There is a peculiar kind of exhaustion that convinces a man he is noble.
I had it.
Eighty hours a week does that to a person. It turns your reflection into a rumor. My family began studying me the way farmers inspect a field after locusts. My sister would squint and say, “You look… gray.” My brother would ask whether I had taken up haunting as a side profession. Even my mother — who comes from the generation that treated sleep as a suspicious hobby — looked at me one afternoon and said, “They can’t treat you that way and expect you to stay.”
Now when a woman of seventy-eight, who believes hard work builds character and calf muscles, tells you to quit, you are no longer working.
You are being farmed.
The company had once taken a chance on me. That is how these things begin. They spot you in the wild and say, “Come, we have Purpose.” Purpose is a handsome word. It arrives wearing suspenders and a confident smile. It shakes your hand firmly. It does not mention it will later be replaced in a quiet hallway meeting.
The leadership changed in what polite society would call a restructuring and what anyone with a pulse would call a coup. New management moved in like a remarried couple redecorating. The old pictures came off the wall. The furniture shifted. And there I stood — the child from the first marriage, holding a participation trophy no one remembered awarding.
No one fired me. That would’ve been neighborly. Instead, I was treated with a certain delicate confusion, as though I had wandered into the wrong wedding reception and everyone was too polite to tell me. Meetings adjusted themselves around me. My ideas developed a habit of maturing only after they had been adopted by someone else.
There had been departures. Quiet ones at first. Then noticeable ones. Then the sort that make you open LinkedIn before you’ve finished your coffee. The exodus was not dramatic. It was atmospheric. Like birds changing direction mid-sky.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, I began running an experiment I did not know I was running:
Could I remain myself inside a system that prefers versions?
Fear, it turns out, is an efficient sculptor.
In every organization, I accidentally become the bartender. Colleagues lean in and say, “Let me tell you what’s really going on.” They confess exhaustion. They confess resentment. They type in private chats during meetings, “I hate it here.”
And then — with admirable athleticism — they unmute first for the celebration Zoom.
The same hands that typed revolt applaud the speech. The same mouths that cursed the villain beam when he says, “We are a family.”
It is less a workplace and more a costume department.
I do not say this from a throne. I attended the meetings. I nodded at the myths. I learned the choreography. I am simply not very good at splitting myself into market-ready versions.
I come from a world where being the same person in every room is called integrity. In this one, it is called naïve.
I knew the game.
I saw the way public applause operates differently from private approval. A post will gather a modest handful of visible endorsements, polite and measured. Meanwhile, my inbox fills with messages that arrive like whispers through a keyhole: I loved what you wrote. I feel it too. Just… not out loud.
Courage, it seems, has a visibility setting.
Now, I could resent this. I could call it cowardice. But that would require me to pretend I did not consider doing the same.
I fully intended to play.
I told myself I would master the mask. I would sand my edges smoother. I would nod with greater precision. I would compliment upward and critique sideways. I would become fluent in the dialect of strategic enthusiasm.
Fake pays the bills. That is not bitterness. That is bookkeeping.
And so the fault, if we are assigning it, is mine.
No one forced my silence. No one confiscated my backbone. I adjusted willingly. I improved, even. That is the part that unsettled me most.
When you begin succeeding at something you privately disdain, you are in dangerous territory.
Somewhere between the applause and the private chat, something quieter began to erode.
Not my title.
Myself.
Boldness used to be my native language. I would say the thing in the room that needed saying. I would build before being fully approved. I would volunteer for the hard problem because it seemed interesting, not advantageous.
Over time, that part of me became negotiable.
You do not lose yourself all at once. You lose yourself the way paint fades — evenly, politely — until someone shows you an old photograph and you realize the color used to be brighter.
I became careful. Then quieter. Then tired in places that sleep does not repair.
In the mirror each morning — razor in hand, fluorescent lighting unkind — there stood a man I could tolerate professionally but not admire privately.
Adjustment, repeated often enough, becomes identity.
And children notice identity shifts the way animals notice weather. They do not file complaints. They simply feel the storm.
Around this time, the man who disliked me most vanished.
Let us call him The Admiral, because he navigated exclusively by his own reflection.
The Admiral possessed that rare corporate talent: supreme confidence paired with fragile insulation. He could lecture for hours on vision and alignment — provided no one asked for footnotes. The moment leadership questioned his brilliance, he evaporated. One day he was holding court. The next, rumor had him shipped overseas like surplus ambition.
No farewell tour. No reflective post. Just gone.
What he left behind was not a villain-shaped hole.
It was a system-shaped one.
There were origin stories. Every leader had one, each delivered with the identical cadence of a man who had recently completed a public speaking seminar titled How to Inspire Without Actually Revealing Anything. “When I was young…” they would begin. And you could feel the room brace.
The stories were polished. Symmetrical. Suspiciously moral. They sounded less like memory and more like compliance training for the soul. Listening to them was as uncomfortable as hearing your parents describe the night they conceived you — earnest, unnecessary, and entirely too intimate for the setting.
Meanwhile, beneath the mythology, a quieter truth hummed: many of us did not quite know why we were there. Some suspected it was because we were moldable. Underqualified enough to be grateful. Grateful enough to be obedient. Obedient enough to be shaped into someone else’s vision.
I do not leave because they are villains. That would be convenient. Villains make for tidy exits. Real life is less theatrical than that. It simply rewards compliance and calls it professionalism.
So I resign from the version of myself that mistook adaptation for growth.
I resign from the subtle habit of doubting my own read of a room because someone with a title read it differently.
I resign from the exhausting sport of being one man in private chat and another on the record.
If you know, you know.
If you do not, you are likely very comfortable.
For a time, I believed resilience meant endurance. I believed maturity meant silence. I believed professionalism meant strategic amnesia.
I was wrong — not morally wrong, just personally.
The cost was color.
And I find I prefer color.
So I leave gratitude where it belongs. The company once took a chance on me. That remains true. I learned much. I grew in ways I cannot dismiss.
But I also shrank.
And shrinking, when done long enough, begins to resemble wisdom.
It is not.
It is self-abandonment in a sensible jacket.
People rarely remember the speeches. They do not archive the Slack threads. They forget the origin stories almost immediately.
They remember how it felt to be around you.
Whether the air tightened.
Whether it relaxed.
Whether you shrank.
Or stood.
So I resign.
Not in anger.
Not in martyrdom.
Not keeping notes like a defense attorney preparing for trial.
I resign not merely from a role, nor from a paycheck, nor from a calendar date circled in March.
I resign from the smaller version of myself I allowed to take up residence here.
The meetings will continue. The masks will fit their wearers. The applause will sound convincing. The private messages will arrive in whispers.
And I will begin again.
Not as a scorned man.
As a man who ran an experiment, gathered the data, and chose himself.
Which, at this stage of life, feels less like rebellion and more like maintenance.
March 6th will arrive. Payroll will conclude. The building will remain standing.
And somewhere, under kinder light, I expect to meet myself again — in full color.
This investigation is part of The Deductionists—a league of sharp minds dissecting the peculiar. Because if we don’t question it, who will?