The tab has been open in my brain for about a year and a half.
Not an actual browser tab. A mental tab. The kind that takes up space without loading. I would catch myself thinking about it on commutes, while making dinner, while half-listening to a status call I did not need to be on. I should write something. I should start something. I should figure out what comes next.
I never closed the tab. I also never actually opened it.
Until today.
I’m not going to pretend I know why today is the day. I woke up, had my coffee, sat down at my desk for my first call at eight, and thought very clearly: I am not doing this for the rest of my life.
Not dramatically. Not dramatically at all, actually. It felt more like reading something I’d already known for a while and had been pretending I hadn’t.
I’ve been in corporate for 24 years. Four companies. I’ve been good at it. Not brilliant, but consistently good — the kind of good that earns you a comfortable salary and a title with “Senior” in it and a chair at tables that matter a little bit. I never questioned whether I wanted to do it. I now understand that was a separate question from whether I was good at it. I conflated the two for a very long time.
Last year I got a performance review that said I “meet expectations.” For a year where I thought I’d done everything right. My manager explained that the bar had moved. That meets was the new exceeds. He said this with his camera off, which is the kind of detail I’ve been turning over ever since.
I sat in a parking lot after that call for about half an hour. I was not crying. I was just very still, doing math. Not financial math. The other kind. The kind where you count years and try to figure out what they added up to.
I’m 49. I turn 50 in November. And I have decided — not out loud, not to anyone yet, but in the spreadsheet I renamed “The Plan” — that I will not still be in this job on my 50th birthday. That’s the line. Not “someday.” November.
The problem is I don’t know what comes next.
I have a note on my phone with business ideas. There are nine of them. A candle brand. Two different types of consulting. Something vague about courses. A newsletter. A few things I can’t fully read because I typed them while driving and I am not a careful thumb typist.
None of them feel like THE thing. All of them feel like maybe.
I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about this. I’ve read a lot of articles. I’ve saved things to a folder in Substack that I have never opened. I’ve done research the way I’ve done research my whole career: thoroughly, organized, occasionally color-coded. And I’ve arrived at exactly the same place I started, which is not knowing what I want to do but knowing with new clarity that I’m supposed to want to do something.
That’s where I am. Day one. Not at the beginning of a success story. At the beginning of not knowing.
I’m starting this for two reasons and I want to be honest about both.
The first is that I need someone to hold me accountable and I don’t fully trust myself to be that person. If I write this publicly, I can’t quietly absorb it back into the background. I can’t pretend I never wanted out. I have done that before. I’m not doing it again.
The second is that I couldn’t find this anywhere. When I went looking for someone actually in it — not “here’s how I did it” retrospective content, not “you’ve got this!” content, but someone standing in the middle of it right now with no clean ending — I didn’t find them. I found people who had already figured it out. I found people whose story had an arc. Nobody writing the part before the arc.
So I’m writing the part before the arc. I don’t know how it ends. I have some guesses. I’ll let you know.
If you’re in a parking lot somewhere doing the same math I was doing, this might be for you.
Or maybe it’s just for me. We’ll find out together.
Day 1 of… however long this takes.