Is It Bailing, or Is It Self-Preservation?

One year out of corporate, eight journals full of contemplation, and the mindset shifts that brought me back to myself

8 journals and 5 pens. Journal carnage from the last 12 months.

Happy anniversary to me! A year ago today was my last day in corporate.

In the last year, I’ve filled seven journals, and an eighth is well underway. I wrote at least five pens dry. Contrast this with my previous years’ two-journal max. I guess I had a lot to say to myself in the last 12 months.

As this anniversary approached, I started reading back through the year, beginning in September 2025, right around the breakdown that led me to quit.

It was painful. I felt a deep sadness for the woman who wrote those entries. She was desperate to please others. She was angry about where her ambition had landed her, and she aimed that anger at a roster of characters, past and present. Her self-worth deteriorated with each day she stayed in a role that didn’t square with the passions and values she knew were hers.

I wanted to comfort her after every story of waking up screaming from near-daily nightmares. Her nighttime dreams replayed her waking life: suffocation, destruction, desire for affection, frantic and chronic lateness, mutation, being submerged in ghastly, unsanitary conditions.

She had been handed a map to “the ideal life” and followed it dutifully, dropping her inner compass along the way, deep into the woods. She was doing her best to navigate. In reality, she was dangerously far from safety.

Here are some snippets from my journals:

“I am in the unfathomable and inglorious messy middle between what was — marriage, Seattle, lucrative career, fitness and health, community and friendships nearby — and whatever will be next.

I am giving myself one year of freedom. … No pets, no husband, no job, no girlfriend, no uterus, no home, no plan. And I’m full of everything else - hope, curiosity, audacity, authenticity, and revival. I’m 21 again in spirit, but I have the learnings, strength, reality, and fuck ’em of a 49-year-old. It’s not a second chance. It’s my first chance at ‘right now.’

Now that I don’t have any large forces demanding things from me, the only impetus to act on is my free will, which I don’t have a lot of experience listening to. I feel like a puppet master has been at the top, conducting me for years, and now they’ve left me to unravel.”

Around December, the clouds started to lift. When I went to sleep, I dreamt of impossible leaps, far greater than anyone could make safely, knowing I’d made them before and it hadn’t ended well. But in these dreams, people were watching, and I chose an easier course. Analyzing those dreams, I wrote: “Is that bailing, or is that self-preservation?” Eureka!

Things got better from there.

Looking back, I can name the mindset shifts that put my true self at the center of my life. People-pleasing and financial success now get negotiated around my passions, values, and talents - instead of the other way around.

What Changed This Year

I traded an ingrained definition of success for my own barometers: energy and joy. To retrain my inner compass, I built a Lovable app called Fill My Cup. Every day, I logged how I spent my time and whether each activity and person filled me up or drained me. Every week, I got a report with “Do More of This” on one side and “Do Less of This” on the other. I planned around the first list. Where I couldn’t eliminate the second, I reframed it. For example, if a conversation with a loved one drained me, and I had no intention of cutting them out of my life, I reframed our interactions around gratitude and empathy instead of annoyance.

I abandoned external validation for my own measures of success. Title and salary used to be my success metrics. Now I measure:

• Energy and joy

• Admiration for the people I surround myself with

• Alignment of my work with my talents and passions

• Positive impact on my values

I’ll be honest: the promotions and raises I never got still sting. But the more time I spend outside the corporate world, the clearer it is that most people see a title as a measure of political savvy, not craft. I’m now more proud than ashamed of the reasons I never became a VP:

• I spoke truth to power.

• I prioritized my team’s effectiveness and my customers’ happiness over the bottom line.

• I acted, foremost, with personal integrity.

• I always gave my best effort.

From my journals:

“I feel like my entire career has been for other people. Thank God I got paid well for it. And does that make it all worth it? I wasn’t wrong to follow the money, but doing so contributed to my dis-ease with everything in my life and clouded my judgment about what I truly needed for myself.”

“My drive is to prove how great I am. Yet, the person whose praise I want, I will never, ever receive. The dissonance between these two things have driven me to this suffocating place - rolling around in the most violent tidal wave. This torture is my motivation. Self-masochism. Mutilating, yet comforting.”

On the day I gave notice, I wrote:

“Even as [my boss] asked me to forget my company and everyone there, and just tell him what I need, I didn’t know. I couldn’t say. I lost all memory of what it felt like to want something for myself. I just wanted to be left alone.”

