The Version That Still Answers
The language around leaving is engineered to sound like a decision. Resignation. Transition. Alignment. Words that suggest a clean break executed by a coherent person at a specific moment in time. As if there’s a meeting, internal or otherwise, where a version of you stands up, presents its case, and is formally dismissed. But the actual process feels less like termination and more like erosion. You don’t fire that version of yourself. You just start noticing that you no longer agree with him in the same way you used to. The agreement weakens. Not dramatically. Quietly, like a contract you keep honoring out of habit rather than conviction. And the problem is that he’s been effective. I built a version of myself that made sense in environments where things needed to be handled. Not heroically. Not visibly. Just consistently. If something broke, I fixed it. If someone needed something, I stepped in. If there was pressure, I absorbed more than my share because it seemed inefficient to let...
