read this blog. Or let’s even pretend for a moment that it’s only people that do. There’s a lot to be said beyond the facts, right? There is a lot of mental headspace that exists surrounding these changes.

Okay, I’ll stop with the drama of the big reveal. After 19 years I have left my job. No, not my job, but my career, as a hospital medicine administrator. I have for 19 years considered myself a hospitalist and defined myself by that moniker. I have dedicated myself to this field. And I don’t regret it. Despite the fact that I have made the choice to leave, I will still always identify myself as a hospitalist first and an administrator second. When you love something as much as I love hospital medicine it’s hard to describe how difficult a decision like this has been to make.

So why make it? If you follow this blog at all, and its very intermittent posts, you’ll know that my mental state has not been in a good place for a couple of years now. I don’t blame this on work. All I know is that my ability to deal with work has been greatly diminished by the struggles I have had. I have been desperately unhappy, to the point of crying many mornings at the thought of having to go into the office. Days home have been much easier, but it’s been a year since doing all days from home has been an option. But even those have been a struggle on a lot of days. I haven’t lost my love for my career, but I have lost a lot of my resiliency to deal with the challenges and stress of that career. This makes me sad. Losing something you love due to something that may be out of your control is never easy. I have actively tried to work with my mental health professionals to make this better, to make this easier, but have been unsuccessful in that realm.

So many people when faced with this kind of dilemma are just basically fucked. They may not have the capacity to go on, but they have no choice but to do so. Dave’s semi-recent promotion has given me that choice. I say semi-recent because it’s been a bit actually, and I could have made this choice much sooner, but as I mentioned it’s been an almost impossible choice to make. My ability financially and feasibly to make it hasn’t played into my ability to mentally and emotionally make it from a time perspective. But in the end it has tipped my decision.

I have told people that the reason I have made this decision is to be more available to Eli. That’s not actually a lie. It’s a simplification of the truth to be sure, but not an all-out untruth. He just started middle school and the idea of after-school activities is a real thing. But after-school activities are really difficult when you work a 9 to 5 job. I know this because my family worked a 9 to 5 job, and after-school activities were either difficult or impossible for me to participate in. I don’t want that for him. Besides Dave’s promotion, which has made this financially feasible, this has probably been the biggest tipping point in my decision of making this really major choice.

So the combination of my own mental health struggles, and my desire to be there so that he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, have put me at this place where my decision has been to leave my job.

My last day was Friday. This last week has been filled with farewells on literally every day but Thursday. It has been a little bit overwhelming, definitely humbling, and certainly sad. It’s made me realize that beyond my love of this specialty, I have made an impact on others’ lives. Who can ask for more than that in the work they do?

And now it’s Sunday, Monday really as I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, and it’s the first one of those where I don’t have to get up in the morning and go to work. It’s the first Sunday where I haven’t experienced the “Sundays” that I have experienced for years. Yet it still hasn’t sunk in. There’s a pile of boxes full of stuff from my office. On top of that is a pile of gifts and balloons as going away presents. I sit here as I write this and see them, but it still doesn’t register. I honestly think it’s going to take a couple of weeks before it does.

So that’s all the practical stuff. It’s the story of the why, it’s the story of the how, but what does it really all mean about the why? I come back to the title. One part just needs the quiet. For at least a little bit, I just need the quiet to find myself again, to center myself, to learn to live a life that isn’t dominated by depression and anxiety.

So this is a really long post. And I feel like it’s time to wrap it up. If you’ve stuck in this long… I appreciate you. ❤️