Today, I know I’m okay. The ocean is pretty, not a tidal wave trying to kill me. I am who I am, and who I am has unique intelligence and talent. I no longer need to make someone love me. They will or they won’t, and it isn’t my job to spend my precious energy changing someone’s heart. They will find their way, and so will I.

I traded “do hard things” for “let it come to you.” I still love doing hard things. So much. Both mantras can be true. The difference now is that when I’m chasing something and it feels forced, I hand the universe the reins instead of doubling down on my type-A playbook of goals, strategy and checklists. I used to shy away from the word faith because it felt too religious. Now I trust that my path is already written, and that walking it requires me to act, constantly, as my true self. “Letting it come to you” isn’t sitting back and waiting for magic. It’s showing up as yourself and trusting the timing.

That trust gets tested. My bank account goes into the red every month. I have faith I’m not headed for ruin, because financial management is one of my talents. As long as I act with authenticity and integrity, there is no version of this where I go broke by my own doing.

I redefined productivity. Quiet time is every bit as productive as task time. The forced 9-to-5 is not built for creative work. Some of the most lucrative creative ideas never come to fruition because they’re never given room to tangle, breathe, stretch and grow. Meditating, wandering, making bad art and writing unrealistic business plans are as productive as revenue-driving work. That empty space is where I hand the universe the reins. I am and always will be action-oriented and goal-minded, so I make peace with “unproductive” time by treating it as movement driven by curiosity instead of fear.

I stopped investing my talents in other people’s dreams and started investing in my own. Art Camp (the business, not just the play dates with my aunt) started forming ages ago. Early in my sabbatical, I wrote at length about wanting to create with a co-creator and a community, and about knowing I thrive as The Producer, not The Artist. My business skills are a superpower in the arts, not a betrayal of them.

More insights from my journals:

“I think I’ve always known that my forte is in something in the arts, but not being The Artist. Something in the business or production of it all.”

“I feel an energy, a certainty, that I am meant to be at the intersection of art and science, that I am meant to be the Producer more than the Creator.”

This is likely what led me to product leadership. I wasn’t the engineer building the product, the salesperson selling it, or the marketer crafting the persona. Product is where art and science meet in the technology business.

The next role I’m growing into is being my own boss.

Earlier this year, I worked on a creative project that seemed like the ideal expression of me as a Producer. It checked every box: passions, values, talents. But I wasn’t the boss. My ideas had to clear someone else’s bar before they could happen, and the frustration was far too familiar. It mirrored every great product idea from my career that never saw daylight because of someone else’s vision, goals or ego. When I finally convinced my partner to execute my idea, it succeeded on every measure. I was elated. I was also pissed at myself. How many times would I give my best ideas and instincts away before I used them to build my own vision?

That question to myself was a turning point.

A short while later, I had the chance to angel-invest in a company and founder that excited me. Few angel investments ever pay off, but I had a strong feeling this one would net something for my future self. I was one email away from investing. My vision for Art Camp was coming together, but it still felt fuzzy and far away. So I stopped and asked myself: What if I spent this $5,000 on my own dream instead of someone else’s? Do I believe in myself as much as I believe in them?

That question stopped me cold.

I took the dare. I kept the $5,000 and invested it in Art Camp.

Becoming What I Already Am

This post is not a declaration that I’ve figured it all out. It’s a celebration of how far I’ve come.

The stories from a year ago feel like a dream now. What strikes me most is that I’ve always known my passions, my values and my talents. They’ve barely changed since I was a little girl. They are my true essence. What drove me into the exhaustion and desperation of this time last year was the effort I spent doubting them and “fixing” them to fit “the ideal life.” That was the demon. I never let my passions, values and talents sit at the center of my decisions. I put people-pleasing, financial success and the ideal-life roadmap there instead, and I saw everything else through self-doubt.

I can describe my perfect life clearly. And all year, I’ve been saying that I feel uneasy because I’m not tethered to anything. So why am I not simply living that ideal life? It turns out I am tethered: to my family. I live in a city instead of the mountains. I have to seek out movement in nature instead of waking up inside Planet Earth’s “best of” cycling and mountain destinations. I’ve made peace with the fact that this part of my ideal life doesn’t need to happen right now. I’m giving the universe the reins on this one. It’ll come to me when the time is right.

This weekend, with Halloween’s spooks and spirits for company, I’ll celebrate turning one: one year of choosing myself, and my first chance at “right now.”

Live with Love. Be Unexpected. 😘