Why I left my 9-5 for good

Struggling, simplifying, and recentering.

For those of you who I confided in over the last several months, the title of this piece will not come as a surprise to you. Thank you for being there for me! For everyone else, the title means what it says: I left my job (again!) and this time I do not plan on getting another one.

There are about a dozen potential essays in here, but I lived them in one go and I couldn’t figure out a way to separate them. I’m writing this for the people who felt that things used to be easy and fun and then they started being hard and not fun. I spent months years racking my brain trying to figure out what stopped working and why. I identified a laundry list of themes, but ultimately this became a process of self-discovery and acceptance more than solving and restoring my world to its previous state.

When my professional support systems evaporated and a pandemic moved the world online, my mental health fell off a cliff, eventually leading me to discover I have autism. Today, I'm leaving the corporate world to start a small business that aligns with who I truly am. My brain operates differently, and while my needs may seem nuanced or complex to others, they are valid. When our institutions do not provide fellow-feeling towards our peers, the world becomes a dark and isolating place. This void is where I have lived for the last five years. I have turned inwards and built a rich inner world and a loving home with my partner, yet I miss believing in systems and feeling a part of society.

What Stopped Working

Keep your head down, befriend the people around you, and focus on your technical work. This was the playbook I used from my school years through the first half dozen years of my working life. I can’t really take credit for this; I inherited this playbook from my parents and it worked well for all of us. In fact, my success and comfort so precisely matched what I had always envisioned for my adult life, that I began to take more risks and act on my ambition. I moved to the city and followed my passion. I brought people together. I was fortunate to find a job which let me focus on my technical work, befriend the people around me, and start to poke my head up a bit. The world was so much more exciting and I was shaping it!

It’s difficult to shape the world as a lowly technical worker, so I started climbing the management ladder. I won some friends and we were influencing some people! Sure, I was doing all my work with only one or two people, but I was respected by the rest even if I didn’t understand why. My ultra-supportive manager helped me be recognized as a “mid-career leader” in our city, even though I was only 28. It was my first recognition outside of technical circles and there were surely more to come. I went to the first couple gatherings of the mid-career leaders and didn't connect with anyone. Days later, my manager, who had a penchant for arguing with superiors, was let go by our organization. Suddenly, I found myself overextended. In retrospect, this was the first time I saw the signs of autistic burnout. I was still respected within my organization and even advanced a bit more in the rat race. Yet I would walk back to my desk with a vacant stare, plug in my computer, and stare out the window until it was time to go home. My head was no longer down, I had replaced peers with mildly-political allies, and I couldn’t focus on my technical work.

Had I known at this point I was autistic or recognized how much my traditional supports had fallen away, this chapter may have been shorter. Instead, I job hopped to a more intense work environment for a raise and a management position. I don’t regret this per se, but it’s remarkable how much my decision making has changed since then. I struggled through this role for barely over a year until I could not take it anymore. This era gave me my first depressive episodes and my first large-scale feelings of catatonia. Fortunately, this experience was traumatic enough (in the professional sense), that I knew something needed to change. I quit without another job lined up and took several months off. I didn’t really know where to turn, but the time off gave me a chance to figure it out.

The Turning Point

Rather than a single turning point, I categorize much of the last 3 years as a series of small turning points which all built towards today. I was fortunate to discover a public service fellowship a few months into my unemployment. Even after being unable to sit in a chair during my last management role due to anxiety and catatonia, I was still holding onto my goal to be a leader in my industry and knew that would likely involve a large public service component.

Refreshingly, I felt welcomed by the staff immediately. They seemed happy I was there! As a volunteer, I ended up working roughly 11am-4pm four days a week and spending the mornings reading and taking walks outside. Crucially, I was back in a technical role. A few weeks into this experience, I had a breakthrough where my brain felt the best it had after a work day in many years. All I had done that day was read a book and make meaningful progress on a technical assignment for my team. I had rediscovered a critical part of my playbook! Having spent so many years believing that rising through management was the only way to have an impact and properly honor my ambition and abilities, I had gotten away from what it meant to feel good while doing work.

It’s fascinating and frustrating that up to this point I had still not considered autism as a possibility. I left two jobs in 13 months and chalked it up to anxiety and not finding the right people, which was only a small part of the story. Building on my fellowship experience, I found a technical role in a public agency. This felt like the end of the story: I had overextended myself through management and fast-paced environments, I simply needed to reset as a technical worker and contribute towards something I cared about. Little did I know, I would have more bad days as an office worker than good still ahead.

