Subtitle: Leaving removes the thing that was deciding your days. It does not decide them.
A leisurely lunch midweek. The menu kind, ten dollars, half a carafe of wine included. Nothing after it, so I stayed. An hour. An hour and a half. Two hours.
Then it’s early afternoon, the wine’s worn off, the kids don’t need collecting for a couple of hours, and I’m just kind of sitting there thinking I could be doing— and not finishing it, because there was nothing specific to finish it with.
The wine was great. The meal was great. I love doing that every once in a while. But I’d got things to do.
This is about a year into Portugal, after the kids started school and the stay-at-home day stopped being a full day.
On Tuesday I put a price on the exit — the floor, the insurance, the tax year, a date on the calendar. All of it worth doing. None of it prepares you for the afternoon.
One long lunch isn’t a problem. One long lunch is the entire point. What got me was once it compounds — once you’ve had several days like that and it compounds, you start to look back and realize there is time that could be better spent.
Between all those things — expanding my network, playing padel, going to the beach, making friends, working on the blog and a subscription community I enjoyed, learning Portuguese, climbing, getting fitter — I still had time. Too much sitting around. It felt a bit antsy.
I want to be careful with “wasted,” because it isn’t the word. I knew I was using it, but not maximizing it. Valuable skills I’d spent seventeen years building, sort of underutilized. Idling. A little letting myself down.
And I needed to recharge. Particularly with young kids, I wanted to be full of energy and focus and understanding, and do the parenting piece well. That became my focus. It just wasn’t necessarily a full time deal once they went to school.
What leaving didn’t solve
I want to concede the obvious objection before it hardens, because it’s fair and I believe it: sometimes the job really is the problem, staying really is the more expensive choice, and every extra month of preparing is a month of the life you were preparing for. I’m not arguing anyone into another year of it.
But leaving does not automatically change the habits the job gave you. You can bring home the guilt about the hours, the low-grade resentment, the reflex to take the first thing that pays. Or you can make thrift into the new job, a full-time occupation with no salary attached.
What the job actually was
I did go back. An opportunity came up.
That’s a strange sentence in a publication about getting free of salaried work. Leaving was supposed to be the end of trading time for money.
The restlessness never pointed me back at a job, though. It pointed at financial literacy — the thing that kept coming back when I asked what the next chapter looked like.
What was worth holding it for
Not everything was murk, and the parts that worked are instructive because none of them were financial.
I made more friends in a few years in Portugal than I had in a long time before it. That sounds like a lifestyle detail, but it was the first thing since school that organized my time around something other than work. Being at pickup. Being the one who was there when something happened at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Those weren’t rewards for having left. They were what gave the reclaimed hours a shape.
And they still didn’t settle it, which took me a long time to understand. The life was good. The restlessness was still there: a set of skills built over seventeen years that were not reaching anybody.
The restlessness never exactly went away. It got legible. What started as I am not putting out enough turned into something I could act on, and it kept coming back to the same place: financial literacy. Not a discovery — a return. It’s been the thing since college, watching people work hard for money and then have no framework for keeping it or aiming it at what they actually wanted.
Part of why we left was to find out what the next chapter was. The break was the search. The restlessness began pointing me back toward an answer I had been carrying for a long time.
So the question I’d put to anyone with a letter half-written isn’t can I afford to leave. Tuesday’s post can answer that one, and the answer is usually more encouraging than people fear. The question is what is already waiting to be given the hours — a person, a project, a skill you can feel yourself getting better at, a room you want to be in at three in the afternoon. If the honest answer is “I don’t know yet, but not this,” that’s real, and it’s also not a plan. It’s a subtraction.
You can spend a lot of a life on subtractions. I know people who have.
The resignation is the only part of this anyone will notice, and the only part that isn’t a decision about how to live. The freedom isn’t the hard part. Deciding what to hold it for is.
Keep reading
Start with Tuesday’s Before You Quit the Job You Hate for what to price first. If you want one number to start from, the free Real Hourly Wage Calculator will tell you what the hours are currently going for, and the Career-Break Planner will bound the leaving.
If what you’re feeling is closer to who am I without this, read The Identity You Didn’t Choose. If it’s closer to who will I even talk to, Where Did Everybody Go? is the one that surprised me most.
Reply and tell me: if the job disappeared on Friday, what’s the first thing you’d give Monday to?
— Ashleigh