The public sector was exactly what I expected: there was no pressure to work past 5pm, but the culture, or lack of culture, was suffocating. The shift to virtual meetings added to this difficulty. I could no longer rely on informal, 1:1 chats before or after meetings, which had been a lifeline for navigating group dynamics. Without these small moments, I felt more disconnected than ever. I knew a few people when I joined and was hopeful they would become my people, that together we could build cool things despite the prevailing culture. What I didn’t realize was that their heads-up approach was a departure from my original playbook. I quickly found myself frozen between my ideal technical work and their unspoken expectations. It wasn’t just about speed—these individuals communicated as if I should naturally be comfortable speaking with people I didn’t know, without acknowledging my hesitations or feeble attempts to set boundaries. I spent days totally frozen at my desk, a new experience to add to my growing catalog of mental health struggles. That this was occuring in an otherwise slow-paced environment made this the second turning point. When given an option to work at a slow pace or a fast pace, I aligned myself with the people working at a fast pace and hated it. I didn’t yet know the term “freeze response,” but I believe this was what I was experiencing.

Around this same time, my partner recommended we watch a documentary about a person who was diagnosed with Asperger’s in their 40s. My reaction after watching this was, “Maybe?” There honestly wasn’t that much overlap, but I was bored, frozen, and desperate, so I did what we all do: began taking online quizzes. If I was autistic, it seemed like I must be right on the edge, which made me feel dramatic for even considering it. After months of uncertainty, I discovered Cynthia Kim’s book I Think I Might Be Autistic and browsing the r/Aspergers sub on Reddit. These contained voices of those who have always felt on the outside of groups yet seemed to understand group dynamics better than the people on the inside. With confidence that I wasn’t being dramatic, I took an all-day neuropsychological exam which confirmed my autism diagnosis.

Upon receiving this news, I experienced a mix of relief and confusion. It felt amazing to have an explanation for why I had felt outside of groups my entire life, why society perceived me as quiet when this isn’t how I saw myself. My therapist helped me begin to set boundaries in my professional and social lives. It’s interesting how long I stayed in a work environment that was awful for my brain because I could go home at 4:30pm (yes, I moved the time up from 5pm). I had not yet considered that “work” could look any better for my well being than this culturally acceptable going-home time.

The final turning point truly could only occur in the public sector. After making a case that our team members deserved to be treated with respect multiple times and each time being told I was the problem, I decided to leave my team. I stopped going to the meetings, but otherwise kept going to the office. In the private sector, someone would have either been let go or immediately reassigned. In my case, people responded to my leaving in a supportive way and still the process of landing on a new team took nearly six months. This period of time was filled with cognitive dissonance: I dove deep into a technical project which kept me engaged and learning for its own sake, yet it was depressing to walk into a large building each day, have no one look at me in the halls, and also know that no one even cared if I was on a team.

Earlier this year, I was eventually assigned to a new team. I was hopeful at first: the manager was supportive and the team was reasonably technical, but ultimately it was too little too late. This environment may have worked when I was 18 and thought being quiet was my only option, but at 33, after building large projects and using my full creative energy, this team wasn’t going to cut it. They “included” me, but in a bureaucratic, transactional way. We were hemmed in by the norms and processes of a larger organization designed to maintain the status quo. Most people developed a light cynicism to cope, but for me, it turned into a deep disbelief in the entire system. In meetings, I’d give a brief update after 25 minutes of silence, only to be referred to another team with no professional chemistry. This made me want to scream! I came to abhor these calls. I often took sick time after them, or even took the day off beforehand. When I did go to the office, I stopped doing any work, knowing if I did I’d be blocked by more bureaucracy. I set a mental six-month timer to re-evaluate my well-being in this job.

I had craved belonging in a team and now that I was in one, it was somehow worse than not being on one. I felt trapped by my own conflicting desires and needs. Could I start applying for jobs and find one with a slightly better culture than my public sector team? Of course! But that bumped up against other contradictions: I still wanted to go home at 4:30 to rest and recover, I had reached autistic burnout at 2 previous private sector jobs without the proper support, I wanted to work on something meaningful to me, and it all just felt like a crapshoot.

Realizing that I was mentally becoming my own jailer, I stepped back and asked what was really important to me and what my needs were. This time, I no longer meant my needs as a 20-something ambitious person. I would prioritize my needs as a 33-year-old autistic person with a lot left in the tank, assuming I was given the keys to control my own energy and outcomes.

Minding My Own Business

I never set out to start my own business. I can trace a through-line of random entrepreneurial pursuits throughout my life, but they were not monetary. As teenagers, my friend and I started a club for people who jumped off curbs (yes, we lived in the suburbs). I made a free website and it briefly became the talk of our school, even though we rarely jumped off curbs. I started two small meetups in my 20s and met a good amount of people through them. They were fun, I got to be silly, and I felt respected for bringing people together. I enjoyed creating things that other people wouldn’t think of, things which were inherently ridiculous. Coming from a financially conservative family of technical people, I viewed these pursuits as side flings. Professionally, I minimized the importance of creative pursuits while finding myself frustrated whenever my environment didn’t support my creativity. It took 5 years of professional isolation, several years of therapy, and significant inner work to bring some of these needs fully to the surface.

A few ideas came together during 2023 and 2024: a desire to be of service to others, a meticulous budgeting practice, and my autism diagnosis. Oh, and a growing need to take care of my brain. Feeling catatonic most days at work gave me a lot of empathy for others, but it was no way to live. A few people in my life recommended medication to essentially snap me out of staring at my computer and feel less anxious about the team meetings which wrecked me. I have been on Cymbalta for a couple of years and while it helped reduce some of my negative thought patterns, it was not a quick-fix. I viewed medication as a band aid. I was proud of the large project I built while teamless and my brain worked great if you removed the systems which ignored my needs. Those systems also happened to pay the bills. Should I be required to add more chemicals into my body just to be able to sit through a 30-minute meeting at work without screaming? I knew that even if I stumbled upon a system, pharmaceutical or not, which allowed me to tolerate those settings, I would be giving up other parts of myself. The parts of myself which made me, me.

Money is a tricky subject to discuss, but I can’t honestly tell this story without articulating some of my thought processes around how I pay my bills. While I have supported myself as an adult, I have been extremely fortunate to finish school with no debt and work almost a decade in well-paying technical roles. I have been able to live with a high savings rate, which has allowed me to save up a significant buffer and do research into the FIRE (financially independent, retire early) movement.

My spreadsheets showed I would need to work until my mid-40s to be financially independent, which sounded great until I found myself in my low 30s and unable to think or, at times, even move at 3 consecutive jobs. With a detailed grasp of my expenses, I knew I was being paid quite a bit more than what I needed to pay my bills, all to sit there and be miserable. There are a few FIRE variants which ask: how can I make less money to improve my life? By letting your pot of investment money sit untouched for decades, you can shift to a lower-stress job to cover your expenses.

I married this question with my research into acts of service. I volunteered a few places but none of them stuck because of my usual difficulty with group dynamics. I eventually stumbled upon being an online tutor for technical people. I began meeting students and professionals during the first half of 2024 and earned some money. I found it rewarding to teach skills I truly enjoyed and, for the most part, people seemed genuinely grateful.

The third thread is why this newsletter exists at all: my autism diagnosis. This validated my difficulty in groups and my near-constant desire to do my own thing. Without this, I likely would have leaned more heavily on medication and applied to another random job while keeping my fingers crossed I would win the friends-at-work lottery. My diagnosis confirmed my needs were different and that the only way to move forward was to honor that. My therapist has repeatedly gone back to these themes: self-expression, self-efficacy, autonomy, and meaning. They encouraged me to keep these top-of-mind, even if that took me outside the confines of a W2 paycheck. That is where I now find myself.

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Friday, September 13th, 2024, was my last day in a 9-5 job. I’m no stranger to quitting jobs, but many other things are still new to me. I opened an LLC and I think I set it up correctly. I have a business plan I believe in, even if the numbers still make me nervous from time-to-time always.

I am building a small business to serve as a vehicle for my creative and technical work and to be in service of others. I will be rolling out my website and a faux press release in this newsletter in the coming months¹. I’m not looking to grow exponentially, be acquired, or go public. My goal is to build a business that supports my creative work and gives me the flexibility to live in alignment with my values. If I can maintain a simple, steady income that allows me to prioritize what matters most, I would be thrilled. More details to come, but for now, I can say it’s been rewarding to shape a business that aligns with my values and expertise.

A loss of professional support, the pandemic, ambition, dehumanizing environments, and my brain’s unique wiring all led me to this point. Though I still miss believing in systems and feeling a part of society, I’ve found a new way forward—one that offers me more autonomy and aligns with my needs. Sure, I have some business infrastructure to build out and a budget to stabilize. But I am accountable only to myself and students who share my values. That’s a helluva silver lining.

I want to close by offering a word of support for anyone who finds themselves at an earlier stage in this journey. Things where you are may not get easier, but you have more options than it may seem at first. I hope you will listen to your brain and body and be what the world needs you to be, as isolating as that may feel at times. You are not alone.

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